On Century Boulevard, the Intuit Dome looms large on the horizon, the latest glittering monument to the dramatic turnaround Inglewood has made over the past 13 years. In 2011, the City of Champions teetered on insolvency and its school district was in such disarray that the state would take it over a year later. Homicide rates and unemployment climbed into the double digits and most of its anchors, including the Lakers and the Kings, had long since abandoned the city.
The Hollywood Park Racetrack, its last major attraction, put itself out to pasture in 2013, a final bookend to Inglewood’s string of hard knocks. Today, the $2 billion, 18,000-seat Intuit Dome, where the Los Angeles Clippers will play beginning in October, is now just one of the city’s multibillion-dollar sports venues. Across the street is the $5 billion SoFi Stadium, home of the L.
A. Rams and Chargers, the flourishing YouTube Theater, a 12-screen cinema, restaurants, retailers and hundreds of luxury apartments. The city hosted the Super Bowl in 2022, Wrestlemania in 2023 and will be home to the FIFA World Cup in 2026 and the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympics in 2028.
“There’s opportunities that have never been dreamed of,” Mayor James T. Butts Jr. said.
Following three years of construction, the Dome is finally opening its doors Aug. 15 with a concert from Grammy-winning artist Bruno Mars. Related: Inglewood’s Intuit Dome is poised to be the future of SoCal’s live entertainment It is yet another milestone in an ongoing revitalization of Inglewood that started with the reopening of The Forum in 2014 and is expected to continue for years, with other such projects as a potential $2 billion automated people mover to connect the three sports and entertainment venues to Inglewood’s downtown and the Metro K Line in time for the Olympics and an overhaul of Market Street, the city’s historic shopping district.
But beyond the glitz and glamour, other parts of Inglewood are still waiting for their renaissance. While Inglewood has experienced tremendous and unprecedented growth in parts, the transition has been far from seamless. Glance across Prairie Avenue from SoFi Stadium and it is hard to miss the seams: derelict buildings riddled with graffiti and shuttered storefronts in empty strip malls.
Business owners in the area complain that speculative investors bought up neighboring properties and then left the buildings to rot, attracting squatters, vagrants and trash. In an interview with the Southern California News Group in 2019, Lawrence Scott, the owner of Scottle’s Gumbo and Grill, described his struggles to stay afloat ahead of the stadium’s opening . Not long after the first kickoff, his building was sold and he was forced out, he said in a recent phone interview.
“If they hadn’t opened the stadium, I’d still be there, I know that for a fact,” Scott said. “Because the people had no reason to sell, none.” Today, the property, dubbed Pride Plaza, is fenced off, the windows covered in graffiti.
Scott’s gumbo shop now operates out of a ghost kitchen in Chino and delivers directly to customers. He hopes to bring Scottle’s back to Inglewood someday, but he says he wouldn’t go anywhere near the stadium this time. “I started there, I worked there for 35 years, I want to end there,” he said of Inglewood.
So far, the impact from the stadium has been a mixed bag, according to other businesses in the area. Some events draw scores of new customers, while others only seem to attract drunken tailgaters looking for a bathroom. Traffic keeps regulars away on event days, a problem they feared could become more frequent with the opening of the Intuit Dome.
“If they know there is a game, they’re not even coming,” said Christopher Plummer, the manager at Sweet Red Peach, a popular Inglewood bakery. Food delivery services, like DoorDash and GrubHub, won’t pick up orders either because it takes too long to navigate the traffic, he said. While there are fluctuations in customers depending on what teams are playing or the style of the concert, the stadium has been a net positive for the bakery, Plummer added.
Sweet Red Peach is one of the last remaining tenants in Holly Park Plaza strip mall at the corner of Prairie Avenue and Hardy Street. Most of the businesses left three or four years ago, Plummer said, and the landlord stopped taking on new tenants because the city has indicated it intends to purchase the land for one of the stations for the Inglewood Transit Connector, the automated people mover project that city officials hope will alleviate the traffic nightmare around its popular venues. “They’ve been saying they’re going to knock it down for two years,” Plummer said.
