Destination Crenshaw Breathes Life Into 'Open Air Museum' and Emerging ‘Digital Equity Zone’

On a map, the Crenshaw District is a 2.9 square-mile neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles, home to nearly 30,000 mostly black residents.

In the popular imagination, Crenshaw is the backdrop for the Oscar-nominated movie "Boyz In the Hood" – the real life neighborhood that cultivated the likes of former Los Angeles Mayor Thomas Bradley; rappers-turned-actors Ice Cube and Ice T; and the late rapper/entrepreneur Nipsey Hussle.

But on the streets of Crenshaw, a transformative vision is unfolding – an initiative local leaders describe as “a reparative development project.”

The idea is to inspire and empower neighborhood residents with strategic investments rather than displace them through gentrification. The effort is being led by Destination Crenshaw, a nonprofit community organization established in 2017 to celebrate the history and culture of Black Los Angeles.

The most visible part of the vision is to create the largest Black public art project in the nation along Crenshaw Boulevard, the 1.3 mile spine of the neighborhood – or what Destination Crenshaw describes as an “open air museum” centered around “pocket parks” and a “comprehensive streetscape design” that will feature commissioned murals and sculptures from local Black artists.

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The community celebrated the kick off to construction in 2020, which, when finished, will include an 800-foot Crenshaw Wall debuting the mural The Saga Continues by the RTN Crew, as well as commissioned sculptures by renowned artists Maren Hassinger, Artis Lane, and Kehinde Wiley.

That’s the visible part of the project. The potentially more impactful part of the plan, however, will be invisible to the naked eye.

Destination Crenshaw Dives Into Digital Equity

Working with city officials and a coalition of community organizations, Destination Crenshaw is also now leading the charge to turn the entire neighborhood into a “Digital Equity Zone,” built on the back of a proposed open-access fiber network that would serve the 50 businesses on Crenshaw Boulevard (the largest black business district on the west coast) and 15,000 households in the surrounding area.

“I started in November 2019 and (Destination Crenshaw) was very much into the project execution phase,” Destination Crenshaw President and CEO Jason Foster tells ILSR.

“We had a groundbreaking, announcing we are about to start construction. Four days later came the stay-at-home order for Covid.”

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Construction came to a screeching halt. Fabrication of the art and construction of the pocket parks were delayed. It also brought into focus another aspect of disinvestment the community has been dealing with: widespread lack of access to reliable and affordable Internet service.

With his ear to the ground, during the pandemic lockdown Foster learned that the Marcus Garvey School, a nonprofit private school, had 120 students enrolled at the time but only had enough Chromebooks for 60 of them to do their school work remotely.

“If you are working in infrastructure, broadband is always a part of it. But it was rarely seen at the residential level until Covid happened and specifically the issue with the Marcus Garvey School,” Foster said, explaining what prompted Destination Crenshaw to dive into tackling local Internet access challenges and join a growing coalition of community groups known as Digital Equity LA.

“They were literally trading laptops on Wednesdays. So one kid would have the laptop over the weekend and the next week that kid would only have it for a couple of days,” he explained.

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As the school’s website candidly acknowledges: “historically, the Marcus Garvey School has operated exclusively from the tuition paid by our families. However, there are financial limits on what the school can afford to offer our students in addition to the excellent curriculum we have in place.”

Destination Crenshaw leapt into action. “I did what any nonprofit leader would do: I went out and bought 60 laptops,” Foster said.

First Stop: Devices – Next Stop: Infrastructure

Those laptops were a critical response to an immediate need. But Foster wasn’t patting himself on the back.

With a background in finance – and as a son deeply influenced by his mother’s 40 year public sector career back in his hometown of Knoxville, Tenn. – he intuitively understood that, not only were Marcus Garvey students and countless other families in and around Crenshaw facing persistent problems of poverty, they were also dealing with its close cousin, inadequate infrastructure investment.

Like most cities across America, the big incumbent cable and telecom monopolies have historically underinvested in neighborhoods seen as not profitable enough to justify the cost of upgrading network connections. It has not only left poor and historically marginalized communities with antiquated wiring, but with higher monthly Internet service costs.

Laptops for households who couldn’t afford the slower, spotty service incumbent providers offered was only a part of the solution. Being able to afford home Internet service was the bigger issue, which has only been exacerbated recently by the demise of the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP).

Foster, his staff, and other Digital Equity LA coalition members came to realize that local communities could build their own networks that would not only offer reliable, high-quality connectivity, they could also offer financially-strapped households broadband at affordable rates.

“After doing an analysis, we found out that we are not (adequately) connected as a community,” Foster said.

