Long Beach Don't Change: Dichotomies

A zine about processing change and gentrification in Long Beach

Oct 31, 2024

Today’s Neighborhood Dispatch comes from Sarah Bennett, an educator, journalist, editor, designer, and zinester living in Long Beach, CA.

Long Beach Don’t Change is an ongoing zine series that I started in 2023 to process the last six years of all of the thoughts, feelings and changing views I’m having about the city I’ve lived in for nearly two decades. As a longtime local journalist who was accustomed to writing with clarity and purpose in my pieces, I couldn’t reconcile into coherent words the drastic shifts I was experiencing in the years before COVID, when the Recession-era construction slump thawed and momentum returned to the decades-in-the-making, politician-conspired plan to increase the tax base of our historically working class port city.

This plan involved a long, government-led effort to become land brokers, removing “blighted” properties (and in turn, their fixed-income, mostly immigrant and veteran residents), then giving the land to developers with the loftiest goals. The result is a shifting landscape, both because of the new high-rise market-rate and luxury apartments that dot former empty lots and in the people who have moved from outside the city to fill them.

The streets are different here now. OC girlies finally feel safe enough to “slum it” at the refurbished 4th Street dive bars (where the worn-through bar stools that once held space for neighbors to gather have been replaced with pastel cocktail tables built for isolation and Instagram). L.A.’s foodie entrepreneurs finally see a risk worth taking in our higher median income and more affordable retail rents (we see you Win-Dow replacing the legendary local favorite Archibalds). And transplants from all over flocked here with their lower interest rates to scoop up our cheaper housing stock, which raised property values and created the very same purchasing crisis they were themselves avoiding (which makes me feel like a hypocrite hater since I also moved to Long Beach from L.A. after high school, although at the time my income matched my new neighborhood).

Long Beach finally has the light we’ve always wanted to shine on it. So why does it feel like we aren’t the ones writing the narrative?

At the time I was experiencing it, specifically around the summer of 2018, I could only vomit out disconnected chunks of text and try to visually (and with futile words) document the way that things were in that moment, without knowing how to fully explain the pit in my stomach or what I was watching us lose. It took me years (and a whole pandemic) to sift through these media vestiges and try to put something together that could process how I feel watching Long Beach slowly change into the very LA/NY/OC that so many of us loved living here because that’s exactly what it’s not.

I’ve often called my zines “punk rock scrapbooking” and this is my first attempt to do that on the topic of my beloved Long Beach. Please enjoy the first issue of Long Beach Don’t Change. To buy a printed copy and have it mailed to you, click here.

— Sarah Bennett, October 2024