Question to be Answered
What are the concerns of Boyle Heights residents with having 6-freeways run through their neighborhood?
Potential Answers to the Question
Residents’ concerns may include:
- Commuter traffic congests the through fares used by residents to get to their destinations, such as appointments, work, school, on time.
- Freeway traffic entering or exiting freeways does not stop for pedestrians at freeway adjacent crosswalks.
- 18-wheelers/semi-trucks are using local streets as a cut thru to avoid freeway congestion.
- Tittle:
Priority Concerns Outlined by an Environmental Justice Community Disproportionately Impacted by Six-Freeways: The Case of Boyle Heights, California
- Audience
This report is intended for government bodies such as elected officials representing the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles at the state, county and city level, and two transportation agencies, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation and Caltrans. This report is also intended for resident-led groups and community-based organizations whose work involves traffic issues and environmental impact mitigation, interested in understanding community concerns.
- Description Infrastructure
The Boyle Heights community is home to the East Los Angeles Freeway Interchange, a network of six- freeways that traverse the Los Angeles, California neighborhood. Located east of the City, the freeway interchange serves as a gateway to 500,000 employees who work in the downtown financial district and government buildings from every level of governance. The East Los Angeles Freeway Interchange is a complex system of connector roads that make the transition from one of the six-freeways to another possible for more than 2.4 million vehicles daily. Travel in any southern California direction is possible from the East Los Angeles Interchange by accessing one of these freeways:
- Golden State Freeway (1-5)
- Santa Ana Freeway (US 101)
- Santa Ana Freeway (I-5)
- Santa Monica Freeway (I-10)
- San Bernardino Freeway (1-10)
- Pomona Freeway (SR-60)
The freeway network continues to impact Boyle Heights residents long after the displacement of 15,000 residents and their 2,000 homes in the 1940’s to build the connector. Pollution from massive gridlock and idling vehicles in the Interchange is well documented as a source having detrimental consequences to the welfare of residents. This paper, however, looks to understand how Boyle Heights residents feel about having six-freeways run through their neighborhood, and looks to identify the concerns with the existing transportation infrastructure.
Figure 1: Boyle Heights neighborhood divided by the East Los Angeles Interchange
Source: L.A. TACO, accessed November 16, 2022, https://www.lataco.com/personal-history-betsy-kalin-boyle-heights/
Figure 2: The freeway connector at the East Los Angeles Interchange in Boyle Heights, CA
Source: KCRW.com, accessed November 6, 2022, https://www.kcrw.com/culture/shows/design-and-architecture/5-design-things-to-do-this-week-1549976931.93
- Evaluation Question(s)
What are the concerns of Boyle Heights stakeholders in having 6-freeways run through their neighborhood? Which concerns are the most significant to them?
- Relevance of the Evaluation
The evaluation questions this paper proposes to answer will focus on the concerns Boyle Heights residents and invested stakeholders may have with having six-freeways in their neighborhood. Identifying their most significant concerns will also be addressed by this report. This information is valuable as it will provide insight into the thoughts and experiences of invested stakeholders in this community disproportionately impact by the concentration of a freeway network. The findings identified through a qualitative analysis methodology will lend a voice to the individuals that make up this neighborhood. It will personalize the concerns that are of most importance to this community, further humanizing the need to address them.
The identification of the community concerns may lead to policy management opportunities that could make the concerns less burdensome to Boyle Heights residents. In Environmental Justice on the Streets, Stacy Ann Harwood explains how “advocacy planning as a strategy” is necessary to aid communities in improving the environmental conditions of communities of color. The most significant concerns can perhaps be addressed through environmental justice mitigations. Harwood describes advocacy planning as an effective mechanism to improve environmental conditions for communities that have historically have not been prioritized to receive betterments to improve the quality of life of residents because of systemic racism. Instead, influential, and civically engaged communities historically receive transportation infrastructure improvements due to their awareness of their power to influence policy and decision makers such as elected officials and transportation officials.
But before identifying an environmental justice mitigation appropriate to address the concerns of the Boyle Heights community bisected by six-freeways, context on the history of the Boyle Heights community is important to further understand why these evaluation questions are important.
Historically, Boyle Heights was known for being the melting pot of Los Angeles. Boyle Heights was home to Jews, Japanese American, and Latino residents when redlining practices prevented them from purchasing homes in Los Angeles. After World War II “racially restrictive housing covenants started to loosen up” and Jews were able to move out of Boyle Heights as they were now considered white. The Japanese American community was decimated with their incarceration during the war. A high concentration of Latinos remained in Boyle Heights, making it ““economically feasible for California planners to put the freeway there and displace…15,000 people.’” The low-income working-class neighborhood did not have the political representation, power and influence needed to defend itself from the California freeway planners. Construction of the first freeway started in the late 1940’s.
