The Sad Demise of an LA Block Club

Back in March 2020, my neighbor Chris died. She was a longtime resident of our southeast corner of Inglewood and a stalwart member of the local block club. The club members immediately mobilized upon her passing, sending word of her funeral and urging everyone to attend. Then, three days before the service, the lockdown order came down. Funerals were exactly the sort of gathering we were warned to stay away from. After wrestling with the risk, I decided to stay home. I told myself the block club would get together on the other side of whatever this was, and we’d do Chris right. 

We never did. February 2020 was the last time we met, and the block club now exists in name only. Of all the casualties of the early pandemic—theater, restaurants, retail stores, work itself—a block club may seem negligible. Some of our members believed the club was on the wane, anyway; that it had gotten sclerotic, outlived its usefulness. But nearly four years later, its absence looms large, highlighted by the massive redevelopment that is reconfiguring Inglewood. Those in-person, at-home Monday night meetings made the neighborhood feel like a family (if sometimes a dysfunctional one). It made the city feel manageable. Though Inglewood still feels very familiar, I feel more alone, as if I am floating above it. 

My husband and I moved to our neighborhood 20 years ago, in flight from the contentious homeowner association politics of our former gated community on the other side of Inglewood. We were welcomed by a member of the block club bearing a bouquet of flowers. I was surprised and charmed—this was old-fashioned gentility in Los Angeles, a place where people often don’t know, or want to know, who’s been living next door for years, never mind who’s just arrived. I was warmed, too, by the fact that this chiefly Black neighborhood’s block club felt like part of a bigger tradition of maintaining cohesiveness in the face of racist dynamics that diminish and degrade Black communities, actively or by neglect. Inglewood was a modestly middle-class city that, like so many Black places, had long been saddled with a “ghetto” reputation. In films such as “Grand Canyon,” it was depicted as dangerous and forbidding, a blight on the ideal of Southern California. When a block club announced itself to newcomers with flowers, it was an act of defiance.    

L.A. block clubs have not always been about uplift. Block clubs have functioned—and sometimes still do—as “neighborhood watch” crime-prevention groups allied with police. Throughout the city, neighborhood “quality” is synonymous with public safety, which is often taken as a synonym for keeping bad elements out (and property values up) by cultivating relationships with law enforcement. This almost always entails repressing and misrepresenting Black folks. The historically fraught relationship between black communities and police make Black neighborhood watch groups feel compromised at best, self-defeating at worst. The furthest thing from uplift.

And yet, when Alan and I were invited to join the club, we could hardly say no. Though wary of the police focus, I was eager to be a good neighbor, to be part of an extended family that I had certainly been part of growing up just a mile or so away. We didn’t have a block club or neighborhood watch back then because we didn’t need it; it was the era of kids playing all day in the streets, doors left open, people dropping in on each other unannounced. I hadn’t experienced that kind of community in a long time, not since I’d left home, and the block club was transporting. Walking down the street in the evening to gather at a local house for the monthly meeting was deeply affirming, almost spiritual. For that reason, I endured the opening prayer. Despite being a staunch atheist, I bowed my head and clasped my hands in a gesture of solidarity that never failed to move me. The conversations that followed were less about public safety than the bureaucratic details of getting streets paved, lights repaired, signs replaced. The talk was also about people: updates about who was doing what, who was doing well, who was ailing. We planned an annual block club party and raised college funds for local high school students.

When it was our month to host the meeting, I left the door unlocked for latecomers, something that recalled my childhood in the best way. I was gratified that people lingered afterward in the kitchen, wandering among our dogs, chatting and making plates of salad and lasagna to take home. We may not have all liked each other all the time—some rifts went back decades—but we all stuck around, drawn by a commitment that was bigger than any one of us.

The block club wasn’t perfect or always thriving. The small cadre that met regularly complained endlessly about the lack of participation (read: the apathy of Black folks none of us can afford). There was also a conservative bent among older folks that grated on me. At one meeting, a Christian neighbor promoted an anti-gay marriage bill; at another, I was shocked to hear all the NIMBY-ish grumbling about a family on Section 8 that had moved in at the end of the block. Fortunately, those moments were few. The bigger thing that I saw while delivering flyers advertising an upcoming meeting was that the block club made the neighborhood better. Even the people who never came saw its existence as an asset, something that enhanced our overall quality of life. They called one of us whenever they had a complaint or problem that needed airing and sharing. The club gave everybody a voice and a surplus of what a developer friend calls “good eyes.” Certainly, we looked out for crime or anything threatening, but our aim was more holistic and humanistic than that. When my husband died unexpectedly in 2015, I experienced an outpouring from the block—flowers, cards, phone calls, food. A man I’d never seen before showed up at my door one morning with two $20-dollar bills and a cake. He apologized for not having more.

The pandemic hiatus came at a bad time. Changes that had been brewing for years had started to accelerate—posing a greater threat to our cohesiveness than crime—and that demanded a regular community response. The billion-dollar SoFi Stadium opened, fueling gentrification and hikes in already-skyrocketing housing prices. Construction began on the Intuit Dome, another billion-dollar sports venue that has taken some of what was left of our precious affordable-housing stock. Traffic in the city also got suddenly, dramatically worse. A new city councilwoman was elected in our district without running a visible campaign or making a single public appearance. George Floyd’s murder reinvigorated discussion of all aspects of anti-Black racism, starting with police brutality but including historical discrimination in housing, commercial development, schools, the very nature of the American dream. That would have been an uncomfortable block club discussion, but I would have loved to host it. While the meetings were frequently a respite from the politics of being Black in America, a space where we could simply be homeowners swapping advice or invitations to charity events, politics always hovered.

Since its demise, nothing has taken the club’s place. Not online platforms like NextDoor, which are often little more than glorified social media that amplifies paranoia about crime while reinforcing tropes about “good” and “bad” neighborhoods. Posting security camera videos of “suspicious” people ringing doorbells or using sidewalks does not build community; it does the opposite. Online forums can be useful for spreading the word about a yard sale or a lost dog or a new restaurant. But these are services. And whatever else they might be, they aren’t exactly spiritual. 

On my street we continue to be diminished by the loss of block club veterans. Shortly after, Chris, our longtime treasurer, became ill and died, and his wife, the secretary, was sidelined with a stroke. The club president also got sick and, though he has since recovered, is not calling meetings. I don’t think he will again. The pandemic seems to have put the fear of contamination into people, especially seniors, tainting the prospect of small gatherings in a way that’s starting to feel permanent. Four years on, I am more distraught than usual that there will be no holiday party this year, as there hasn’t been since 2019. That gathering was always a logistical nightmare—where would we have it? How much would it cost? Who would come? In the end, I was always glad to go and let go of being a journalist for a night, to revel in just being a neighbor among neighbors.