Hector Rebolledo, 76, and Regina Jones, 82, have a lot in common. They’ve lived on Van Ness Avenue in Country Club Park for more than five decades. When they talk, sometimes they break into laughter mid-sentence, like you are in on a joke, something so absurd as to be delightful — just between the two of you.

They both believe that in a disaster, it’s your neighbors who matter.

“There should be community surrounding where you live,” Jones told the Neighborhood News Online in 2015. “If there were to be a disaster, it’s not your family or friends who’ll be able to come to you. It’s your neighbors.”

Jones and Rebolledo have been neighbors for more than 50 years, but for about 30 of those years they have been divided by an iron gate that stretches the width of Van Ness Avenue that allows no car, bike or pedestrian to pass through. To the north of the gate are 10 single-family homes. To the south of the gate is a strip mall, a preschool and the apartment building that Rebolledo has lived in and managed for 54 years.

The gate was installed in the 1990s by the Country Club Park Neighborhood Association, creating a roughly 200-foot cul-de-sac to the south right off busy Pico Boulevard. After the Van Ness gate was installed, the association gated off the three streets immediately to the east: South Wilton Place, South Gramercy Place, and St. Andrews Place.

“I love — know— Hector and he’s still pissed about those gates,” Jones said. “And he felt left out. And I get it. I would too.”

Rebolledo is unhappy about the gates. For more than 30 years, he has swept his street every week because he says the city won’t do it. Even worse: Parking enforcement still gives out tickets on street sweeping days.

For 30 years, Hector Rebolledo’s apartment building has been separated from an enclave of single-family homes by a neighborhood gate. (Maylin Tu/AfroLA)

“We don’t get the service, but we get the tickets,” he said. “You know, I even mentioned to the city, ‘Just remove the signs.’”

Right now, Rebolledo is fighting a ticket that he got while he was in surgery. After sweeping the street by hand for decades, he recently got a leaf blower after hurting his back in a fall.

But the grievance about the gates runs deeper than 30-plus years of parking tickets.

“They divide the community,” he said.

Critics of the gates say that they are a form of segregation, dividing the rich and the poor, the haves and the have-nots, homeowners and renters. Now, a group of neighbors and advocates is fighting to take them down.

Finding community in Country Club Park

Country Club Park is a neighborhood in mid-city Los Angeles bounded by Crenshaw and Western Boulevard to the east and west and Olympic and Pico Boulevard to the north and south. Bordering Koreatown, the community has long fought to protect its residential character against the “creeping commercialism” of neighboring businesses. There are apartments in Country Club Park, but the gated streets create four consecutive blocks of only single-family homes, many of them built in the 1920s.

The neighborhood was once an enclave for wealthy white Angelenos. When Black families started purchasing homes in the neighborhood, nine white neighbors promptly sued to enforce racist housing covenants. After an L.A. County judge threw out the lawsuit in 1947, some white families moved out. The neighborhood soon became a haven for Black homeowners, including doctors, lawyers, religious leaders and media celebrities.

Regina Jones moved to the neighborhood in 1966 with her family and raised five kids in the same house she lives today. She worked as a radio operator at the Parker Center, the former downtown headquarters of the LAPD, and took the bus to work. At her job, she faced blatant racism and discrimination, according to an interview with Alex Cline for the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research. 

Jones went on to edit and publish SOUL Magazine for 16 years with her then-husband, Ken Jones, the first Black broadcast journalist in L.A. The magazine covered Black artists and music that mainstream media sidelined or ignored. 

Jones found a community in Country Club Park, even as the demographics shifted. While the homeowners on her block used to be majority Black, now most are white or Asian.

“We’re all here — together,” Jones said. “And I wish we could spread it. That would be a reason to take the gates down, if we could spread the love and to know your next door neighbor.”

Why were the streets gated?

In 1981, the Country Club Park Neighborhood Association first applied to gate off five streets off Pico “to improve the residential character of their neighborhood by minimizing traffic and parking problems from the adjacent business area.” 

The neighborhood association’s request to gate off five streets (including Westchester Place, which has remained ungated) was granted by the L.A. City Council in 1985.

No one seems certain of the exact dates, but around 1992 the first gate went up on Van Ness, according to Jones. The cost? $2,561.74 per household, including permit fees. With 10 single-family homes north of the gate, that was roughly $25,600 or more than $57,000 in today’s dollars.

Jones explained that the city initially wanted the association to completely take over the streets, paying for street maintenance, street lights, and other services.

