Narrator: With L.A. County's new River Master Plan, Los Angeles is asking big questions about the future of the river that runs through it.

The plan envisions transforming the flood control channel into a new centerpiece for the city, but it's an open question if this can be done equitably.

Can the river be reimagined as a place where people want to live, work, and spend time?

And can we do this without displacing the people who now call it home?

These questions aren't just about the river but about how we'll green our infrastructure in the future.

[Music] Announcer: "Earth Focus" is made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, and the Orange County Community Foundation.

Narrator: For many years when environmentalists imagined what a restored river would look like, they envisioned a 51-mile blue-green ribbon strung with parks and wetlands.

But in many places, doing this is difficult because we built our homes and critical infrastructure right up to the river channel.

And while the new master plan includes projects to increase habitat and green space, it also acknowledges there are limits to how far we can go.

The plan says that in order to return the river to its natural state, the channel would need to be widened by as much as 3 to 7 times its current width, raising the specter of forced displacement.

And it wouldn't be the first time.

For centuries, the river has shaped life in Los Angeles, and it's also seen waves of people displaced from its banks.

From time immemorial, the river was the center of life for Native peoples who lived with its ebbs and flows.

But waves of colonization erased Native culture from every part of the river.

Then, in the mid-20th century, infrastructure projects removed about .25 million residents.

Many were people of color living in segregated communities because of unfair housing policies.

And over the last few decades, as revitalization has gathered steam, real estate speculation has driven up rents and forced people to move out, reaching a crisis level in some river-adjacent communities.

Today, with nearly a million people living within a mile of its banks, the question isn't just how we restore the river, but if there are solutions for people to thrive in place, people who call the river home.

For the residents of Elysian Valley, green gentrification isn't just a potential problem but something they've already experienced.

After a bike path and several parks opened a decade ago, real estate development skyrocketed, transforming the neighborhood in the process.

[Music] Dario Herrera: My name is Dario Herrera.

I'm 22, and I've been here for 22 years.

So my dad was the first one to actually come here, I think, in, like, 1985 or something like that.

So we've always had, like, a very familiar presence in the neighborhood.

You just knew everybody because they were all, like, your family, and you could just rely on everybody to help you.

I just think the river has become this commodity that developers, real estate people, politicians have tried to commodify.

And because of that, people that have lived here for so long can't enjoy what it's going to be in the future.

I think the one that's the most noticeable to me is, like, the absence of my family members that lived here, because they've just been pushed out of the neighborhood.

The price of living in this community has just gone really high up.

And so because of that, they've had to go to, like, other areas in, like, L.A. County.

And because of that--that whole, like, small town feel, it just collapsed basically.

[Music] Julia Meltzer: My name is Julia Meltzer.

I'm the founder of Clockshop and currently senior advisor.

Clockshop is a nonprofit organization that brings arts and cultural programing to public space in Los Angeles.

Since we came here in 2002 to this block, Clearwater Street, I've seen a lot of change, real estate speculation being the main driver.

And that has to do with generally just change in northeast L.A. and in Los Angeles in general, that real estate prices just go up and up.

I think it also has to do with the projected vision of green space in the neighborhood, which is at the end of our block, the L.A. River, and river revitalization fueling real estate speculation.

And the crash in 2008 and the pandemic contributed significantly to a changeover in ownership.

Dario: New businesses that have come to the community, their clientele is not the people who have lived here for a long time.

Maybe it's the people who have just moved here.

I just saw a menu for one of the businesses, and it was, like, avocado toast was, like, $13.

That's not something that people who are longtime residents want to eat or can afford, especially given the fact that there's no grocery store in Elysian Valley.

And a place where there's no access to food and the only access to food is, like, this high-priced, gentrified establishment, it's not really appealing.

And because of that, the community has had to respond to that lack of resources.

So Food Forward is one of those organizations, along with L.A.-Mas, that are bringing fresh produce and other, like, canned goods or, like, nonperishable items to these food-insecure communities.

