![]() ![]() But racist real estate rules and low pay sequestered Mexican workers and their families in cramped, often pestilent shacks, where deadly tuberculosis spread just like COVID-19 has today. To bring the vision to fruition, business leaders recruited Mexican laborers en masse to build rail lines, houses and schools pick crops clean homes and work in slaughterhouses, sugar-beet refineries and steel plants. What emerged was a singular thread tying civic leaders’ decisions from the founding of modern L.A. census data and conducted dozens of interviews with academic experts, public officials, residents of cramped apartments and people whose family legacies in the region date back more than a century. To understand the contradiction underlying L.A.’s status as the nation’s capital of both crowding and sprawl, The Times reviewed historical archives, oral histories and newspaper accounts, analyzed decades of U.S. Repeated warnings about the consequences of such unprecedented crowding - for public safety, disease control, schools, urban services, sanitation - were ignored. So in working-class neighborhoods, more and more people crammed into the existing housing stock, particularly as new streams of immigrants came from Mexico and Central America. ![]() But they saw those ideas as anathema to the Southern California lifestyle they were creating. L.A.’s leaders could have addressed deplorable living conditions for the region’s poorest residents with more apartments, taller buildings and public housing. ![]()
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