Business
On a Crenshaw Boulevard corner, old gives way to new, but it stays in the family
The corner lot on Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street looks like any other construction site. Inside the chain-link fence encircling the property, an excavator last week was moving a pile of rubble — the last remains of an old building that had been demolished to make room for something new.
But the mundane scene belied an unusual story in Los Angeles real estate: Instead of selling it, a Black family with deep roots in South L.A. chose to hold on to a property they’ve owned for decades and develop it themselves into a $24-million apartment and retail building.
They’ll mark their progress with a formal groundbreaking ceremony Thursday, a rare instance of a local, minority property owner participating in the redevelopment of their neighborhood, which had long been overlooked by conventional developers. In keeping a seat at the table, they are bucking the norms for how development in L.A. typically is done, in which owners sell to outside developers looking to capitalize on the rising fortunes of once-neglected historic neighborhoods.
But even with a train stop for Metro’s new light rail K line nearby, funding for the project was hard to come by. It took years of effort before siblings Jamial Clark and Bridgette Reed, who inherited the property from their parents, could start turning their mother’s former hair salon and wig shop property into a six-story building with 48 apartments and perhaps a small grocery store in the first-floor retail space.
The grind, they said, has been worth it. Their parents, Henry and Lucretia Clark, scraped together money in 1995 to buy the building and the siblings didn’t want to let go of it. Perhaps, they said, they will provide a road map to others who own properties in evolving neighborhoods near the many new transit lines being built and planned by Metro.
Co-developer Kacy Keys, left, and Clark family members Bridgette Reed and brother Jamial Clark at the site.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“There are a lot of Black-owned properties up and down Crenshaw,” Reed said. “We just want to encourage other families to do the same thing and not sell out to these developers who are coming in and actually pricing us out of our own communities.”
Key to getting their project underway was teaming with developer Kacy Keys, who has spent nearly three decades building commercial projects including apartments, offices and stores. She heads Praxis Development Group, which will have an equity stake in the project, which is named Clark on 54th.
“We were responsible for playing the developer role,” Keys said of her company, such as getting city construction approvals, overseeing the design, hiring contractors and finding financing. The Clarks “agreed to contribute their land into a joint venture with us.”
Both Praxis and the Clarks had to put up cash for the last few years to make sure the project didn’t falter, which was worrying, Jamial Clark said.
A 48-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail will be built at Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street in Los Angeles near the Metro K line.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
“I invested over $100,000 of my money just to keep things going,” he said, “and to keep bills paid and the mortgage paid,” but he and his sister didn’t want to let go of the property their parents toiled over and where they spent many hours of their young lives.
“Selling was never going to be an option, even though we got to a point where we had to think about it” as rising interest rates and inflation drove the potential cost of the project so high it looked out of reach, Clark said.
The pair attended nearby 54th Street Elementary School and after classes they walked to their mother’s salon, where they pitched in answering the phone.
“It was like our second home,” Clark said, a place with a nurturing vibe that encouraged customers to linger and chat.
“Mom was old-school press-and-curl,” he said, referring to a popular hairstyle in the 1990s. “My mom was taking out those weaves and regrowing their hair.”
The salon had a private area where women with thinning hair could get scalp treatments that included massages from their late beautician sister Carla Taylor and oils formulated by their mother.
“It was almost like a counseling session,” he said. “The ladies would stay after they got their hair done and order lunch.”
Members of the Clark family have owned the property for decades.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
On Saturdays their mom played such “old” music as the Temptations, Al Green and the Whispers, he said. “The ladies would just love to come and sit.”
Her tenants in the building included the wig shop with a celebrity clientele, a shoe repair shop, a frame shop and a social services provider, all of which relocated in the neighborhood, he said.
Some neighbors were apprehensive about the plan to knock down a building infused with emotions and memories for so many, but Clark saw an opportunity to be part of potential economic changes coming to the area. In West Adams, another historically black community, development of new apartments, restaurants and shops was already taking place on Adams Boulevard.
“I was like, ‘Wow, Crenshaw should be comparable to that, at least.’”
