Seizure City

The hoards of fans who once blotted out the asphalt of the Marathon Clothing store’s parking lot are gone. A chain-link fence now surrounds the strip mall that was ground zero for the empire of Nipsey Hussle, the 33-year-old Los Angeles rapper who was murdered here on March 31, 2019. His death came only weeks after he and his business partners had purchased the building for $2.5 million.

On the surface, the acquisition was the latest in a series of shrewd business decisions by Hussle and his partners, another jewel in the crown for the Grammy-nominated rap star. But this was about more than business. The decision bought him time. For months, city attorney Mike Feuer had been trying to evict the Marathon Clothing store from the strip mall, which cradles the southwest corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue in the heart of South Los Angeles. The city claimed Marathon, the mall’s anchor store, was a haven for members of the Crips gang.

Hussle counted himself among the Rollin’ 60s Crips, whose territory covers much of the Crenshaw neighborhood. As such, he and his associates never denied the claim that members of the notorious L.A. street gang convened at the store and other adjacent businesses owned by the rapper. It was known that Hussle and his associates employed gang members in an effort to invest in both the neighborhood and its residents. These efforts won Hussle praise from celebrities including Jay-Z and Beyoncé and public officials such as Mayor Eric Garcetti and the Los Angeles Police Department’s top ranks.

“He was a tireless advocate for the young people of this city and of this world,” Garcetti said in a press conference following the rapper’s murder, “to lift them up with the possibility of not being imprisoned by where you come from or past mistakes but the possibility of what comes in the future.”

But in July 2019 The New York Times revealed the city had been investigating Hussle at the time of his murder. The shocking report speaks not only to contradictions in Hussle’s life and death—he was allegedly killed by a man from the same gang— but also to the powerful forces that have shaped and continue to shape the City of Angels.

California’s Interstate 10 once served as a barrier between the affluent and the working class, which is to say between white on one side and black and brown on the other. Today, with the median monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment nearly $1,400, L.A.’s young white residents are fleeing neighborhoods like West Hollywood, Santa Monica and Westwood and dipping south of the I-10, either in search of more-affordable housing or drawn to the new developments hugging the Metro, the city’s quickly expanding light-rail system. At the same time, the city attorney’s office has flooded property owners in South L.A. with nuisance-abatement lawsuits. Ninety-eight were filed in Feuer’s first four years on the job.

The lawsuits are part of the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, which since 1997 has “revitalized” properties with alleged ties to criminal or gang activity. Leveraging the power of court injunctions, the program—enforced by the LAPD, the city attorney’s office, the Department of Building and Safety, the Housing Department and the Planning Department—can legally force property owners to abide by new rules ranging from hiring armed security personnel to installing security cameras that face common areas or even individual apartments. Tenants are also subjected to new rules, such as registering their IDs with building security or limiting time in common areas. Violation can lead to eviction.

This is the method of policing the city was exploring in its attempt to evict the Marathon Clothing store from Crenshaw, a neighborhood that appears to be a hotbed of nuisance-abatement lawsuits due to the construction of the new Crenshaw/LAX light-rail line, which plays a central role in the Metro’s expansion project. At eight and a half miles, the line will connect Los Angeles International Airport to the recently completed Exposition Line, which runs from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica beach. It’s set to open in 2020.

The Marathon store is only a few hundred feet from a planned Metro stop at the intersection of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue. After decades of disinvestment, developers are now pouring billions of dollars into new hotels, luxury apartments and mixed-use developments. As builders hatch plans to reshape L.A., benefiting from an overcrowded city buckling in a housing crunch, the city’s black and brown working-class residents find themselves in the crosshairs.

“They’re taking over Crenshaw,” says Zerita Jones, co-founder of the branch of the Los Angeles Tenants Union that covers Crenshaw and the adjacent neighborhoods of Baldwin Village and Leimert Park. “They are not coming in to share it with us. They are coming in to take it and move us out.”