The future of the transit project rests on this year’s federal budget. The House removed $200 million meant for the ITC from its appropriations bill, after U.S.
Rep. Maxine Waters turned against it, but there’s hope it will return in Congress’ final tally Further north, Blessed Tropical Jamaican Cuisine has seen a steady increase in business, along with a steady increase in rent. In 2019, co-owner Shawn Weir said his rent had jumped from $2,600 to $4,600, but that he was optimistic the stadium’s opening would make a difference.
Sierra Pettway, the restaurant’s supervisor, said the rent is now $7,000 per month. It can be difficult to predict which events will lead to a boom, creating situations where there is sometimes too much, or too little, food ready. The property owner also rents out the parking lot for big events, making it inaccessible for existing customers, she said.
“We’ve been able to manage it, so that’s a blessing,” she said. SoFi Stadium and the Intuit Dome have been clear wins for Amin Badrudin, the owner of a 7-Eleven on Prairie Avenue. In 2019, an influx of construction workers made it clear he needed to expand, so he took over a neighboring property, doubled his space and updated the store’s offerings.
“Overall, it is only doing good things for us,” he said. Traffic and roadwork have created some problems, he said, but the construction at least seems to be easing up. He is hopeful that more development will shift to his side of Prairie Avenue soon, though he also added that he believes Century Boulevard, closer to the Intuit Dome, seems to be catching on with developers more quickly.
In an interview, Butts said the reality is that the plazas along Prairie Avenue may no longer be the best place for small businesses. Efforts to revitalize Market Street — the city’s next focus — will aim to create an Old Pasadena-style destination for local eateries and shopping, officials have said. Elsewhere in the city, residents are struggling with rising housing costs brought by the development frenzy and wonder whether Inglewood’s new future still includes the people who stuck it out through its rough past.
Despite Inglewood’s status as a regional destination, its total population has largely stayed flat since 2010 and was estimated at 106,806 in 2022. That data, however, predates the opening of hundreds of new units of housing in the years since. The data suggests the demographics of Inglewood are shifting.
Inglewood is estimated to have lost 13% of its black residents and 4% of its Latino population from 2010 to 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
The decrease to the total population was offset by the addition of thousands of new white and Asian residents, the data showed. The departure of black residents isn’t unique to Inglewood, though it seems more pronounced in the City of Champions than it was in Los Angeles County as a whole. Black and Latino residents now make up about 87% of the Inglewood’s population, down from 92% in 2010.
Mayor Butts believes those declines are likely due to people selling their much higher priced homes and moving elsewhere. “I know plenty of seniors that have homes that they bought for $30,000 or $35,000 that are now worth close to $1 million,” he said. Butts also takes issue with claims that Inglewood is facing gentrification.
Anyone moving into the community is paying a premium to do so, he said. “This is just integration,” Butts said. “It is not gentrification because we raised our own property values.
We made our city desirable. “When Anaheim gets Disneyland, when San Diego gets the Chargers, you have the same dynamic. You have an increase in property values and no one cries the blues about it,” Butts said.
“Whenever you have a community that is majority black and brown, you have this sentiment that you guys can’t have too much good because it’ll hurt you.” Rents and housing prices have skyrocketed, creating generational wealth for some and a financial crunch for others. The average home in Inglewood was valued at $370,413 in 2016, but now sits at about $770,000, according to Zillow .
Meanwhile, the apartment listing service RentHop estimates two-bedroom apartments have risen from about $1,500 to $2,400 in the same time frame. Wages have shot up at a faster rate in Inglewood than in L.A.
County as a whole, though not quite enough to keep up with the meteoric rise in housing costs. The median income in Inglewood went from $44,377 in 2016 to $67,563 in 2022 , the last year of available U.S.
census data. Before that, it had increased less than $1,000 from 2010 to 2016, the data showed. More than 60% of Inglewood residents are renters.
