Super Bowl showcases Inglewood's shiny new stadium as concerns of gentrification loom

INGLEWOOD, Calif. - Rent was $800 a month when Dolores Hernandez moved into her studio apartment almost 12 years ago. She moved to Inglewood because it was affordable. She worked as a housekeeper and split the rent with a roommate.

Today, rent on that same studio apartment is $1,440, and Hernandez and her roommate are barely scraping by. 

Many Inglewood residents say soaring rents are one of many signs that the primarily Black and Latino city is gentrifying. The changes have been fueled by intense development in recent years, including the construction and opening of the $5 billion SoFi Stadium, which will host the Super Bowl Sunday, prompting millions of Americans to turn their attention to Inglewood. 

The city of 108,000 just outside Los Angeles has seen rent and home prices surge in recent years as Southern California has marked record housing prices. Corporate chains like Starbucks and the Habit have begun to dot the landscape, and local businesses are moving to the area from other white-dominant neighborhoods, including Jon & Vinny's, a Los Angeles eatery popular with celebrities and known for its pizzas topped with caciocavallo and fior di latte cheeses. Concern over the city's small, but growing white population was a recurring plot on the HBO show "Insecure," which celebrated Black stories centered in Inglewood.

In 2021, the average home in Inglewood was going for about $744,000, according to Zillow, jumping 14.5% from 2020. Ten years ago, the typical home value was $266,000. 

To Hernandez, it is little coincidence that her rent shot up parallel to the 70,000 seat stadium’s construction across the street. A new owner bought the apartment building in 2019 and renamed it Stadium View apartments. 

“Speculators and investors were buying up properties left and right and it seemed like they were all frantically raising their rents astronomically during that period,” said Michelle Joy Munsat, an organizer with Lennox-Inglewood Tenants Union, an activist group that advocates for tenants rights. “Because they had a sense that sooner or later rent control was going to come in.” 

Hernandez said most of the long-time tenants in her 50-unit building left as the rent increased. 

In 2019, housing rights activists pushed Inglewood Mayor James Butts Jr. and the City Council to adopt a rent control ordinance that capped annual rent increases on certain older properties at 5%. 

“We have to do something about this right now so we don't become like some of the other cities that have born the true brunt of full gentrification, with no friction and stoppage of that process,” said Derek Steele, an organizer with the Uplift Inglewood Coalition, a collection of community organizations that banded together to advocate for policies to keep Inglewood affordable for its residents shortly after billionaire Rams owner Stan Kroenke revealed plans to build the stadium in 2015. 

It’s not just the displacement of individual families and tenants that are at stake, Steele said, Inglewood’s culture and character are on the line too. 

“When you start seeing a sociodemographic group slowly disappearing, when you start seeing mom and pop stores that you grew up with being replaced by, let’s say, Starbucks,” said Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, an urban planning professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has studied gentrification in Los Angeles, “that is another aspect of what is happening. People may no longer look like you —there is no longer a traditional Black or Latino neighborhood— but also the goods, the services and the stores may be different.” 

Eddie Cruz grew up in Inglewood and left for college in 2014 after graduating high school. 

“As I would come back periodically, I would see change: the stadium, new faces coming in, business that I grew up seeing closing down,” Cruz said. 

Cruz noted Inglewood’s newest Starbucks, which opened last year on the former site of Ms. B’s M&M Soul Food, a Black-owned Inglewood staple that relocated after the stadium was built. The changes contrast with his childhood memories of spending weekends on bustling Market Street, Inglewood’s downtown area once crammed with Latino and Black-owned businesses. In more recent years, many of the storefronts that line Market street have been shuttered. 

Butts, who could not be reached for comment, played a major part in bringing SoFi Stadium to Inglewood. He has championed the stadium and other projects, such as a new $1.8 billion basketball arena to house the Los Angeles Clippers that broke ground in September. 

Earlier this week, a suite of paid promotional articles entitled “Inglewood Renaissance” celebrating Butts’ work bringing investment to Inglewood appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The ad said Butts had fought off gentrification while fostering economic growth.

“Mayor Butts was keenly aware of this issue, and purposefully steered the city along another path,” one paid article read, touching on the rent control the city enacted to mitigate gentrification.

“Inglewood is still 93% Black and Brown,” Butts is quoted in the advertisement. 

The ad angered some activists, including Munsat, who said the city should focus on uplifting everyone instead of worrying about its messaging. 

Still, some longtime Inglewood business owners are cautiously optimistic the changes will be good for the city. 

Mom-and-Pop businesses have come and gone over the years, said Rodney Phillips, whose family has owned and operated Woody’s Bar-B-Que, a popular restaurant known for bringing diners to Inglewood, since 1975.

Philips said the stadium, which is just over a mile away from his restaurant, has boosted business for him and other small business owners. He started opening on Sundays to accommodate hungry football fans walking to the game. When the Los Angeles Rams beat the San Francisco 49ers at SoFi to advance to the Super Bowl two weeks ago, he ran out of barbecue for the first time, two hours before closing.

At the same time, Phillips worries what the future holds. He may not see his rent going up because he owns the restaurant property, but he fears he’ll one day be pressured into selling as investors eye revitalizing Market Street.

Just up the street from Woody’s, work is underway on a new luxury apartment with restaurant and retail space. Last year, Phillips said he was approached by a developer interested in buying his property to make way for a similar project. But he is not interested in selling. 

“We don’t just want to roll over and put the white flag out and surrender,” Phillips said. “I’m an asset to the community.”