If the smog that notoriously chokes the L.A. skyline isn’t too thick, you can squint and see the Hollywood sign from Crenshaw. Just 12 miles separate the corner of Crenshaw Boulevard and Slauson Avenue from the iconic sign, but for decades they were worlds apart. The sign to the north is the beacon of a city whose most noted exports are celebrity, film and television. South of its shadow, in Crenshaw—and to a larger extent South L.A.—sits what was once an industrial hub where black and Latinx laborers churned out cars, tires and tools for the nation’s war machine. These worlds have collided as L.A.’s population swells. The city has added more than 1 million residents since 1980 and is now bursting with 4 million people.

It wasn’t long after Garcetti won his first mayoral election, in 2013, that he made his ambitions clear: to fix the city’s transportation woes. He also wanted the Olympics to return to L.A. He tethered these goals and in 2016 convinced voters to back a half-cent sales-tax hike to fund his transit plans. “We’re using the Olympics as a rallying tool,” Garcetti told Government Technology magazine in 2018. “By the time the world comes here, let’s be the best we can. Let’s get rid of homelessness on our streets, let’s build out the infrastructure that we need and accelerate that, and let’s leave behind a legacy: that L.A. became the healthiest city in America when it hosted the greatest sporting event in the world.”

Garcetti named his plan Twenty-Eight by ’28, representing the 28 transit projects that need to open before the Olympic torch is lit in summer 2028. Developers are tracing the blueprints. Where a shopping mall currently sits in South L.A., the city has approved a $700 million development that includes 961 apartments, a 400-room hotel and retail spaces. Across the street, a developer is looking to build 69 units. Another wants to build 111 more apartments down the street. All these developments are adjacent to planned stops on the Crenshaw/LAX Line. All of them will include affordable housing units—but not nearly enough to prevent displacement.

From the window of Jones’s apartment on Obama Boulevard, she can see change coming. She can see the Exposition Line as it chugs west toward Santa Monica’s beaches; she sees the $3.25 million investment for a new gymnasium and indoor pool at the Rancho Cienega Sports Complex and developers snatching up mom-and-pop stores every week. She can also see the demographics of her neighborhood changing.

Jones lives in Baldwin Hills’ Chesapeake Apartments, where 105 buildings are spread across 17 acres. The crosscurrents of change landed at Jones’s doorstep in November 2017 when the city attorney’s office filed a nuisance-abatement lawsuit against the Chesapeake, claiming the property posed a threat to the public health and safety of local residents. The ensuing court order set conditions for the owner; if the owner didn’t comply, the city could ask the court to close down the property, ultimately forcing a sale.

“Negligent, callous management has allowed the Chesapeake Apartments to become a hotbed of terror in this neighborhood,” Feuer said in prepared remarks after filing the lawsuit. “We’ll continue to hold property owners responsible for these harrowing conditions as we take back our communities.”

Specifically, the 2017 lawsuit alleged that the Black P-Stones, a division of the Bloods gang, and an open drug market flourish at the Chesapeake. Residents don’t dispute this. For one, the complex features a road that connects two major thoroughfares in L.A., making it prime real estate for drug dealing and, by extension, violence. To make its case that the Chesapeake is a stronghold of the Black P-Stones, the city sourced evidence on YouTube. Court documents cite a music video filmed at the Chesapeake that features aspiring rappers and alleged gang members flashing hand signs. Another music video includes scenes from a memorial for a man killed by police in a neighboring city; it shows purported Black P-Stones members brandishing handguns.

The argument that the entire complex should be deemed a gang headquarters concerns legal scholars. “The gang allegation was the most racist of the allegations,” says Shayla Myers, an attorney with Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles who helped Chesapeake tenants fight the lawsuit. “The videos are an artistic expression of life in the community. To have that thrown back at them as evidence of gang activity is problematic.”

In its lawsuit, the city demanded the property owner install security cameras trained on residents’ entryways, the footage of which the LAPD could review without a subpoena. The city also tried to establish new “house rules” for residents, demanded that armed security guards take up posts in the complex and suggested that the owner contract a management company to help oversee the property. The injunction filed by the city asked residents to police gang activity and told the property owner to distribute rental agreements that included the new rules. Guests could spend only limited time in common areas and were required to carry photo IDs, which had to be registered with management. If any of the house rules were violated, the property owner was expected to evict the residents.