Ana Chavez, 18, has personally felt the effects of Inglewood’s rapid ascension. The rent on her family’s three-bedroom home, which faces the new basketball arena, hit $3,000 per month last year, though no improvements have been made to the property, she said. It isn’t insurmountable yet, she said, but their landlord has made it clear he wants to replace her family and their neighbors with people who could pay even more.
“They’re trying to kick us out,” Chavez said, walking along the sidewalk near the Dome. Fre’Drisha Dixon, a local attorney and former mayoral candidate, experienced it firsthand, too, she said. Her rent jumped from $1,250 to $2,450 after nine years in the same apartment, forcing her to downgrade to a smaller and older unit with fewer amenities.
“I can barely afford to live here,” said Dixon, an advocate for returning Inglewood schools to local control. “I can’t imagine how somebody who makes less than me is managing.” In March, Inglewood Unified School District’s county-appointed administrator announced plans to close five schools , including Morningside High School, because they no longer have enough students to justify the costs.
Officials promised development would benefit the schools, but that doesn’t seem to be happening, Dixon said. “We are more neglected than ever,” she said. “Our leadership keeps selling these dreams that aren’t based in facts and reality.
“In reality, those folks came into Inglewood, they went to that stadium, they patronized whatever businesses are in the stadium, they watched the game, and then they got in their cars and they drove away from Inglewood,” she said. Inglewood City Hall has taken steps to try to alleviate housing costs. The Inglewood City Council implemented a strict cap on rent increases in 2019 that prohibits increases in excess of 10% in a single year.
Properties with four or less units can increase rent by 5% plus the cost of inflation, while those with five or more units, are limited to 3% or the cost of inflation, whichever is higher. Rental units are exempt from the cap until 15 years after receiving a certificate of occupancy. “What we want to do is to do the best we can to maintain the affordability for the residents that have come through this journey in Inglewood,” Butts said.
“That’s why we passed the strictest rent cap in the state. That’s why we’ve developed more affordable housing.” Inglewood had 1,678 affordable housing units as of 2023, more than double the amount in Torrance, its much larger neighbor, he said.
There’s discussion within the struggling Inglewood Unified School District to develop workforce housing to entice teachers back to the district, Butts said. This month, The Greater Los Angeles Education Fund announced the establishment of a $12.75 million fund, made possible by the Intuit Dome’s construction, to benefit young people in Inglewood.
The city also required a 35% local hire provision for both SoFi Stadium and the Intuit Dome’s construction, which the city says resulted in more than $55 million in wages and benefits staying within the community. An additional “hard-to-hire” clause prohibited contractors from refusing a hire someone because of a prior felony conviction. Those jobs mean residents can support their families with prevailing wage jobs, Butts said.
The city’s unemployment rate, at 17.5% before Butts took office, is now around 5%. “It’s the story of resilience, it’s the story of care, it’s the story of co-creating a future together,” said Derek Steele, executive director of the Social Justice Learning Institute in Inglewood, when asked how the city is doing today.
A lot has changed since Steele worked as a community organizer for the Uplift Inglewood Coalition, a community organization that sued the city and the Dome’s developer in 2018, alleging the project violated a state law requiring public agencies to prioritize affordable housing when disposing of public land. Uplift lost the case and the project moved forward, but the battle opened a new line of dialogue, he said. Related links He credits city officials, as well as the developer, for rising to the occasion.
The Clippers set aside $100 million in community benefits, including $75 million that will be used to encourage the construction of even more affordable housing. The City Council implemented rent control and threw its weight — and the weight of its billionaire allies — behind affordable housing, he said. “We had to march, we had to push for our voices to be heard, but when they were heard, things started to move,” Steele said.
“The city moved to put one of the most extensive rent stabilization plans in place that is still being upheld today.” Steele doesn’t shy away from the fact that the development has had negative impacts, but he said he believes the city is better off today than it was a decade ago and getting better. “There are stories of success, but there are also stories of despair,” he said.
“Is it perfect for the people who have historically been here yet? No, there is still work that we need to do,” Steele added. “We’re building something fantastic here and I think all of the players that are in this understand their responsibility as neighbors and community members in the city.”.
