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From their front porches, residents of the West Adams neighborhood have watched with mixed emotions as their elderly neighbors disappear, and the young newcomers who replace them peel away the years on their aging homes, transporting the community back to yesteryear.
For better or worse, West Adams, just northwest of USC, has become the new darling of historic preservationists. Since 1981, when middle-class whites began trickling into the area, buying time-worn homes and restoring them to their former glory, scores of newcomers have bought bargain-priced, mansion-sized fixer-uppers in the predominantly black neighborhood.
As their presence has increased, so has the hostility between the newcomers and the longtime residents, many of whom feel the restorationists see the neighborhood only as a collection of historic houses, ignoring the longtime residents inside them. It is a conflict that is cropping up more and more in old, big-city neighborhoods as middle-class, mostly white "urban pioneers" move into minority areas to "reclaim" historic houses gone to pot.
"At first, we thought they were coming in to be neighborly," said Marion Downs Smith, a Juilliard-trained classical musician who has lived in her home on 20th Street for 30 years. "Now, we see they're out to exploit and take advantage of us. They don't mean us any good. We're not going to sit idly by and let them take over like we're dummies."
Now, what could have been a cooperative effort to upgrade neglected homes in this grand old neighborhood has become mired, instead, in acrimony and resentment, fueled by fear and misunderstandings on both sides. The hostility reached its climax a month ago, when some residents waged a successful protest against the preservationists' annual Historic Homes Tour and Street Faire, forcing the group to scale down its most important event of the year.
"It's really too bad about the hostility," said Karen Blackwell, one of only three blacks in the 100-member preservationists' group, the West Adams Heritage Assn. "There's a lot of suspicion on the part of old-timers."
Many residents believe their elderly neighbors are being pressured to sell their homes at below-market prices, she said. Others simply mistrust leaders of the association, who have alienated their neighbors by disparaging the neighborhood in association meetings and talking...