To read more of the Times Editorial Board's opinion, please click here, Editorial: Palm Springs brutally displaced hundreds. They're finally getting a measure of justice
Image source: Jason Armond | Los Angeles Times
They were children when their families’ Palm Springs homes were bulldozed and burned as part of the systematic destruction of a community. Now they're in their 60s or older, and their loss is finally being acknowledged.
The mostly Black and Latino families affected had found a haven on a 1-square-mile tract of land known as Section 14. Located adjacent to downtown Palm Springs, the land is owned by the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians, but the federal government had forbidden them to lease it long-term. Instead, from the 1930s into the 1960s, the tribe rented parcels to people with few housing options, particularly Black and Latino residents who worked in the city as housekeepers, carpenters, gardeners and more but were prevented from living in most of Palm Springs by discriminatory housing practices.
Utilities were meager in Section 14, and residents often built their own modest homes. Though they didn’t own the land underneath, they created a community.
Until it was ripped out from under them. What the city characterized as "slum clearance" in the 1950s and ’60s forced residents to flee their homes on just weeks' or days' notice or sometimes none at all. A 1968 state report called it "a city-engineered holocaust."
Now, decades later, the city of Palm Springs has offered hundreds of survivors a settlement of $5.9 million. Although it comes late for the surviving victims, who now range from their 60s into their 90s, the recognition that they were traumatized and their homes were burned down, often with their possessions inside, is just.
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