Jordan Downs

Jordan Downs Housing Projects is a 700-unit public housing apartment complex in Watts, Los Angeles, California next to David Starr Jordan High School. It consists of 103 buildings with townhouse style units ranging from one bedroom to five bedrooms. The complex is owned and managed by the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles (HACLA). The complex was built by the Federal Government in the mid-1940s and was the first Veterans Housing Project in the country. It was named for the oldest residents in the area, David Starr Jordan, and Samuel Elliot Downs.

The complex is bounded by Grape Street to the west, 97th Street to the north, Alameda Street to the east, and 103rd Street to the south. This large area had been used as a truck farm for years and during the second World War it supplied vegetables for the surrounding communities of Watts, South Gate and Lynwood.

The complex was originally developed as semi-permanent housing for war workers during World War II. In the early 1950s, HACLA converted it to public housing; it was among the last of the public housing projects in Watts to be opened for that purpose. It opened in 1955, shortly after new mayor Norris Poulson ended all new public housing in the city.

The development, like others in the area, began partially integrated; however, its tenancy rapidly became majority black, approaching 100% by the mid-1960s. This rapid change occurred for a number of reasons. Many of the veterans who still lived in the projects in the early 1950s moved out as they were able to purchase homes. Blacks, still migrating west after the war ended, gravitated toward areas like Watts that already had sizeable black populations. In addition, at least in the first decade of the post-war period, restrictive covenants helped channel recent migrants into Watts and away from nearby suburban cities such as Compton.

Across the next four decades, Jordan Downs and the other project houses came to be seen as microcosms of the ills of society: either of the dependency of individuals on the welfare state, as conservatives argued, or of institutional racism, lack of access to education and jobs, and the cycle of poverty, as liberals argued. The rapid decrease in manufacturing jobs in Los Angeles depressed the area; at the same time, the concentration of impoverished citizens, combined with a pervasive sense of disenfranchisement and official indifference or hostility, made the housing projects likely breeding-grounds for crime. Jordan Downs was one of the flashpoints of the 1965 Watts riots. Like the other housing projects, Jordan Downs benefited relatively little from the influx of federal money and attention that followed the riots. In the seventies and eighties, despair about the post-war model of public housing and declining federal spending in this area served to further dilapidate this and the other area projects.

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