LOS ANGELES _ Duane Pierfax grew up after World War II in Pacoima, one of the few Los Angeles suburbs that offered the American dream of home ownership to African Americans who had been locked out of other neighborhoods by racial covenants.
His stepfather worked at Lockheed Martin to support the family of 15. His sister worked at the General Motors plant in Van Nuys. She bought one of the Joe Louis Homes _ no relation to the revered black boxing icon, but his name still drew African Americans fleeing lynchings and Jim Crow laws in the South to the rows of boxy houses.
But the 1990s brought deindustrialization, the crack cocaine epidemic and mass incarceration. With the advent of fair housing laws, some black people moved to other San Fernando Valley communities and beyond, yet many African American families in Pacoima lost their homes as a result of those societal forces.
Now, Pierfax, 62, and four dozen other mostly African American people live a few miles away in a flotilla of tents under the 118 Freeway. The giant encampment is a stark illustration of the racial disparity among homeless people that Los Angeles and cities across California are just starting to recognize and address.
In L.A. County, African Americans are 9% of the population but 40% of its homeless population, and two-thirds of them live outside.
The poverty rate among black Angelenos does not fully account for the racial gap. That is not unique to L.A., but it's particularly uncomfortable in a liberal city with a painful racial history, including the police beating of Rodney King and two riots.
In December, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority released a study blaming the disparity on generations of institutional and structural racism in housing and in the criminal justice, education and child welfare systems.
"The story of the debacle of the black middle class has been taken out of conversation and the onus is on the pathology of the individual," said Suzette Shaw, a skid row activist and a member of an advisory committee for the report. "Workforce redlining, housing redlining have systemically displaced us."
It would be hard to find a purer example of displacement than the Pacoima encampment. Some of its residents were laid off together by a Price Pfister faucet factory that no longer exists, said Kris Freed, chief program officer at LA Family Housing. Others grew up together. A few are blood relatives. Many have lived together in the streets for three to five years.
"Those same individuals lived in these same homes that their parents bought in the 1950s and '60s," said Crystal Jackson-Bradley, a Pacoima native and creator of a documentary and upcoming book about the community.
