“Help is not on the way. We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” observed Damien Goodmon in an interview with NPQ. For two decades, Goodmon has been a leading community organizer in Los Angeles’s Crenshaw neighborhood. Crenshaw Boulevard has long been considered the cultural and commercial hub of Black Los Angeles.
A few years ago, a group that Goodmon directs and helped found, Downtown Crenshaw Rising, was on the verge of a spectacular achievement—arranging for the community to acquire and rehabilitate a 40-acre-plus shopping center that had opened in 1947.
It had the potential, wrote Oscar Perry Abello in Next City, to be a “statement win” for the solidarity economy and to become a hub for locally owned businesses, worker co-ops, mixed-income housing, a recording studio, and a green space. In 2021, the group’s initiative even inspired a long report on the “emerging solidarity economy” by the Brookings Institution, a moderately liberal but largely middle-of-the-road thinktank.
Despite lacking site control, Downtown Crenshaw Rising raised $34.6 million from philanthropy and nearly as much in letters of intent from impact investors. In July 2021, the group leveraged its cash and commitment letters to submit an offer of $115 million to acquire the property—outbidding Harridge Development Group, an established LA real estate developer. Yet the seller, Deutsche Bank, chose to sell to Harridge anyway, in spite of its lower bid. A lawsuit filed by Downtown Crenshaw Rising against Deutsche Bank and pension fund investors who backed the sale to Harridge remains in the US district court.
Regardless of how that lawsuit turns out, Goodmon and the Crenshaw activists aren’t deterred, and they are not waiting for help. Instead, they are building a community land trust (CLT). “We endeavor to be, by the end of the decade, the largest CLT in America,” Goodmon said. Instead of developing a 40-acre lot, the goal now, he says, is to develop scattered site properties in Crenshaw and the surrounding neighborhoods, a region that extends over 40 square miles.
A Century of Economic Justice Organizing in Black Los Angeles
Goodmon is a fourth-generation Angeleno. Members of his family have lived in Los Angeles for over 100 years. Among Goodmon’s ancestors are the Blodgett family, who helped in 1924 to found the Liberty Building-Loan Association, the city’s first Black-owned banking institution, which later became Liberty Savings and Loan Association.
W. E. B. Du Bois had traveled to Los Angeles in 1913 and saw the city’s potential for Black economic advancement. But, Goodmon told NPQ, “one of the main problems was that folk couldn’t get loans to buy their homes.” The formation of Liberty made home loans available to Black Americans in Los Angeles. “I rarely run into a Black person over the age of seventy-five who doesn’t say they had an account at Liberty,” Goodmon remarked. The bank also provided loans to Black-owned businesses and helped finance commercial development in the city’s Black community. For a time, Central Avenue in South Los Angeles was known as “Harlem West.”
Liberty Savings and Loan Association remained Black-owned until 1961. Its sale to a White-owned firm, according to Goodmon, was the result of a “hostile takeover.” The land trust that Crenshaw residents have formed is named after Liberty, as an homage to the bank’s legacy.
From Transit Organizing to the Pursuit of Community Ownership
Today, Goodmon is part of a broader effort to build a solidarity economy throughout Crenshaw and the surrounding South Central Los Angeles region, all of which goes under the moniker of Liberty Ecosystem. But the initial community group that was formed, known as the Crenshaw Subway Coalition, started with a more modest goal, namely, to make sure new public transit light rail lines—first, the Expo Line and, later on, the Crenshaw Line—were built by and served the community.
The campaigns—particularly the second one around the Crenshaw Line—generated many wins, including an agreement with the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority in 2013 to work with the Los Angeles Black Worker Center to train and hire Black construction workers from the neighborhood to build the line. In one year, the center reported “the number of Black workers on the Crenshaw-LAX line increased from 2% to 19%.”
But the transit lines, perhaps not surprisingly, started to result in rising living costs that threatened to displace Black Angelenos from their own neighborhoods.
A few years later, many of the largest real estate developments in the city were happening in communities that had never seen such projects before, such as Inglewood, Boyle Heights, South Central, and Crenshaw—all neighborhoods with a predominant Black population. As of May 2016, planned projects included 3,000 units of market-rate housing in Inglewood; over 5,700 mostly market-rate new or rehabbed units in Boyle Heights; plus 961 units at the Crenshaw Mall, a 1,200-unit project in Baldwin Hills, and a 1,440-unit project in South Central—most at market rate.
Goodmon and community groups quickly realized that the plans, while increasing housing availability, were also actively undermining housing affordability; they needed to organize a response.
For a period that was initially expected to last three weeks—but ended up lasting eight, Goodmon said—community groups held an intensive series of popular education sessions to bring themselves up to speed with all of the developments. Out of those sessions, one clear realization emerged: “We need to do something if we want to have a Black Los Angeles.” Preserving community self-determination became the primary objective.
These sessions also led to the founding of the CLT and a desire to take on a project of the scale of owning the Crenshaw Mall site. As Goodmon explained to NPQ, the community’s analysis showed that “we need thousands of units off the speculative market today” and to build out “the structures and that ecosystem needed for us to achieve that goal.”