“We were the nuisances,” Jones says, “and we were the people who had to be governed and policed.” Jones and her mother, Jessie Smith-Jones, intervened to fight the injunction. They claimed the terms would turn the Chesapeake into a prison. The armed security guards would only add guns to a place already marked by violence. The security cameras criminalized all residents, including the innocent. Residents acknowledged the presence of gangs in the complex, but policing was the LAPD’s responsibility, tenants argued, not theirs.

The city walked back some of the conditions. Today, the security guards in the complex are unarmed and the cameras record only common areas. But residents are still being pushed out. As head of the Chesapeake’s tenant association, Jones is often the first person those facing eviction call. Some fight; some don’t. When they leave, the apartments are renovated and rented at market rate.

Mike Feuer rode into the city attorney’s office in the same 2013 election that vaulted Garcetti, a former city councilman, to power. Feuer’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story, but scrolling through its website, you get the impression Feuer wants to align with a new era of progressive prosecutors. His office champions alternatives to imprisonment for teens in street gangs, diversion programs for nonviolent offenders and pop-up legal clinics for the homeless. These programs are part of L.A.’s Community Justice Initiative, or CJI—a name that suggests a softer approach to crime. In language posted online, CJI is “a neighborhood-focused array of restorative justice, alternative sentencing and diversionary programs.” Nuisance-abatement lawsuits are categorized within CJI as “administrative citation enforcement.”

In his first term, Feuer appeared to have borrowed heavily from two of his predecessors: James K. Hahn, who was city attorney for 16 years before becoming L.A.’s 40th mayor in 2001, and Rocky Delgadillo, who succeeded Hahn as city attorney and served from 2001 to 2009. In 1989 Hahn laid out plans to use the city attorney’s office to tackle L.A.’s gang problem. He wanted to implement the criminological theory known as “broken windows.” A social science term coined in 1982, it gained traction among law enforcement in the 1990s but has since been discredited. The idea is to snuff out minor infractions such as loitering and drinking on the sidewalk with the goal of not just rounding up small-time offenders before they commit major crimes (a theoretical certainty) but signaling to the community that cops won’t tolerate infractions of any kind.

Where Hahn’s tactics differed was his idea to use civil courts via nuisance lawsuits rather than criminal courts as a hammer against crime. The city would move for an injunction to bar alleged gang members from congregating in areas covered by the injunction. This criminalized innocuous gatherings such as family cookouts should two alleged gang members be there.

Those facing civil injunctions have no right to an attorney. Rather than proving cases beyond a reasonable doubt, city attorneys have to prove only that the majority of evidence supports their claims. Once the injunction is in place, those who violate it may later face criminal charges.

Delgadillo’s pursuit of street crime differed in that his office targeted homes, businesses and properties. Those plans landed heavily on downtown L.A.’s homeless population. Meanwhile, cops got tougher on the streets. William Bratton, another supporter of broken-windows policing, became LAPD police chief in 2002. He launched the Safer Cities Initiative, which flooded downtown L.A. with an additional 50 cops on patrol. This was classic broken windows. Cops handed out 12,000 fines for small offenses in the first year; a 2011 survey by the Los Angeles Community Action Network found that more than half the people living in the Skid Row area had been arrested in the past year.

Upon taking office, Feuer moved forward with an injunction his predecessor had filed against people with alleged gang ties in Echo Park, a gentrified Latinx neighborhood on L.A.’s east side. In June 2013 the city attorney’s office filed a permanent injunction against known members of six gangs. But the effort faced blowback from activists and civil rights attorneys. Chief U.S. District Judge Virginia A. Phillips ruled in 2018 that the injunction violated the due process rights of thousands and compelled the city to toss the remaining 1,400 names off the injunction list. (According to the Los Angeles Times, almost 9,000 people had faced injunction enforcement since 2000.)