I think there's, like, a divide.

There's two worlds.

I want to say, like, Frogtown is like a brand.

Elysian Valley is, like, the generic name.

And so the brand that they're trying to sell is, like, this luxury, like, hip enclave that is going to benefit those who have the means to frequent the establishments on the river.

The people who have lived here and who have had to deal with the changes aren't benefiting from those supposed benefits, right?

Julia: Yeah, I think neighborhood change and gentrification is very complicated and has been complicated here in Elysian Valley.

For example, the bike path is a space of a lot of contention in the neighborhood because it's been a walking path for a long time for a lot of people.

And when it was repaved, there was not space made for people who walk, and the people who are walking there are often senior citizens who live in this neighborhood.

And so there became, in a way, like, this battleground between bikers who are coming through the neighborhood and riding really fast.

A lot of senior citizens have said, like, "This space was taken away from me."

Dario: I like to avoid the bike path just because I don't like seeing the changes in the neighborhood, because I know it's real.

If I walk in the community, I still have some hope that things aren't going to change as drastically.

I'm reminded of, like, my childhood.

I'm reminded of, like, my past.

Julia: It's a little too late to be thinking about, How can we preserve the fabric of this neighborhood in advance of green space coming?

Because property values are already so high.

And you can't fault anybody for saying, like, "Oh, you know what?

I'm going to sell this place for 1.5 million, and I'm going to go to..." Idaho or Texas or wherever and get, like, three times the amount of space and a lot less headache.

And that's what's happening.

Narrator: Just two miles downstream from Elysian Valley, L.A.'s historic Chinatown was cut off from the river by railroads and other infrastructure.

It's also experiencing green gentrification, and residents wonder whether the benefits of river restoration will pass them by or run them over.

[Music] Mariela Cruz Suarez: My name is Mariela Cruz Suarez, and I'm 16 years old.

So right now, we are in front of my home, but more specifically in the William Mead community.

So I've lived here since I was in kindergarten, and for reference, I'm now an 11th grader.

Never really thought about how change along the river affected me, but now I think, just thinking a little bit more about it, it's like, you know what?

I do care, and also partly because I've never had access to it.

I think when you take a closer look at it, you see that most of the people that are now coming to live around William Mead are mostly White.

So, for example, the bus drops me off at Chinatown, and from there I walk home, and on my walk home, I do walk by Llewellyn, the big fancy apartment complex.

So anytime my family and I walk by Llewellyn, my mom is just dazzled by the building.

She's just like, "Oh, I hope one day I can live there.

I hope one day I can, like, bring you all guys to, like, live here in, like, a nice building that looks like this."

But in reality, there's so much more that comes with those buildings, like the gentrification.

I think that a lot of people actually don't know that, and I think that's the main reason why they're building those type of buildings here, because nobody's going to fight back, nobody's going to say anything against it, nobody here has the resources to even fight back if they wanted to.

Woman: Chinatown and Lincoln Heights are two of the oldest neighborhoods in the city, and actually, the city was founded right on top of where Chinatown is now.

So Chinatown was created as a containment zone to restrict where low-income Asian immigrants could live.

So we have, like, two of the oldest freeways in the country that are cutting through there.

Our regional prison system and our regional rail, like, both light and heavy rail, so Union Pacific as well as Amtrak.

As a result of all this heavy industrial development, Chinatown and Lincoln Heights are two of the most polluted and environmentally-burdened neighborhoods across the state.

Chinatown was historically a place where not just low-income Asian immigrants went to find housing and jobs, but it was also a place with a lot of affordable housing.

So we do have a significant population of Latino immigrants that live in the neighborhood.

So Chinatown is prime real estate.

For a long time, it wasn't, right?

Everybody was moving out into the suburbs and building new, like, planned communities out there.

And now, you know, you have a generation of millennials who don't want to commute long distances and want to live closer to the city center.