In the 1920s and 1930s, Central Avenue was the center of L.A.’s black community. Later, the center shifted to the Crenshaw Corridor, particularly between Adams and Slauson Avenue, said real estate developer Philip Hart, who is familiar with the plans for Clark at 54th but not involved in the project.
Lately, the multibillion-dollar public investments in Metro’s Crenshaw line and the Expo line that intersects it “have had a ripple effect in terms of the communities they serve becoming desirable,” Hart said.
That economic shift puts pressure on local residents, he said. “Can they continue to pay their rent or their property taxes? The question of gentrification and displacement has become a very important question in the Crenshaw District over the past 10 years or so.”
If redevelopment doesn’t bring with it affordable housing and good-paying jobs, residents will be priced out of their neighborhoods and join a long-running exodus to Palmdale, Lancaster and the Inland Empire, where the cost of living is cheaper, he said.
The Crenshaw community, Hart said, “should retain its historic African American cultural cachet.”
Keys and the Clarks hope their project will play a small part in keeping the neighborhood intact. The building will include 10 units considered “deeply affordable” because they are reserved for tenants earning 50% of the median income in the area when they become available in late 2026.
The apartments will be bigger than average, including two- and three-bedroom units to accommodate families, said Keys, who is working on the project with her partner Charles Wise.
Work has begun on a 48-unit apartment building with ground-floor retail at Crenshaw Boulevard and 54th Street in Los Angeles near the Metro K line.
(Myung J. Chun / Los Angeles Times)
One of the biggest challenges to getting the project underway was finding financing. A building that size typically would be funded with a loan or two, but Keys had to assemble a complicated package from seven entities including philanthropic nonprofits after approaching about 100 financing sources.
“Even though I’ve built over a billion dollars’ worth of projects over the course of my career, this was my first time as a small woman-led business that I was raising money on my own,” Keys said. “It was incredibly challenging.”
Praxis put up more than $200,000 of its own funds and worked without compensation to prove that partnering with legacy landowners to create new housing can work, she said.
Among the financiers was MSquared, a women-owned real estate development and investment firm that will retain an equity share, as will New York investment and development firm Six Peak Capital.
The need to securing financing from multiple sources dragged out the process, but the effort was worth it, Hart said.
“What they’ve done was challenging, but they’ve done it and they’re having a groundbreaking,” he said. “That’s a good thing.”
As the war in Iran strangles the flow of oil around the globe, California’s jet fuel reservoirs are running low.
The state — which refines much of its own fuel in El Segundo and elsewhere but still relies on crude oil imports — has seen its jet fuel stock decline by more than 25% from last year’s peak to a level not seen since 2023, according to data from the California Energy Commission.
The supply is shrinking as a global shortage is already affecting travelers’ summer plans with canceled flights and higher fares. It could even affect plans for people coming to Los Angeles for the 2026 World Cup, which starts in June, said Mike Duignan, a hospitality expert and professor at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
“People don’t know exactly how this is going to escalate,” he said. “There’s a huge black cloud over the sea for the World Cup and the travel slump that we’re seeing is all linked to this oil shortage.”
As fuel supplies shrink, flight prices are rising. Airlines are adding baggage surcharges to cover fuel costs. Several routes leaving from smaller California hubs, including Sacramento and Burbank, have already been canceled.
Air Canada has suspended flights for this summer, cutting routes from JFK to Toronto and Montreal.
“Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the Iran conflict, affecting some lower profitability routes and flights which now are no longer economically feasible,” the airline said in a statement last week.
Europe had just more than a month’s supply of jet fuel left last week, the International Energy Agency said. In an effort to cut costs, the German airline Lufthansa slashed 20,000 flights from its summer schedule this week.
Without a fresh oil supply flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, the situation is unlikely to improve, experts said. The oil reserves countries and companies have in storage are helping fill shortfalls, but the squeezed supply chain could still wreak economic havoc.
“When there’s a shortage somewhere, everything is affected,” said Alan Fyall, an associate dean of the University of Central Florida Rosen College of Hospitality Management. “Airlines are being cautious, and I would say that is a very wise strategy at the moment.”
California’s jet fuel stock reached its lowest levels in two and a half years at 2.6 million barrels last week, down from a peak of more than 3.5 million barrels last year.