“That would have been a fortune, and no one could have afforded that,” she said.

The gate was installed directly behind the apartment building where Rebolledo lives, but this exclusion was not intentional, explained Jones. At the time, there was a vacant lot across the street from his building. That vacant lot, which eventually became a strip mall, was excluded.

“That would have been wonderful to have been included,” she said.

Rebolledo said he wasn’t notified about the gate. After it was installed, he remembers a neighbor dropping by with an unexpected gift — a big basket of fruit.

“Maybe they don’t want me to say anything. Maybe — I don’t know why.”

By the beginning of 1993, there were more than 100 pending applications to gate streets in the city of L.A. 

After a group of neighbors prevailed in a lawsuit challenging gated streets, the city turned to a new section of the California Vehicle Code. The ordinance allows a city to temporarily shut down a public street for 18 months to address “serious and continual criminal activity.” The closure can be extended for up to eight additional periods of 18 months for a total of 13.5 years, but a hearing must be held every 18 months to determine if the closure is still necessary.

In 1998, the neighborhood association again petitioned the city to gate off streets in Country Club Park, this time citing crime as the reason. In a letter of support, then-Chief of Police Bernard C. Parks noted that “the area has crime and traffic problems similar to the surrounding neighborhoods,” but he nonetheless supported the closure.

Residents south of the gates say they were never notified. Max Hawkins, co-founder of Open Sidewalks LA, the group trying to take down the gates, created a map of all the signatures in the 1998 council file supporting the gate. He found that they all came from homeowners who lived north of Pico.

The motion passed in 1999, and gates went up at Wilton, Gramercy and St. Andrews.

The 18-month permits for the gates were never renewed and are long expired. According to emails obtained through a public records request by Open Sidewalks LA, the city has known about the expired permits since 2016. In February, Manuel Perez, chief street services investigator for the Bureau of Street Services, reached out to the Bureau of Engineering to ask if the gates were legally installed following an LA Times article about the gates, writing, “We are trying to get ahead of it.” 

AfroLA followed up with Guy Toley of the Country Club Park Neighborhood Association 10 times over the course of four months, but he did not provide either an interview or any comment on the gates. Attempts to individually reach out to members of the association via social media were also unsuccessful.

Jones said that she did not speak on behalf of the association — she left her position on the board over a year ago.

Homeowners’ rights

There are pedestrian gates at Wilton, Gramercy and St. Andrews, but neighbors say that the gates are meant to function — and do function — more like a wall than a gate. No one goes in or out. One pedestrian access point is chained with locks on the top, middle and bottom. Chicken wire runs along the bottom in some sections, presumably to keep pests out.

The gates don’t just deter outsiders, they protect a way of life that is unattainable for the majority of Angelenos.

“What about homeowners’ rights?” asked Jones in an email. “When you work hard to finally buy a piece of property who would not want to protect that property in every way possible[?]”

L.A. may be a city of renters — 64% of all housing is renter-occupied — but homeowners have long wielded outsized power in determining how public space is used.

Unfortunately, homeownership is out of reach for the majority of Angelenos. The ongoing housing crisis means there are not enough homes to go around, driving up prices. The California Association of Realtors estimates that a household needs to bring in $219,200 annually to afford a median-priced home in the L.A. Metro area, up from $53,780 in 2012. 

Jones purchased her home in 1966 for $42,000 — a fortune at the time. Her family had to take out multiple loans to afford it. But at about $408,000 in today’s dollars, that would be a bargain today.

The same rising housing costs have made rents unaffordable and pushed Black Angelenos, families with children and young adults out of the city. When rent goes up, more people become homeless. Today, there are more than 45,000 unhoused people across the city of L.A.

The housing crisis has limited opportunity and mobility across race, class and generational lines. Jones herself lives in an intergenerational household — her daughter’s family moved in to help with the rising costs of owning and maintaining a home. She stopped driving years ago but can’t afford to move to a more walkable city, like Culver City or West Hollywood.

Despite the fact that owning a home is out of reach for even middle-class households, biases against renters have persisted.

“People consider renters as like a transient group,” said Victoria Tran, an urban sociologist at UCLA who studies community engagement on the local level. The assumption is that renters “don’t have as much of an emotional stake in the neighborhood because they don’t own property.”

Why now?

Open Sidewalks LA was formed last year by a group of neighbors and advocates. The group started posting videos on Instagram, interviewing people in the neighborhood about their experiences with the gates. The group says that the gates harm people with disabilities, children and the elderly who must navigate around them by foot to reach school, the bus stop or other destinations.

