Councilman Seeks Jobs for Youths

By Oliver Lukacs
Staff Writer

Oct. 12 -- The City Council will be asked at the Oct. 14 meeting to launch an ambitious employment program targeting local black and Latino youth, a request that comes several months after a shooting spree that erupted on the streets of the Pico Neighborhood brought attention to the plight of unemployed at-risk minority youth.

Being introduced by Mayor Pro Tem Kevin McKeown, the item seeking to allocate a number of city- contracted construction jobs to local youth and provide better job training, coincides with the overhaul in leadership of the Pico Neighborhood Association. The organization is now overwhelmingly dominated by local working-class Latino women.

In what many hope will usher in a new era for the historically crime-troubled neighborhood, McKeown said he was responding to a growing community outcry for a more proactive and involved City Hall. Mothers and neighbors of the youth seek to reverse a disturbing trend that has claimed an entire generation of Santa Monicans.

“Clearly there is something going on here where the next generation of minority youth is being lost to Santa Monica,” said McKeown. “It’s not fair to say the city has not been doing this -- the city has been doing this, just not effectively,” he said, referring to the existing job training and employment opportunity programs open to local youth.

“Violence is directly attached” to the issue McKeown said, and “what leads to violence is alienation and a lack of opportunity.”

When minority youth are denied access to well-paying local jobs, they revert to illegal means of income, McKeown said. Others are forced out of the city by high rents and upper-six-digit housing prices, breaking a generational continuum vital to sustaining a healthy community, he said.

McKeown said he hopes the program will help create a true intergenerational community. “We’re going to lose a whole generation of youth and I don’t want to watch that happen,” he said.

“That’s already happened,” said Oscar de la Torre, the founder and director of the Pico Youth and Family Center. “We’ve already lost a generation of Latino and African-American youth due to poverty.”

The population of local black youth between the 15 to 24 age range declined by 40 percent from 325 to 195 in the past decade spanning. The Latino population saw a 25 percent decline during the same period, dropping from 1041 to 880, said de La Torre, quoting a recent U.S. Census report.

“The numbers speak for themselves. People can’t find a good job to pay the rent, and if you can’t pay for rent, you’ve got to move elsewhere,” said de La Torre.

A recent RAND analysis of the 2000 U.S. Census found the number of black Santa Monica residents dropped 17.4 percent since 1990, while the number of Hispanics declined 7.4 percent.

The same analysis showed that the Pico Neighborhood is home to the largest concentration of Blacks and Latinos in the city, while it is also the home of Santa Monica’s poorest residents, who earn between $17,500 and $34,134 annually.

On the other side of town, the North of Montana neighborhood houses the city’s largest concentration of white and wealthy residents, whose median income is $118,553.

McKeown hopes to stem this apparent exodus of ethnicity with his agenda item, which he said seeks to package existing city job programs more comprehensively while exploring links with Santa Monica College, the school district, unions and private sector employers to create an more “effective” integrated job opportunity program.

“We might not need to reinvent the wheel here, it might be that we already have all the pieces and they just need to be reconfigured to work more effectively,”said McKeown. “It’s not a City give-a-way program, it’s a way of connecting dots that were already there in the community.”

De La Torre, a Santa Monica school board member as well as PNA leader, said McKeown’s action is a “direct result of the new leadership” on the PNA board. He added that McKeown is the most visible council member in the neighborhood and regularly attends meetings of the neighborhood association.

“On an individual level, one job can make a life-changing difference,” de la Torre said. “But if we’re looking at making a lasting difference, don’t just focus on construction. That’s falling back to that old stereotype that Mexicans and Blacks are only good with their hands.”

De la Torre hopes the new job program will focus on workforce development by training them for managerial positions eventually so they can develop a career.