Communities like Boyle Heights, according to Hadley Meares in Why L.A.’s Freeways Are Symbolic Sites of Protest, endure multilayered consequences from the infrastructure investment, “those who were left behind in neighborhoods bisected by freeways faced economic, societal, and health inequalities that are still felt today.” This evaluation may be able to confirm that the concerns of Boyle Heights residents are similar to those of other Los Angeles neighborhoods that experienced racists redlining policies, as described by Meares, “[n]owhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, where several generations of Angelenos, mainly people of color, have been displaced or trapped by the construction of freeways in the name of progress and ease of movement for white residents, many of whom moved outward to the suburbs of L.A. and Orange counties as the postwar era dawned.”
In 1994, the federal government under President Clinton introduced Executive Order 12898 instructing “each Federal agency shall make achieving environmental justice part of its mission by identifying and addressing, as appropriate, disproportionately high and adverse human health or environmental effects of its programs, policies, and activities on minority populations and low-income populations.” Nearly 30 years later, Executive Order 12898 remains an opportunity that can improve the welfare of disproportionally impacted communities like Boyle Heights.
To augment the intention of President Clinton, President Biden’s administration established Justice40 Initiative “to confront and address decades of underinvestment in disadvantaged communities. The initiative will bring resources to communities most impacted by climate change, pollution, and environmental hazards.” The Initiate creates resources for communities who are seeking to reconnect neighborhoods previously harmed by administrative racist policies of governments and “allocates at least 40 percent of federal investments to disadvantaged communities.” Interviews with a diverse group of leaders and subject matter experts will inform on the level of knowledge and commitment to advocacy planning for historically disadvantaged communities.
- Evaluation Methodology
A qualitative evaluation method will be used to analyze the community’s concerns with having six-freeways in their neighborhood by interviewing two type of Boyle Heights community stakeholders: residents and community leaders. For the first group, two-to-four (2-4) residents will be interviewed. The second group of interviewees will include four-to-six (4-6) individuals in leadership positions in Boyle Heights. Leaders will be identified at institutions located near one of the freeways and may include a combination of elementary school, faith-based congregations, and community-based organizations (CBOs).
It will be assumed that their proximity to the freeway network will provide good-quality and credible information to this analysis based on residents’ personal experiences. In the case of the community leaders, their gained knowledge through their interaction with neighborhood residents and perhaps combined with personal experiences as well, will inform this case study. Residents and the community leaders must live or work within 0.5 miles of one of the six-Boyle Heights freeways to be interviewed, a qualifying condition that must be met to be selected.
Residents will be identified through a referral process from family members who live in Boyle Heights. Community leaders’ institution will be selected by driving the neighborhood, followed by on-line research to determine who leads the organization. The following methods will be used to secure the interviewee: cold-call, email, and in person-soliciting. If no response is received after three contact-attempts, a different interviewee candidate will be identified.
During a 30-40 minute semi-structure interview, interviewees will be asked about their experience and concerns with living or working in a neighborhood with six-freeways. Interviewees will be asked to identify concerns in the areas of traffic mobility, the environment, and will be asked to identify barriers to the quality associated to the six-freeways.
Interviews will be conducted in-person, over the phone or via Zoom to allow the audio to be recorded on my phone and later transcribed verbatim. The transcript option will be enabled when using the virtual platform. In addition, interviewees will not be asked to be on-camera during the Zoom recording. Written notes will also be taken during the interview to highlight responses I find insightful and to guide follow up questions. After a detail review of the transcribed data, I will analyze the responses and group it into common themes in a matrix.
Interviewees will be identified in the report along with their association to denote their investment in the community. However, they will not be directly quoted in the document. Interview participant will be given the opportunity to review a draft of the detail notes from their interview to confirm accuracy of their feedback. All participants will be provided with the final report.
Write brief answers to the following questions about each student’s draft paper:
- Is the evaluation question clearly written and easy to understand? If not, why?
- Are the methods described in enough detail that someone else performing the work would know exactly what to do? If not, what details are missing?
- Would completing the methods described provide a strong, credible answer to the evaluation question? If not, why? For example, is there important evidence (data) that would be missing?
- Do the methods seem feasible? For example, is the desired data accessible? Would the author have time to complete the methods?
- What argument in section 5 (relevance) will the intended readers find the most persuasive explanation of why the evaluation is needed?
- Overall assessment
- What is the strongest element of the draft?
- What would be the single most useful revision the author could make?