Residents volley a ball over the gates during the “Unblock Party” hosted by Open Sidewalks LA on Aug. 10. (Maylin Tu/AfroLA)

On Aug.10, Open Sidewalks threw an “Unblock Party” south of the gates on St. Andrews. Attendees batted a giant inflated ball back and forth over the gates in a game of volleyball. Members of the BlacklistLA run club ran more than two miles, starting on one side of the Van Ness gates and ending on the other, touching each side of each gate along the way. Children and adults wrote how they felt about the gates on large laminated printouts of keys, zip tying them to the bars.

Cardboard key cutouts were attached to the gates on St. Andrews Place during the “Unblock Party” in August. (Maylin Tu/AfroLA)

“This is literal segregation” read one key. “Queremos acceso a la calle para caminar en todas las cuadras. :)”, “We want access to the street to walk on all blocks. :)” read another.

Jones questioned why people are paying attention to four streets in one neighborhood.

“I’m amazed, I’m hurt, I’m — I don’t understand it,” she said. “I just do not understand, in a city this size, why four gates have been an irritant to a few people for a period of the last, I don’t know, maybe 10 years.”

Supporters of gates say that they keep the streets safe, creating a tranquil, park-like atmosphere. Edgar Devora, 22, grew up north of the gates and remembers walking along Country Club Park Drive with its mature shade trees. He supports opening the gates so that people who live south of Pico — which is noisy from car traffic and lacks shade — can walk in the neighborhood without having to detour down busier and more dangerous roads.

The section of Pico Boulevard south of the gates is part of the High-Injury Network, the 6% of streets that account for 70% of deaths and severe injuries for pedestrians. According to LADOT, between 2013 and 2019 there were 12 severe or fatal crashes on Pico between Westchester Place and Western Avenue. 

“These gates prevent a lot of people from basic rights to green spaces,” he said. “And those are just [tree] canopies, they’re not even actual parks.”

Arturo Cambron has lived south of the gates on St. Andrews for 13 years. He bristles at the idea that crime is the reason for keeping them up.

“What are they saying? They’re saying that people on this side are the criminals, that I’m the criminal, that my neighbors are the criminals,” he said. “And so it’s very insulting.”

Rebolledo has had multiple confrontations with his neighbors to the north. He said that when his niece was attending Los Angeles High School on Olympic Boulevard, she would go up Van Ness through the pedestrian access gate that existed at the time at the back of the apartment building. One of the neighbors would tell her she wasn’t allowed to be there. He said he got angry and confronted Jones about it.

“This is not a private street,” he told her. “If somebody’s got the right to be in this street, it’s my niece, because she [was] born [on] this street.”

During one dispute, a neighbor on the other side of the gate called his apartment a “cockroach” building.

Despite the stigma of renters as transient, Rebolledo said that some residents in his building have lived there for decades.

In car-dominated Los Angeles, opposition to multi-family housing is nothing new. More people mean more congestion, less parking. In some cases, homeowner gripes about multi-family housing can be ugly, with apartment-dwellers cast as criminals, or in a historical context, as dirty and diseased. In the past, efforts to limit multi-family housing were blatantly racist, aimed at preventing an influx of immigrants and racial “others” who would wipe out the dominant white population. Even today, blocking certain types of housing is often about keeping the “wrong” people out. 

Now, attempts at class- or race-based segregation are more subtle, said Andrew Whittemore, a professor of urban planning at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who researches zoning and land use decisions in the U.S.

“No one’s going to come out and say, like, ‘I don’t want renters or poorer people or those people walking on my street,’” he said. “Instead, they’ll complain about traffic from the businesses, which is a less controversial comment — and it is also probably a legitimate concern.”

Jones is worried that people shopping at the strip mall on Van Ness will park on her street if the gates are removed. The businesses include a Subway, Domino’s, vape shop and a popular Oaxacan restaurant.

“All of those people would be parking in front of our homes and throwing trash on our street,” she wrote in an email.

What the neighborhood association says, goes

Critics say that councilmembers gated streets as a political favor to influential homeowners.

“There’s definitely a cozy relationship between the city council and this neighborhood group, in a way that I find pretty uncomfortable, because it leaves everybody else out,” said Hawkins.

