Gentrification

The musicians who make Mariachi Plaza their office and the Boyle Hotel across the street their home are not singing their last song yet -- or at least, it doesn't appear that way. After mariachis waged a public battle over the fate of the Boyle Hotel, the four-story brick building that for decades has been a home for many of Boyle Heights' mariachis, the East L.A. Community Corp. announced Monday that it had purchased the hotel, along with a neighboring commercial building.

City officials and developers are testing the reach of downtown L.A.'s development boom with a massive push to bring the mixed-use concept to Washington Boulevard -- a good two miles south of downtown. The Community Redevelopment Agency sees a 22-block area along the boulevard -- now lined with older storefronts and industrial buildings -- as ripe for conversion into several large projects that mix housing with retail and commercial space. Planners hope the buzz from Staples Center, the huge L.

Artist, art instructor and art gallery director, Ron Linden is talking about a sense of place. He is talking about the curious community of San Pedro at the far reach of Los Angeles and its appeal to the sensibilities of artists who have clustered there over the years.

A marionette show about the effects of gentrification, set along the eastern portion of Sunset Boulevard, might seem a bit of a stretch. But that is precisely the point for the creators of "Sunset Chronicles" -- to flex their creativity and comment on the reality of living in Los Angeles by crafting a fantasy world.

Tony Franklin is a skinny figure in a big blue coat, a walking testament to Martin Luther King Jr.'s unfinished war on poverty. He is part of the army of panhandlers who roam Atlanta's Auburn Avenue, bearing down on the tourists who flock to the civil rights leader's grave. There will soon be 159 new homes on Auburn Avenue, all of them condos that Franklin cannot afford. But he is proud of them nonetheless. He is a black man.

It was true love when Arlynne Miller moved to Stuyvesant Town 30 years ago to live with a boyfriend. The relationship failed, but Miller clung to something more valuable: a rent-stabilized apartment in the sprawling collection of World War II-era buildings peering over the East River. The 110 red-brick buildings, stretching along 1st Avenue from 14th to 23rd streets, were constructed with government assistance in 1947 to house returning veterans.

SANTIAGO SANCHEZ and Yolanda Ibarra were running out of time. It was already mid-March, and in less than a month they and their six children would have to leave their $662-a-month apartment in an old building halfway up a dead-end street in Echo Park. They'd been scouring neighborhoods to the north, east and south of downtown Los Angeles for vacancy signs. But even after repeatedly lowering their expectations, they hadn't found a single thing they could afford.

The city of Los Angeles has made little headway in expanding the supply of housing for low- and middle-income residents because old affordable units have been destroyed almost as quickly as new ones have been built, according to a new study. The analysis, to be released today by the Southern California Assn. of Non-Profit Housing, is likely to fuel an increasingly heated debate about housing and gentrification in the city. Using municipal and U.S.

Over the last seven years, nearly 400 students have left the public school rosters in Santa Barbara. Enrollment in this wealthy, Spanish-tiled coastal haven has dropped as steadily as home prices have risen. It is a trend expected to continue as the median home price pushes past $1 million. It is also a trend that increasingly appears to be occurring across California. Public schools circling downtown Los Angeles are losing students as their neighborhoods gentrify.

DRIVE around Silver Lake and you quickly see why the neighborhood has become a geographic byword for hip. Old storefronts abut sleek new businesses, comfortably ramshackle bungalows sit next to million-dollar Modernist architectural gems.