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The former Jefferson Boulevard drill site in Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of Richard Parks)
For more than 30 years, Richard Parks and his neighbors have strived to make their South Los Angeles community a paradise.
Through the strength of friendship, prayer, and joyful determination, they managed tutoring systems for children, shut down a crime-ridden liquor store that they later replaced through a networked marketplace, and took on a major oil company to shut down a nearly 60-year-old company. old shop. Former drilling site in the middle of the neighborhood.
They now hope, along with the State of California and network partners, to build a grid park and affordable housing at the former drilling site, which closed in 2018 after years of grid pressure.
“God is giving us beauty for ashes,” said Parks, president of Redeemer Community Partnership, quoting the biblical prophet Isaiah.
Last month, the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust finalized the $10 million acquisition of the 1. 86-acre site, which is home to 36 wells, on Jefferson Boulevard from Sentinel Peak Resources.
Almost as soon as the site was shut down, the netpaintings went to work making plans for the future. Parks and his neighbors were concerned that the site would be purchased through a for-profit developer rather than becoming a netpaintings asset. After a series of netpaintings during meetings in which citizens expressed their hopes for affordable housing and a park on site, they sought partners to make those hopes a reality.
One of the first people they reached out to was Tori Kjer, executive director of the LA Neighborhood Land Trust, which has been creating a network of small parks around the city since 2002. With so few undeveloped homes in Los Angeles, places like the former Jefferson drilling site are offering a rare opportunity, Kjer said.
Community members protest the drilling of Jefferson Boulevard in Los Angeles in 2017 (Photo courtesy of Richard Parks).
Recovering from a previous commercial calls for expensive cleanup at most of the purchase price, he told Religion News Service. The progression of the project will require several years and a lot of effort on the part of all the partners involved.
Kjer said a team of partners has already been at work behind the scenes for years, including Redeemer, the Land Trust, their real estate broker and a squad of lawyers. They also got help from California Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer, who got a $10 million grant for the purchase approved by the state Legislature.
“Everyone had to roll up their sleeves to cross the line,” he said. “We’re very grateful. “
Parks said it was imperative to have a spouse like the Land Trust. For about a decade, network teams like Redeemer have worked with a coalition called STAND-LA working to shut down the city’s oil wells. Last December, the Los Angeles City Council banned the creation of new oil wells in the city and called for the closure of all existing wells for the next 20 years, largely due to suitability considerations similar to those of fossil fuel wells so close to residents. The Los Angeles Times reported in 2022 that the town had more than 5,000 oil and fuel wells.
After all the pressure to close the Jefferson location, Parks said it was unlikely that Sentinel Peak, the previous owner, would have tried to work with its neighbors to sell them the site. The Land Trust, which did not take part in the protest, did not encounter the same reluctance.
Parks said the campaign to shut down the Jefferson site, which is near a community school and so close to the nearest space that you can simply step out the window and touch the wall surrounding the site, had long felt like a David rather than a battle of Goliath. pitting local citizens who oppose a multi-billion dollar undertaking against each other.
For inspiration, he often thought of a familiar saying of Jesus about the power of the smallest prayers.
“You give the words of Jesus that if you have a religion the size of a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move,’ and it will move,” Parks said. “There’s an oil company that used to be called Sentinel Peak Resources, which has now left the neighborhood. To see God respond so generously to those prayers is a reminder that the global and all that is in it belongs to the Lord. “
Those small, steady prayers have helped sustain Parks since the 1990s, when he and some schoolmates moved to the Exposition Park community near the University of Southern California. They expected to meet their neighbors, get personal lessons, and then look what happens.
The concept of taking seriously the commandment to love your neighbor by seeking to love the other people who live in the neighborhood.
Three decades later, Parks and her family are still here. After years of working at USC, he left the school to run the Redeemer Community Partnership, a faith-based nonprofit whose goal is to improve life in the neighborhood. He and his family are also members of Redeemer Community Church, a small local congregation.
Richard Parks, from left, Tori Kjer and Lori Gay at the former Jefferson Boulevard drill site in Los Angeles. (Photo courtesy of Richard Parks)
Parks, a remarkably cheerful and persistent man, said he’s grateful for everything that’s happening in the neighborhood. He hopes the remodeling of the borehole will mark the beginning of a new crack in the life of the community.
Next steps for the allocation of the Jefferson drill site will include the California Department of Toxic Substances Control’s investment request to leave blank, as well as the public budget request for the planned new park and network center.
Parks is also working with Neighborhood Housing Services of Los Angeles County to develop affordable housing on the parts of the property where there were no wells. Lori Gay, president of NHS, said she’s known Parks and the work of Redeemer, where her husband is on the board, for years.
Gay said that Parks first approached her about the Jefferson site a few years ago and she’s been watching as the project progresses. Gay, the daughter of a minister, said faith-based groups can play an essential role in addressing the issue of affordable housing.
He said Parks and neighbors around the drill site had a tenacity that helped make the task of redeveloping the drill site a reality. He recalled how, when Parks recently prayed for the task, he recited a modified edition of the Lord’s Prayer.
Instead of praying that God’s will would be done on earth as it was in heaven, Parks prayed that God’s will would be done “in the community as it is in heaven. “
“I’ve never heard that before,” said Gay.
Parks said praying for God’s will to be done on earth can seem overwhelming. It can also be difficult to implement. But community is a position where you can make changes.
“When we think about the little piece of earth that God has entrusted to our care, then when we pray, maybe it will be done in the neighborhood as it is in heaven,” Parks said.