The bold plan for the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza has raised $28 million dollars to try to begin to implement a new approach to urban redevelopment.
The Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mall in Los Angeles’s Crenshaw neighborhood opened in 1947, one of the first of its kind in the country. Since then, it’s looked like a typical mall, with a sprawling parking lot. But community members in the surrounding majority-Black neighborhood now want to transform the 43-acre site into something different—mixed-income housing, community gardens, and new worker-owned cooperatives, all run by a nonprofit that can return proceeds to the community.