African-American leaders are seeking to block a giant real estate firm from buying the 43-acre Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza property and developing the site with a mega-sized office complex that would expand the firm’s gentrification footprint in South LA where it has already become a major landlord in recent years.
CIM Group, Inc., now in escrow to buy the plaza property, has no meaningful ties to South LA and its executive team has virtually no minority representation.
“What CIM proposes is a hostile takeover of the most iconic African-American retail space west of the Mississippi River and the construction of a project that would ignore the community’s needs and wishes and possibly wipe out dozens of minority-owned businesses that are now tenants in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza mail,” said Pastor William D. Smart Jr., CEO, and president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference of Southern California.
CIM has announced it plans to build office skyscrapers on the plaza property.
The plaza property would be the “crown jewel” in CIM’s gentrification efforts in South LA, warned Pastor K. W. Tulloss, president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Los Angeles and Southern California.