And so you're seeing a lot more investment in downtowns all across the nation.

And so we're seeing a lot of luxury developments coming in.

We're seeing high-end restaurants that are written up by The "New York Times."

You know, David Chang has his restaurant in Chinatown now, and a meal at Majordomo is more than a month's rent for a lot of our tenants.

Mariela: So my mom started her business, Jessica's Produce, and her main motivation for that was because across the street from my elementary school, there was this liquor store, but then it closed down because the rent just got too high.

But after it closed down, my mom was like, "Hey, this is the perfect time for me to start something."

I would say that a majority of the people at William Mead now kind of rely on my mom.

Now there's this new development along the river, so now that all these new people are going to come in and they're going to build their own things.

And I wouldn't be surprised if in a couple years, like, this community just doesn't exist anymore.

Narrator: River restoration has been criticized for ignoring current residents in favor of luxury development, but the county did acknowledge that affordable housing is key to keeping people in place.

It called for an affordable housing land bank because Chinatown organizers insisted, and they got help from an unexpected ally.

Sissy Trinh: So we got involved in the L.A. River Master Plan in large part because what we were seeing were real estate listings basically saying, you know, "Buy this property."

You know, "It's going to be prime development because the L.A. River is going to get restored."

And so for us, we were, like, "Well, do we fight river restoration?

Would we be able to?"

It's like a $2-billion project.

And do we want to be on record as saying, "We don't want nice things for our communities because we're afraid"?

So we started thinking about what's a third option.

And so after making the rounds and talking to the different environmental groups and seeing where they were at, we decided to kind of see, like, well, Gehry Partners and OLIN are working on the plan as consultants.

Let's see where they're at around these issues.

Turns out they thought a lot about it, but they didn't know where to go or what to do because, well, they're architects, right?

Like, Gehry Partners built Disney Hall.

You know, what do they know about displacement and homelessness?

Frank Gehry: I grew up in a fairly poor family.

You know, a lot of tough times.

I think I can relate to what's going on.

You know, I think it behooves all of us to jump in when we can and try to make a better place.

Local government has to step in and create the guardrails.

I think one of the ways is to build housing.

We've got all the pieces.

It's just a matter of a clear go signal.

Sissy: And so we got the county to incorporate a chapter on housing.

So one of the strategies is the creation of an affordable housing land bank.

An affordable housing land bank can function two different ways.

One is it is a county agency similar to the Department of Mental Health or Public Works, where they do all the acquisitions and they do the entitlements, and then they hand off the properties to an affordable housing developer to actually do the construction.

The other option is that they contract with a nonprofit that does the acquisition and planning for it and then, again, hands it off to a separate nonprofit to do the construction.

It signals a shift in how the county and the city sees public investment.

Historically, public investment was always seen as only good, that there was no unintended consequence.

And now I think that there's an acknowledgment that we need public investment but that it comes with some potential downsides.

I had this look on my face because it was just, like, completely unexpected to think Frank Gehry is lobbying for more affordable housing on the river.

But he is, right, which is great, because I think there's a lot of assumptions swirling around Gehry Partners.

Obviously, like, they build a lot of luxury housing and, you know, high-end developments.

Why would they care about affordable housing?

But it turns out they do.

For a long time when we were working on issues of gentrification around the L.A. River, there weren't a lot of allies.

I think that there were a lot of environmentalists who were sympathetic to the issue but felt that this was tangential to their primary goals, right, which was greening the river, removing the concrete, all of that stuff.

Narrator: The growing awareness of green gentrification represents a sea change in how organizations are doing work on the river.

For Friends of the LA River, the nonprofit responsible for recentering the river in public life, this means rethinking how they do their work.

Woman: The story is that Lewis MacAdams, our founder, cut a hole in the fence at the L.A. River and walked down in there with a bunch of friends and decided that this was a good thing and that we should do more of that.