The California Energy Commission, which tracks fuel inventory, said the state’s current jet fuel stock is sill sufficient.
“Current production and inventory levels of jet fuel are within historical ranges,” a spokesperson said. “Although supply is tight, no structural deficit has emerged yet. The present tightness reflects short‑term global market stress. As long as refinery operations remain stable, California is positioned to meet regional jet fuel needs.”
Europe has been affected more directly because it relies on the Middle East for the vast majority of its crude oil and many refined products, experts said. California gets crude oil from the Middle East but also from Canada, Argentina and Guyana.
The state has the capacity to refine around 200,000 barrels of jet fuel per day, most of it from refineries in El Segundo and Richmond.
The amount of crude oil originating in the state has been declining since the early 2000s, as state regulations and drilling costs have led to more imports.
California has become particularly vulnerable to supply-chain shocks like the war in Iran, says Chevron, one of the companies that provides jet fuel in the state.
“The conflict in the Mideast Gulf has exposed the danger of California’s decision to offshore energy production,” said Ross Allen, a Chevron spokesperson. “Taxes, red tape and burdensome regulations cost the state nearly 18% of its refinery capacity in just the past year, and we urge policymakers to protect the remaining manufacturing capacity.”
In 2025, 61% of crude oil supply to California’s refineries came from foreign sources, according to the California Energy Commission. Around 23% came from inside the state, down from 35% five years ago.
The state’s refining capacity has also been declining, said Jesus David, senior vice president of Energy at IIR Energy. The West Coast region’s refining capacity has decreased from 2.9 million to 2.3 million barrels a day since 2019, he said.
“California’s had issues prior to the war,” David said. “Nothing new has been built over the past 30 years, and California has closed a lot of capacity.”
The result is higher prices for both gasoline and jet fuel in the state. Jet fuel at LAX costs close to $15 per gallon this week, compared with almost $10 at Denver International Airport and $11 at Newark International Airport.
Gasoline prices have also been hit hard by the global conflict. Average gas prices in California are close to $6 a gallon, around $2 higher than the national average.
The West Coast is a “fuel island” because it’s not connected by pipelines to the rest of the country, United Airlines chief executive Scott Kirby said in an interview last month. That means oil and refined products have to be brought in by ships.
“Fuel price is more susceptible to supply weakness on the West Coast than anywhere else in the country,” Kirby said.
Some airlines might not survive the turmoil if oil prices don’t level out soon, he said. Spirit Airlines, a budget carrier based in Florida, is reportedly facing imminent liquidation if it isn’t bailed out by the Trump administration.
Nike is cutting about 1,400 jobs in its operations division, mostly from its technology department, the company said Thursday.
In a note to employees, Venkatesh Alagirisamy, the chief operating officer of Nike, said that management was nearly done reorganizing the business for its turnaround plan, and that the goal was to operate with “more speed, simplicity and precision.”
“This is not a new direction,” Mr. Alagirisamy told employees. “It is the next phase of the work already underway.”
Nike, the world’s largest sportswear company, is trying to recover after missteps led to a prolonged sales slump, in which the brand leaned into lifestyle products and away from performance shoes and apparel. Elliott Hill, the chief executive, has worked to realign the company around sports and speed up product development to create more breakthrough innovations.
In March, Nike told investors that it expected sales to fall this year, with growth in North America offset by poor performance in Asia, where the brand is struggling to rejuvenate sales in China. Executives said at the time that more volatility brought on by the war in the Middle East and rising oil prices might continue to affect its business.
The reorganization has involved cuts across many parts of the organization, including at its headquarters in Beaverton, Ore. Nike slashed some corporate staff last year and eliminated nearly 800 jobs at distribution centers in January.
“You never want to have to go through any sort of layoffs, but to re-center the company, we’re doing some of that,” Mr. Hill said in an interview earlier this year.
Mr. Alagirisamy told employees that Nike was reshaping its technology team and centering employees at its headquarters and a tech center in Bengaluru, India. The layoffs will affect workers across North America, Europe and Asia.