This required raising not just capital but organizing technical expertise. As a New York Times article noted, the campaign brought in technical experts including the “SmithGroup, an architectural firm that helped design the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, and MASS Design Group, a Boston-based firm that helped design the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama.” Another part of the design team was a firm headed by the local Black architect Cory Henry. Also involved, as Abello reported at the time, was Jones Lang LaSalle, a global real estate services firm that had “agreed to serve as master developer and property manager, raising the capital to build out the rest of the group’s vision and manage the property on an ongoing basis.”
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The team also drew on a number of national movement leaders, including the late Clark Arrington and Ed Whitfield of the Seed Commons worker co-op community development financial institution (CDFI), as well as Paul Yelder, who helped start Dudley Street Neighbors Inc. in Boston, one of the nation’s earliest CLTs, and who now lives in Crenshaw.
The plan was ambitious. The group, in addition to business development and housing, sought to support and develop:
- Two grocery stores (including a local food co-op)
- An urban garden and hydroponic farming
- A commercial kitchen for culinary artists and catering chefs
- A community solar project and shared district energy system to power the surrounding area through a Crenshaw Energy Co-op
- A six-acre central park for cultural events to showcase Black culture and host community gatherings
- A senior center
- A day care center
- A community fund to power community programs and a democratic economy for generations
“Ultimately,” Goodmon explained, “the goal was not for us to develop every inch of the Crenshaw Mall. The goal was to have the community in literal ownership to direct the plan and the future.”
The Struggle Continues
When the bids were revealed, Downtown Crenshaw Rising had submitted a bid to purchase the mall site for $115 million, while Harridge had submitted $111 million. Yet Harridge won the bid; the seller cited Harridge’s allegedly superior development expertise to justify its decision.
One outcome of the seller’s choice is a lack of affordable housing: 80 percent of Harridge’s housing will be market-rate condominiums.
For Downtown Crenshaw Rising, the response has been multifaceted. On one hand, the effort had enabled a community-based group to make a credible bid on a project of this scale for the first time in US history. For that reason, Goodmon noted, despite the outcome of the bidding process, “It was a very, very successful campaign.” And there is the ongoing legal challenge, which may yet bring good news for the organization.
But the group also recognized the need to pivot. It took a while, Goodmon said, to recalibrate after their bid was rejected. “We spent the first six months after the close just taking a deep breath and doing some internal reflection,” Goodmon said. “By the time we hit 2023, it was quite clear how we could build out what we identified as the Liberty Ecosystem,” which includes the original community coalition, a growing community land trust, a cooperative-business incubator, and an investment fund.
The co-op incubator is still in a developmental phase, but the land trust is growing. To date, Goodmon says, the land trust has succeeded in acquiring 129 units in fourteen buildings that are either “under development or community control or under contract.” A half dozen of these buildings are being organized in the form of housing cooperatives.
The land trust got close to bidding on a much larger building with over 600 units of housing. While the financials ultimately didn’t pencil out, Goodmon noted that “the mere fact that we got the phone call and were taken seriously really puts us a at a scale and scope that was unimaginable two years prior.” Projects of this scale, Goodmon added, are “the direction we are going toward. We are learning a lot from the people who have been engaged.”
Another strategy used by the trust has been to purchase single-family homes and convert them into multiple units, as city zoning laws allow. This, Goodmon explained, is allowing the group to “return homeownership to working-class people in the city of Los Angeles.” As Goodmon elaborated, “We’ve seen laws that allow us to get from one to three or four homes on one property.” This enables the group to begin achieving in practice their long-term goal of creating “no displacement zones,” even when policy advocacy at the city level falls short.
What It Takes
Goodmon said he used to tell people that anyone could put together the type of bid that Downtown Crenshaw Rising did in 2021. He no longer believes that.
In movement spaces, it is often said that you can only build at the speed of trust. And that, Goodmon emphasized, takes time.
As he put it, “We had built to that moment [of placing a $115 million bid] intentionally for at least five years, when we made that decision of being anti-gentrification and pro-community wealth building. For at least twenty-five years, we were building connections, building a network of organizations, identifying technical expertise, building community trust, and operating with integrity.”
To have a tall tree, Goodmon noted, “you need to have deep roots.”
He also emphasized the need for tactical flexibility. Downtown Crenshaw Rising and the related Liberty Ecosystem have favored cooperatives and community land trusts, but they remain open to other tools that support community economy building. “Maybe the next institutional innovation could be a community-based real estate investment trust—or a landowning co-op, similar to what EB PREC [East Bay Permanent Real Estate Coopeative] is doing in Oakland. Maybe it does mean a worker cooperative holding company, building on the work of Obran [in Baltimore]. Maybe it is a combination of these things.”
“There is no shortage of opportunities,” Goodmon observed. “It is about being intentionally focused and having very informed conversations. And about being truly accountable to implementing the results.”