By that time, Feuer’s strategy had shifted from targeting alleged gang members to targeting property associated with gang activity. “When we even think about the Citywide Nuisance Abatement Program, it’s a lawsuit against the property,” says Jamie Garcia, an organizer with the Stop LAPD Spying Coalition. “That’s how the city takes its hands off, i.e., ‘We are not targeting people.’ When you hear LAPD’s rhetoric, they go after location-based policing.” It’s a distinction without a difference, Garcia argues. Targeting land, designating certain areas as high-crime and filing property nuisance suits are still indictments of entire neighborhoods.

The city’s practices are buttressed by state law. Shortly after Feuer took office, Governor Jerry Brown signed two laws that expanded the power of cities to evict tenants for certain nuisance violations, including one that allows a city to evict a tenant based on an arrest report, even if the person wasn’t convicted. The legislation was backed by the California Apartment Association.

When you couple Feuer’s use of civil actions with LAPD’s policing tactics, the city has powerful tools to remove people from within its borders. Until April 2019 one such tool was the Los Angeles Strategic Extraction and Restoration program, or LASER, which the LAPD phased out after eight years. LASER focused on identifying and monitoring chronic offenders. To get off the list, a person had to avoid police contact, which is difficult because LASER increases policing in so-called anchor points—locations where several people on the list live, work or socialize. It’s the same type of regulation used against the Chesapeake. “It became very clear it was about land and displacement,” Garcia says.

Garcia’s colleague, Hamid Khan, founder of Stop LAPD Spying Coalition, elaborates: “Such practices are a continuation of policy over time,” he says. “Broken windows may be discredited, but it serves as a template for what’s happening now.”

Fragments of broken windows pop up in other cities too. The Department of Justice found that Ferguson, Missouri, where a cop killed teenager Michael Brown in 2014, collected more than $2.4 million in fines in 2013, largely tied to minor infractions such as parking and housing-code violations. The city issued more than 9,000 arrest warrants for unresolved fines in 2013 alone.

Former South Bend mayor and presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg, an alumnus of consulting firm McKinsey & Company, has been criticized for his 1,000 Houses in 1,000 Days program, which forced the rehab or demolition of more than 1,000 homes in the city. The city dispatched code-enforcement officers, and the amount of fines jumped 25 percent, with more than $500,000 collected in a single year.

The program hit black and Latinx residents hard. Many came to own their homes through inheritance or investing in low-income neighborhoods. Some had been trapped in zombie mortgages. When the city assessed fines, some residents walked away.

South Bend, where about 45 percent of residents are in minority groups, has one of the highest eviction rates in the country. The city has yet to study the impact of the program on black, Latinx or low-income communities, but Buttigieg, in his political memoir, Shortest Way Home: One Mayor’s Challenge and a Model for America’s Future, writes that “the most important impact of the effort was unquantifiable. Hitting such an ambitious goal made it easier for residents to believe we could do very difficult things as a city, at a time when civic confidence had been in short supply for decades.”

Hussle’s voice booms from cars stopped at Crenshaw and Slauson. His face is on T-shirts worn by the men and boys walking the streets. On another corner, his face stares at traffic from a mural on the wall of a bank. In the global rap world, Kendrick Lamar may be king of L.A., but even in death, Hussle rules over Crenshaw.

The Marathon store was the face card in a broader business plan, which now includes a co-working space, a business incubator and a STEM lab. “If [South L.A.] is to ever be in the condition it deserves—if our people are to ever be treated the way they deserve to be treated—we have to own and build it for ourselves,” said Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents Crenshaw on the Los Angeles City Council, after Hussle’s death.

Hussle’s business partner, David Gross, declined to be interviewed for this story, but he has publicized his fight against the city on social media. His plans for the Marathon Clothing store location: a mixed-use project called Nipsey Hussle Tower. This permanent memorial will serve as both a tribute to the neighborhood and a send-up of outside forces vying for control. Those forces may prevail, Jones says, “but the question is, are we going to allow it to happen, or are we going to fight?”

As Hussle would say, “The marathon continues.”