Editor’s note: This is part of our “My LA” series — a look at how changing demographics are shifting culture in LA’s historic neighborhoods — told by the people from those neighborhoods.
Fifteen years ago, the only white people I’d see in Leimert Park were the police.
Today, I see white people running in groups, running before sunrise, in the middle of the day and in the middle of the night. I see them pushing strollers down Crenshaw or standing in line for expensive coffee at shops that didn’t exist when I was a kid.
All around me, multigenerational homes are disappearing, and wealthy, fully gated homes and Airbnb rentals are appearing in their place. The kinds of people my parents used to work for are now our neighbors.
The relationship between who serves and who is served hasn’t disappeared; it has simply migrated.
The Latina women I used to see commuting across the city to push other people’s babies in strollers now push those strollers down my street.
Now, when I walk through my little slice of South Central, I move with both familiarity and disorientation.
I greet neighbors I’ve known for decades, then side-eye the new one parking a Porsche next to a house my friend’s family lost.
The moving earth
The shift has been sudden, jarring and confusing — and not just for me.
Rising rents pushed lifelong residents like Jennifer Aquino out of the place she grew up in.
“It’s disheartening to see,” Aquino, who now lives in Southeast LA, tells The LA Local.
Aquino sometimes comes back to the neighborhood and walks her old block.
“I get excited to pass by an area where I had so many memories, but when I see it, it’s unrecognizable,” Aquino said.
For decades, Leimert Park was a safe haven for Black and brown families, shut out of other neighborhoods by restrictive racial covenants. Now, homes routinely sell for more than $1 million, putting ownership — and even staying — out of reach for many working-class residents.
Leimert Park has always been a haven for the Black and brown middle and working class, Keysha Baynes tells The LA Local.
Baynes is a resident of Leimert Park and the executive director of Pulse Arts, a nonprofit working to increase access to creative learning opportunities for underserved youth.
According to Baynes, there was a noticeable shift in the area’s demographics during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
“I’ve seen it first hand,” she explains. “An influx of non-Black and non-Latino people started buying up houses in communities that were historically Black.”
But Baynes says she hopes there are still ways for the lifelong members of the community to have ownership amid the changing demographics.
I hope she’s right.
This transformation has forced me to examine what “home” means.
Can a place change so much that you begin to question your own belonging? Can you claim a community that no longer looks like the one that raised you?
I try to reconcile the memories I carry with the present changing ground.
The OG pulse of Leimert Park
Growing up, our neighborhood moved to a steady rhythm.
Before 7 a.m., people were already up: They were packing lunches, finishing their coffee and trying to beat morning traffic.
My parents followed the same path as everyone else, out the door early, home late, exhausted, but this was the routine.
On the streets and buses, I’d see dozens of Latina women heading toward Beverly Hills, Brentwood, Santa Monica or Bel Air.
They walked fast, with coffee in one hand, a bag in the other, gossiping as they rushed toward their day of caregiving and cleaning.
They were the invisible infrastructure of Los Angeles wealth, yet they came from working-class communities like mine.
My dad, tias and tios were part of that workforce.
They worked for wealthy families.
Some kind. Some rude. Some boring. Some indifferent.
But all of them lived in worlds that felt distant from ours.
A 15 to 20-mile commute separated Leimert Park from those neighborhoods. But to me as a child, it may as well have been another planet — one I only heard about when my parents came home tired.
The familiarity and disorientation
It wasn’t until I arrived at UCLA that I saw that other world up close.
Suddenly, I was surrounded by the kinds of families my parents had spent their lives working for.
I walked the same manicured neighborhoods in Brentwood where my dad drove families for years.
I realized that my whole life, I’d lived at the edge of two Los Angeleses — one wealthy and white, the other Black and immigrant — without fully understanding how sharply divided they were.
But now, the division is fading, not because inequality has disappeared, but because of things like the housing crisis and the rising cost of living.
Homes that once belonged to working-class families are being flipped for prices that are not unattainable for those like Aquino who grew up here.
“You try to do everything right,” Aquino laments. “Go to school and build a career, in hopes of returning to your community to buy the home you grew up in, but it’s just not attainable.”
I’m fortunate to still live in Leimert Park, to afford a place in that community that raised me, even as so many others no longer can.
This is my home.
It’s where I raced bikes, ditched school and learned how to move through a city that makes it increasingly harder for working-class people to stay.
The buildings may look different, the faces may change, but our history lives in the people who remain.