Wow Los Angeles has some bad areas!

For this video, I drove to the south side of Los Angeles County - as far south within the county limits as you can get, actually. The goal was to witness the worst neighborhood in Los Angeles firsthand. I entered LA on the city’s far south end, along the coast, in the Los Angeles harbor region. The industrial landscape smelled of chemicals, and was eerily desolate. It was Wednesday, October 28, 2020 at 11 am

The LA neighborhood of Wilmington is well known among people who grew up in Southern California. Not many have been here - but it’s notorious for news reports and pop culture lore. The type of place Long Beach rappers talked about in the 90s. This neighborhood has racked by crime and poverty for decades. Wilmington is about 9 square miles big, bordered by Long Beach and Carson. There are about 50,000 people in this hood - big enough that it would be a fairly large city in some states.

To get a good look at Wilmington, I’ll be generally driving north up Avalon Blvd, which splits the neighborhood in half. I’ll criss cross various side streets to give you some perspective on what the area is like.

Most of the Wilmington neighborhood is poor - folks earn about $15k a year each annually, which is really low - even for Los Angeles. 2 in 3 people here rent their home.

87% of Wilmington is hispanic, which is a huge difference from what this neighborhood was like back in 1990 when this area was 40% black. Gangs have always been a problem here, but gang activity peaked decades ago - back in the late 1990s there would be 40 gang related killings in this neighborhood each year. There’s still a lot of gang activity here these days, just less so.

Crime rates are nearly triple the national average in this part of Los Angeles. To make matters worse, the air pollution in this neighborhood is terrible, because it’s just blocks away from oil refineries. In fact, Wilmington sits on top of the third largest oil field in the country. That’s correct - right here in south Los Angeles, next to a bunch of ports, railyards and distribution centers along the LA Harbor is a large oil field.

On many Wilmington blocks, there’s either a liquor store, a fast food restaurant, a rundown school or a dirty park.

Anyways, I’ll continue the drive so you can take a look and judge the area for yourself. The worst neighborhood in Los Angeles.

#losangeles #california

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