And it really was, I think, Lewis saying, why is there a gate here?

Why are we separated from the river?

It's not something to be in the background in movies.

It's not something to race your car down.

It's actually part of the natural landscape of Los Angeles and something that the people of Los Angeles could be accessing and spending time with.

And so it began with Lewis really pushing that idea, and then it was picked up by other people.

And that's how Friends of the LA River was formed, all these other things that came out of that very simple idea that people should be able to access the river.

For so many years, bringing up equity, bringing up diversity, bringing up anything that had to do with environmental justice was seen as something separate, something other, as possible mission creep.

And now people are beginning to understand that we cannot be successful if we don't bring along the communities that we claim we care about serving.

And it's the sort of thing that we didn't really talk about at FoLAR for many years.

But in the time I was on the board a few years ago until now, we have increased the amount of time and energy we're spending on thinking about and talking about gentrification.

And the reason why is because sometimes organizations that do environmental work, do parks work, do greening work, we tend to think of it as, like, an unintended consequence, and we're really sorry that happened, but what are you going to do?

Well, what you're going to do is be intentional from the beginning of the work that you're doing.

So it's been a real paradigm shift that's happening all over.

Everywhere we go, we hear people talking about how important it is to engage communities, how important it is to be equitable in the work that you're doing.

And so my being here at FoLAR is very much in keeping with our value of bringing equity to everything that we do.

So for the county master plan, I don't tend to look at it as one comprehensive plan as in, "First we're going to do this, then we're going to do this and we're going to do that."

I tend to look at it more as, like, a series of vignettes for plans for different parts of the river.

I think because it is a series of vignettes, they each have their own action plan, right?

You can't make one plan for the whole river.

It's 51 miles.

So as you look at each vignette, it will need to have its own "Where do we start," "How do we engage the community," and, "How do we move forward with these different parts?"

We definitely want to see the river return to as natural a state as safely possible.

Anytime we remove concrete, there is an increased risk of flood.

So that is an extremely strategic decision.

That's an engineering decision that has to be made.

There's never going to be a time when you're hear a FoLAR advocate for blanket concrete removal.

I'm really kind of trying to look at this holistically.

And also, though, it's not sustainability or environmentalism as normal or kind of, like, business as usual when it comes to that.

We're focused on equity and people, not just changing the landscape.

It's really about, How do we engage people and how do we protect people?

Narrator: For the county, protecting people also meant reckoning with the deep history of displacement along the river, and the master plan was the first time they engaged Native communities about the river's future.

[Music] Woman: You have some over there.

So we are at Whittier Narrows Recreational facility.

That's the colonizer name today.

But back in the day, many, many years ago, it was the village of Sibagna.

It was the first place where the Spanish put the mission, and then it was moved from here over to San Gabriel.

After that, when the Mexican government came in, this is also the site of my grandfather's land grant, and so 183 acres that were then revoked by the U.S. government.

It's so beautiful...

So this tule reed only grows in very specific areas.

It needs a marshy-type land.

And so it's not that you drive down the freeway and you just see a marsh with, you know, tule growing and you could go gather it.

And unfortunately for our community, that's a barrier to access to get to the plants that they need.

I like these thinner ones for when we do the doll.

They're also good for baskets.

[Music] L.A. County Parks has the access to these spaces and the L.A. River.

We don't really have access to these spaces.

We've been talking to them for about a year now about some type of gathering pass, but right now it is that we were just told yesterday just to call the office and talk to a certain individual "and they'll give you access."

But that's for me.

What about the rest of my community?

So the Gabrielino/Tongva people were the first people displaced from the L.A. River.

It was our life source.

Water is life.

The villages ran along that river, and that is where we had community, we had celebration, we had ceremony around water.

And so all of those important events that we would have memorialized through ceremony were along the L.A. River, and now there's nothing left of it.

It's concrete.

[Music] Rudy Ortega Jr.: My name is Rudy Ortega Jr.