The Country Club Park Neighborhood Association is hosting a fundraiser for Heather Hutt, the current councilmember for the area running for reelection, on Oct. 9. Members of Open Sidewalks LA question why Hutt chooses to support whatever the neighborhood association wants to do with the gates, given that the permits are expired.

In a March meeting between the group and Andrew Westall, chief deputy for Hutt, Westall repeated Hutt’s original position on the gates: She supports whatever the neighborhood association wants. Multiple people who attended described the meeting as unexpectedly “hostile.”

“He [Westall] said what we should do is to talk to the neighborhood association and get them to basically throw us a bone which… that’s bullshit,” said Brendan Wu, who lives south of Pico and said he can see one of the gates from his bedroom window.

“By them just choosing to stonewall and ignore us, they’re getting what they want, and we’re just negatively affected by it, and we just have to live with it,” Wu added.

On Sept. 20, Council District 10 staff, Open Sidewalks LA and the neighborhood association finally met to talk about the gates. But instead of a collaborative conversation, Open Sidewalks LA said that Hutt’s office told them that the legal status of the gates didn’t matter.

“It’s very troubling to me that a public official feels like they don’t have to cite legal justification for the actions that they take,” said Hawkins.

On the same day Hutt proposed a motion that would turn the gate on Wilton Place into a pocket park, a move that Hawkins called “offensive.”

The parklet would add 3,000 square feet of “needed green space,” according to the motion. To Open Sidewalks LA, this is an admission that the gates currently have no legal standing.

AfroLA reached out to Hutt for an interview, but a spokesperson stopped responding after multiple follow up emails.

Neighbors divided

Rebolledo and Jones haven’t talked for years.

About three years ago, Rebolledo said, Jones showed up claiming that someone from his apartment building had shot her with a BB gun. Rebolledo tried to explain that that wasn’t possible. No one except him had access to the roof and all of the windows facing her side of the street had screens. Later, after a neighbor boy confessed, Jones called to apologize.

“I say, ‘Look, Regina, I don’t want you to say sorry to me. I want you to come to our building and say to the people you insulting there.’”

That apology never happened. Jones remembers the incident differently. She said she almost lost an eye.

“I went crazy checking where it came from and trying to figure out the angle of where the shot came from,” she said. “It had to come from either the apartment building or my next door neighbor.”

She eventually determined it was the next door neighbor, so she sat the neighbor’s son down for a serious chat, asking him if there was something he wanted to apologize for. This is how Jones wants to resolve the conflict over the gates: face-to-face.

“That’s how I handle stuff, not go, ‘Let’s take your gates down. Let’s close the apartment building.’”

Hawkins said that homeowners in Country Club Park don’t consider the area outside of the gates to be part of the neighborhood.

Jones disagrees. She said that the boundaries of the neighborhood include Rebolledo’s apartment building. If he wanted to, he could show up to a neighborhood association meeting to voice his grievances. However, in the interview with the Neighborhood News Online and in her UCLA oral history interview, Jones doesn’t include Rebolledo or the apartment building in her accounting of her neighbors. 

“We have an important thing in common — our homes,” said Jones of her neighbors. “And that’s usually a person’s most valuable asset.”

Will L.A. continue to prioritize homeowners over renters?

The Country Club Park Neighborhood Association may have created a suburban oasis in a dense urban area — but at what cost?

In June, L.A. City Council voted to approve a preferential parking district in the Country Club Park neighborhood, restricting vehicles without a permit from parking in the neighborhood from 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. and limiting them to two hours of parking from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Members of Open Sidewalks LA said that they were not informed, that this is a repeat of the past when neighbors south of Pico were not informed about the gates.

But there are signs that homeowners might not continue to enjoy the same political dominance of the past.

A progressive coalition in L.A. is taking on affluent single-family neighborhoods that are currently exempt from Mayor Bass’s ED1, an executive directive to fast track affordable housing. Currently, about 72% of land in L.A. is zoned for single-family housing. The coalition argues that the exemption puts an unfair burden on low-income communities that are majority people of color, encouraging development in neighborhoods where residents are more likely to be displaced.

For Rebolledo and Jones, the gates have driven a wedge in their relationship.

“I don’t see him, and I don’t think he sees me,” said Jones. “And it’s sad because we’ve been neighbors for many, many years.”

“We used to be very nice neighbors,” said Rebolledo, recalling a time when people from the apartment building went door-to-door in the neighborhood after an earthquake to check on people.

“I say to Regina one time, ‘Hey, now when you put a gate, anything happen, we cannot come and check on you, if you are OK.’”