(RNS) — For more than 30 years, Richard Parks and his neighbors have been trying to make their South Los Angeles neighborhood a little more like heaven.
Through the power of friendship, prayer and cheerful determination, they’ve run tutoring programs for kids, closed a crime-ridden liquor store that was later replaced by a community market and faced down a major oil company to shutter a nearly 60-year-old drill site in the middle of the neighborhood.
Now they hope, with help from the state of California and community partners, to build a community park and affordable housing on the former drill site, which closed in 2018 after years of community pressure.
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“God is giving us beauty for ashes,” said Parks, president of Redeemer Community Partnership, quoting the biblical prophet Isaiah.
Last month, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust closed on a $10 million purchase of the 1.86-acre site, once home to 36 wells, on Jefferson Boulevard from Sentinel Peak Resources.
Almost as soon as the site was shut down, the neighborhood went to work on making plans for the future. Parks and his neighbors worried the site would be bought up by a for-profit developer instead of becoming a community asset. After a series of community meetings, where residents expressed their hopes for a park and affordable housing on the site, they went looking for partners to make those hopes a reality.
Richard Parks, from left, Tori Kjer and Lori Gay at the former Jefferson Boulevard drill site in Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of Richard Parks)
One of the first people they reached out to was Tori Kjer, executive director of the LA Neighborhood Land Trust, which has been developing small community parks around the city since 2002. With so few undeveloped properties in LA, places like the former Jefferson drill site offer a rare opportunity, said Kjer.
Reclaiming a former industrial site requires costly cleanup on top of the purchase price, she told Religion News Service. Developing the site will take several years and a lot of effort from all the partners involved.
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Kjer said a team of partners has already been at work behind the scenes for years, including Redeemer, the Land Trust, their real estate broker and a squad of lawyers. They also got help from California Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who got a $10 million grant for the purchase approved by the state Legislature.
“It was everyone rolling up their sleeves to pull it over the finish line,” she said. “We are very grateful.”