I'm the Tribal President of the Fernandeno Tataviam Band of Mission Indians.

Working on the L.A. River Master Plan was significant for tribes and voices there, because one, it's the first time to have a voice there on the table.

We brought the Native community, not just the communities of tribes here in Los Angeles, like the Gabrielino, Fernandeno, but, as well, the tribes that have been relocated to Los Angeles and have ceremonies along rivers.

And to bring those voices in to the table, was able to talk about the importance of access.

Where do we go?

We were excluded from activity.

We were not permitted to do ceremony.

And when we talk about today's policies about tobacco usage and fire, that's the heart of our ceremonies.

So where is our space for us to do that?

And that's why it was important to me to come to the table to talk about, We need to plan that in.

We got to ensure that there's access for tribes to come to the river and to rekindle with the river.

Kimberly Johnson: So when the L.A. River Master Plan came up, they didn't necessarily reach out to every single Tribal government in a way that I feel was in a meaningful way.

I sometimes feel that with county entities or with state entities, it's more of a check the box.

"Did you do Tribal consultation?"

"Oh, we talked to the tribe.

They said they're fine."

Check the box.

"OK. Move on to what we want to do."

And my question with the master plan is, "OK, you met with some folks.

Are you going to come back to us for more engagement?

What actions are you going to follow, and who are you contacting?"

Rudy: The master plan wasn't perfect.

It was a first good step, but our next step is looking at, Let's have the conversation of a space along the river that tribes can share, a space that can be private for the tribes to use for ceremonial practices, an area that tribes can go and harvest and gather plant materials to continue practicing culture.

Kimberly: If the county is serious about engaging the tribes and land back, the county needs to work with the tribes and to identify plots of land that are important and not just pieces of land that they want to no longer maintain and have the cost incurred by them.

Rudy: The county's trying to have a good heart in listening and seeing, "How can we meet that?"

For me, when we look at the river and the communities that continue to live there, if we're going to uplift those communities, how do we do it so that we bring them, too, with us?

I'm for, you know, enhancing beautification, but I'm not for removing people because they can no longer afford it.

I think if we're going to do it, we got to do it together, and we got to do it with them in mind, because if not, that's what happened to my people.

Narrator: River revitalization will continue to fuel real estate speculation.

And for the first time, the county's master plan recognized this dynamic.

The question of what comes next moves us beyond a vision document.

Going forward, communities must have a voice in shaping the future of the river.

Sissy: There's all these ideas that people have for remaking the river, and I feel like it's, in many ways, a metaphor for how to remake L.A. And for my vision, it starts with who are the most vulnerable and how do we protect them and improve their quality of life as we're remaking L.A.?

I think when we talk about development, we always talk about what we want for the future, and we never really think about what do we want to protect and preserve of the past or of the current?

And I feel like if we really want to build a city for the future, we have to think about, How do we build community?

How do we support each other?

Julia: It's all about how you come into a place and the relationships that you build and what your core values are.

Imagine Los Angeles.

Like, the river is the center, and the river is invisible to so many people here.

But if people could understand that this has been a center, it might change certain people's perspective on, like, what is central.

Kimberly: The future that I want to see for the L.A. River is where Native voices are leading the way for where the river is going next.

I believe that Indigenous knowledge, bringing it back to front and center, will really be healing to not just the city and the county but also set an example for the rest of the world of what to do.

Candice Dickens-Russell: We have to ask ourselves what sort of L.A. we want to see in the future.

And the work that we do on the river now will sustain us in the future if we invest in it.

It's 51 miles.

It connects all of us.

It connects so many communities.

And I think that people believe that we can change the river.

And as we see more plans coming out, as we have people coming and talking to them and engaging them and asking what they want to see, I think that's where the hope comes from.

[Music] Announcer: "Earth Focus" is made possible in part by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation, a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy, and the Orange County Community Foundation.