City Rising

Launching in September on KCET and Link TV, City Rising is a one-hour broadcast special and multi-media project that provides in depth critical analysis of the issues surrounding gentrification and displacement. 

The series looks at six California communities where residents, activists and urban planners have identified gentrification as a primary concern:

• Boyle Heights, an urban enclave of Los Angeles that made itself a cultural mecca for the city’s booming Latino population;
• South Central, the mostly poor and under-resourced neighborhoods near downtown Los Angeles that were historically African-American but have become nearly 80 percent Latino;
• Long Beach, a coastal Southern California city whose central and western neighborhoods have a diverse population of Latinos, African-Americans, Southeast Asians (especially Cambodians), Filipinos and Pacific Islanders;
• Santa Ana, a mostly poor and historically Mexican city in the wealthy, conservative, anti-immigrant and predominantly white Orange County;
• Oakland, a major port city east of San Francisco that was historically ethnically diverse and has seen large influxes of young professionals and waves of urban redevelopment;
• Oak Park, a modest, working-class neighborhood in the state capital, Sacramento, plagued by crime and a struggling economy.