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Searching for solutions, Destination Crenshaw first learned “there was fiber in the rail of the K line but that fiber is only for the security of the closed metro network. There’s no public access to that fiber.”

But the metro rail wasn’t the only city entity that owned fiber.

LA’s Bureau of Street Lighting (BSL) is also building a dark fiber and conduit network to connect the city’s 200,000 street lights – a city-owned asset local officials and community leaders are eager to use to bring quality Internet connectivity to businesses and residents stuck on the wrong side of the digital divide.

Fiber For The People

Working with local elected leaders, city officials, and outside consultants, Destination Crenshaw settled on a three-phase plan.

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The first phase is the installation of Wi-Fi access points on neighborhood street lights to provide free Wi-Fi to local businesses and the pocket parks along the Crenshaw corridor, an initiative currently being piloted by the BSL.

“We wanted to provide that free municipal service. But we also wanted to point out the lack of speed and quality that exists in the community already … and use that as an advocating point to say wait a minute: ‘why can’t we have this all the time?’ We want the same thing Santa Monica has.”

The second phase aims to bring fiber service – the gold-standard of Internet connectivity – to the area’s 50 businesses.

“For Phase Two we worked with HR&A to do an existing infrastructure analysis and RFP to find what companies would help us execute,” Foster said, noting that the Plenary investment group – working in partnership with Ubiquity Capital – had been awarded the bid to build and operate the network.

The last phase of the project (Phase Three) calls for extending fiber service to the 15,000 households in the surrounding neighborhood, Foster explained, adding that an important part of the planning has been coordinating with LA county officials and WeLink, which recently announced the company would be building a fixed wireless access (FWA) network to serve 275,000 underserved addresses in East Los Angeles, Boyle Heights, and parts of South Los Angeles.

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“WeLink stops east of Western Avenue and the Destination Crenshaw project would start west of Western (Avenue). It points to the coordination our municipal partners are trying to do,” Foster said. “We wanted to figure out: what is the Destination Crenshaw footprint and how can we work together with other city and county partners also moving forward on their projects?”

To fund network construction of the fiber build, Destination Crenshaw and Plenary applied for a $25 million grant from the state’s $2 billion Last Mile Federal Funding Account, administered by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC).

The grant awards are expected to be announced sometime in June, along with whether 40 other municipal broadband proposals elsewhere in the state will be awarded grant funds.

Cultivating ‘True Equity’

Should the grant be awarded, Foster said, it would be enough to complete the first two phases of the project when coupled with another $25 million Destination Crenshaw and Plenary would need to raise.

Although the finances for a full build-out (estimated to cost about $75 million) are still being considered, one clear benefit of pushing forward is that “the fiber that Plenary will lay has a 30-year ownership buy-back – meaning the community can actually own that fiber after 30 years. That’s why we selected Plenary because they believe in the ultimate opportunity to own the fiber,” he said.

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Assuming Destination Crenshaw and Plenary secure the grant funding, Foster said, the business plan calls for building the network and then inviting independent ISPs (BIPOC and black-owned companies, if possible) to offer retail service that includes high-quality, low-cost monthly plans starting at $15.

They targeted a $15/month option because, as Foster explained it, “we wanted it to work with the ACP (Affordable Connectivity Program) because we want to eliminate that monthly bill.”

However, with the $30 monthly benefit of the ACP expiring that helped low-income households pay for Internet service, Destination Crenshaw and Plenary will now need to grapple with what to do if a significant number of households can’t afford even the low-cost fiber service and instead have to rely on the free-but-not-as-fast Wi-Fi service.

Still, Foster said, he is keeping his eye on the prize:

“True equity for us is addressing digital discrimination. Currently, [Charter] Spectrum is charging double the price for half the speed. People here have been taken advantage of for (so) many years. So true equity is overcompensating for that.”

The Destination Crenshaw plan, should it come to full fruition, has the potential to dramatically improve the economic prospects and quality of life for its residents.

And it may also prove to be an attractive approach for other cities, considering that the bulk of BEAD funds from the infrastructure law will be funneled to mostly rural communities, leaving metro areas searching for creative solutions to connect the unconnected when the well of federal funds runs dry.

Watch Destination Crenshaw's video describing the project below:

Header and inline images and renderings courtesy of Destination Crenshaw

Inline image of young girl on laptop outdoors courtesy of Street Lab, CC BY-NC 4.0 DEED Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

Inline image of LA Bureau of Street Lighting conduit install courtesy of LA Bureau of Street Lighting website

Inline image of WiFi access points on utility polle courtesy of LA Bureau of Street Lighting website