The cuts will also affect staffing in Nike’s factories for Air, the company’s proprietary cushioning system. Employees who work on the supply chain for raw materials will also experience changes as staff is integrated into footwear and apparel teams.
Nike’s Converse brand, which has struggled for years to revive sales, will move some of its engineering resources closer to the factories they support, the company said.
Mr. Alagirisamy said the moves were necessary to optimize Nike’s supply chain, deploy technology faster and bolster relationships with suppliers.
A bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to homeowners who take steps to reduce wildfire risk on their property died in the Legislature.
The Senate Insurance Committee on Monday voted down the measure, SB 1076, one of the most ambitious bills spurred by the devastating January 2025 wildfires.
The vote came despite fire victims and others rallying at the state Capitol in support of the measure, authored by state Sen. Sasha Renée Pérez (D-Pasadena), whose district includes the Eaton fire zone.
The Insurance Coverage for Fire-Safe Homes Act originally would have required insurers to offer and renew coverage for any home that meets wildfire-safety standards adopted by the insurance commissioner starting Jan. 1, 2028.
It also threatened insurers with a five-year ban from the sale of home or auto insurance if they did not comply, though it allowed for exceptions.
However, faced with strong opposition from the insurance industry, Pérez had agreed to amend the bill so it would have established community-wide pilot projects across the state to better understand the most effective way to limit property and insurance losses from wildfires.
Insurers would have had to offer four years of coverage to homeowners in successful pilot projects.
Denni Ritter, a vice president of the American Property Casualty Insurance Assn., told the committee that her trade group opposed the bill.
“While we appreciate the intent behind those conversations, those concepts do not remove our opposition, because they retain the same core flaw — substituting underwriting judgment and solvency safeguards with a statutory mandate to accept risk,” she said.
In voting against the bill Sen. Laura Richardson, (D-San Pedro), said: “Last I heard, in the United States, we don’t require any company to do anything. That’s the difference between capitalism and communism, frankly.”
The remarks against the measure prompted committee Chair Sen. Steve Padilla, (D-Chula Vista), to chastise committee members in opposition.
“I’m a little perturbed, and I’m a little disappointed, because you have someone who is trying to work with industry, who is trying to get facts and data,” he said.
Monday’s vote was the fourth time a bill that would have required insurers to offer coverage to so-called “fire hardened” homes failed in the Legislature since 2020, according to an analysis by insurance committee staff.
Fire hardening includes measures such as cutting back brush, installing fire resistant roofs and closing eaves to resist fire embers.
Pérez’s legislation was thought to have a better chance of passage because it followed the most catastrophic wildfires in U.S. history, which damaged or destroyed more than 18,000 structures and killed 31 people.
The bill was co-sponsored by the Los Angeles advocacy group Consumer Watchdog and Every Fire Survivor’s Network, a community group founded in Altadena after the fires formerly called the Eaton Fire Survivors Network.
But it also had broad support from groups such as the California Apartment Association, the California Nurses Association and California Environmental Voters.
Leading up to the fires, many insurers, citing heightened fire risk, had dropped policyholders in fire-prone neighorhoods. That forced them onto the California FAIR Plan, the state’s insurer of last resort, which offers limited but costly policies.
A Times analysis found that that in the Palisades and Eaton fire zones, the FAIR Plan’s rolls from 2020 to 2024 nearly doubled from 14,272 to 28,440. Mandating coverage has been seen as a way of reducing FAIR Plan enrollment.
“I’m disappointed this bill died in committee. Fire survivors deserved better,” Pérez said in a statement .
Also failing Monday in the committee was SB 982, a bill authored by Sen. Scott Wiener, (D-San Francisco). It would have authorized California’s attorney general to sue fossil fuel companies to recover losses from climate-induced disasters. It was opposed by the oil and gas industry.
Passing the committee were two other Pérez bills. SB 877 requires insurers to provide more transparency in the claims process. SB 878 imposes a penalty on insurers who don’t make claims payments on time.
Another bill, SB 1301, authored by insurance commissioner candidate Sen. Ben Allen, (D-Pacific Palisades), also passed. It protects policyholders from unexplained and abrupt policy non-renewals.
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