Like most people in the US, I’m profoundly ignorant about Canadian history. Sometimes, though, you read something that is so uncannily familiar that it shocks.
A brief introduction to Canada, through the eyes of the colonized.
In Canada, White Supremacy is the Law of the Land by Arthur Manuel
Our housing prices are subject to market forces. Perhaps they shouldn’t be.
The US economy is basically a capitalist market system, where buyers and sellers participate in markets, and supply and demand, along with regulations and competition, determine prices.
There are, however, many important services that are protected from market forces, or totally withdrawn from the market. Education, for example, is mostly performed by public schools, funded by taxes.
Likewise, poor people now receive Medicaid, and that’s somewhat buffered from market forces. Even private insurance is a service to avoid directly interacting with market forces.
There are other services that aren’t in the market, or at least try not to be: firefighters, police, and the entire US military. The governments, of course, are largely not interacting with the market frequently.
So, I think it’s feasible to have housing that’s not subject to too many market forces.
Los Angeles is now what we call a “one newspaper town”, but it used to support at least five papers in English. One of these, which I have never seen a complete copy of, is The Mirror, the Chandler family’s paper. It merged with the Times, and that’s why it was called Times-Mirror for so long.
It stopped publishing in 1962.
The tone is definitely different from the LA Times of today, the 80s, or even the LA Times back then. It’s pretty populist.
4101 Valley Blvd LA 90032 is at the corner of Valley and Soto, the northeast corner, and the home is no longer there. It has been replaced by a large 1960s-style building, and it seems to be occupied by USC now.
I think the Mirror also featured a columnist named Jane Palmer, who I’d like to know more about. She wrote an advice column, but it was a scolding column. It was real and got to real womens’ issues, but also was not gentle.
That is a chilling story, not only because of the abuse, but because she lays it out how tough it was for women. It seems worse than today, and today isn’t good, either.
This is a clipping from the Rafu, and I think it’s around 1952, because it mentions the McCarran Walter Act, which passed in 1952.
I recognized Art Takei’s name, because he was one of the founders of APALA, the API labor organization within the AFL-CIO.
Fumi Ishihara, I didn’t recognize, but the internet is amazing, and found this information for me:
I found some old erotica, aka “smut”, and cut some up and did a little decoupage demo. Decoupage is a French word that means gluing bits of paper onto a box, and then smearing more glue on top to protect the paper.
Be careful, this is erotica, so there might be some sexual content.
This cut-up paper thing at the end is like the “cut ups” that Brion Gysin and William Burroughs did.
I think the only thing I learned from this text experiment is that realizing the erotic potential of text is dependent on linear storytelling and avoiding weird juxtapositions of words. This “new” text just seems to be a confusing exchange between people scheduling a meeting, interrupted by sexual fantasies. That is pretty “deep”.
If you have old paper, you can do this!
I found this. I suspect it may have been tossed into the trash and retrieved. Upon reading it, I figured out that it was written by, or for, Tom Bradley. I’ve started looking for orgs that could take this kind of stuff. I’m also selling things, but some thing like this might have a bit more historical value, and maybe shouldn’t be sold.
I’m clearing out my father’s hoard, and sometimes you find something interesting. This was a denial of a zoning variance for a church. Given that my father collected a lot of stuff from work, and one of his interests was racial discrimination (because he faced it), I thought, maybe, this was an instance. It’s impossible to know, but here’s the letter.
This couple wanted to turn a house into a church. They were denied. The reasoning was that the area was developing into a suburb, and this conversion to a church didn’t fit in.
I had to find out what was there now:
It looks like that could be the same house. Zillow says it was built in 1947. It’s set back, and I could see why they wanted to convert this house – it has a lot of parking. The lot extends all the way back to the other street. What’s that over there on the right?
It’s a charter school. The previous use was a 3br3ba house 3500+ sqft, built in 1946. The lot extends back the same distance.
That’s too bad that they didn’t get the variance back then. Maybe it was different. Let’s see what’s there today:
Well, look at that. There’s two other churches right in there. The JW place is found online as a 5000+ sqft house built in 2011. The church at Broment and Pierce was built in 1950, and is a large church at 6500+ sqft. So it’s definitely an area with churches.
Looking at the rest of the block, I think it hasn’t changed since 1966, and is still “rural” in character, meaning that people store cars on the property. Look at this map:
It’s not too far off of Van Nuys, and the city saw fit to turn most of the areas into large scale uses, and more churches are around there.
This smells of discrimination. I don’t know the Matsudas, or who they were, or what really happened here… but I can speculate. I suspect they were Buddhist, and they were denied a pretty reasonable variance because they were Buddhist and not white. Christians ran the system, and run the system, and can use their personal biases to help stop the practice of other religions.
My guess is that there was a push to make Pacoima more middle class. The freeway was in, and VN Blvd was being redeveloped. The pattern with suburbanization was to turn communities of color into less poor, places. Pacoima was a blended community.
It’s an old community, and all the old communities tended to be integrated, mainly because they lacked contracts that constructed white supremacy. White-only communities arose from around 1910 to the early 1960s, and it was promoted by government redlining. It started before the government intervention, but was propelled by it when it was instituted. Pacoima was a redlined community.