“It Was Like Dancing in an Open Grave”: The GM Van Nuys Plant on the Eve of Closure

By the mid-1980s, auto workers at the General Motors Auto Plant in Van Nuys felt cautiously optimistic that their plant would make it beyond the infamous decade of shutdowns. It had been a tumultuous few years since GM declared in 1982 that the Van Nuys plant was on the company's “danger list.”Footnote ²⁰ Van Nuys workers, all members of UAW Local 645, responded to the news by rallying behind the Campaign to Save GM Van Nuys (hereafter referred to as the Campaign), a union-led movement to keep the plant in operation.Footnote ²¹ The Campaign's success gave workers some confidence that they might be spared the future facing other Southern California manufacturing plants like GM Southgate, which shut down in 1983.Footnote ²² Most significantly, the Campaign framed the closure of the Van Nuys plant in a larger struggle for civil rights. By 1983, Latinx workers constituted over 50 percent of the workforce, Black workers 15 percent, and women and Asian and Pacific Islanders 5 percent. The Campaign and its supporters insisted that GM had not only a moral responsibility to keep the plant open but that workers could galvanize a multiracial base of support to boycott its products.Footnote ²³ Besides being instrumental to the plant's survival, the Campaign maintained that industrial labor in the Northeast San Fernando Valley was crucial to the region's social and economic stability.

The Campaign secured the plant's existence for several years, and it remains one of the most significant, if overlooked, labor movements of the late-twentieth century. But by November 1986, after a ten-month layoff, GM announced plans to close eleven plants in Michigan, Ohio, Missouri, and Illinois. Miraculously, Van Nuys was spared.Footnote ²⁴ “It's tremendous…. It's great to have news like this,” Gil Luna, a veteran auto worker, professed at the time.Footnote ²⁵ Three years later, General Motors announced that the Van Nuys plant would not produce the next generation of the Firebird and Camaro models. To cut labor and transportation costs, and to consolidate production in the Midwest, the forthcoming models would be produced at GM's new plant in Sainte-Thérèse, Quebec, Canada.Footnote ²⁶ The Van Nuys plant seemed sure to close. George Veloz, a thirty-three-year veteran, recalled that a friend in management pulled him into his office: “He told me, ‘come in here, and shut the door, what is said here, stays here.’ I go, ‘okay.’ Finally he goes, ‘there is no future here. Leave.’ So I transferred and went to Tennessee, the Saturn plant on January 1, 1991.”Footnote ²⁷

Upon hearing the news, elected officials took pains to bargain with GM. Republican County Supervisor, Michael Antonovich, planned a motion to save GM Van Nuys, stating that “a plant closure will destroy thousands of jobs in the San Fernando Valley and have a signifigant adverse impact on the community.”Footnote ²⁸ Antonovich, like other city politicians, hoped that GM would make the Van Nuys plant a flex facility, capable of producing whatever the market mandated or shifting production to electric cars.Footnote ²⁹ In the late 1980s, Los Angeles city officials across the political spectrum were eager to ensure that manufacturing jobs remained in their districts. Their constituents depended on industrial labor to pay their bills, and it elevated the tax base of the district. Yet more than that, local politicians believed that production should remain near the consumer market. The prevailing ethos was still that corporations like GM had an obligation to manufacture its vehicles in the same region as one of its most profitable markets.

By 1990, it was not just automotive or aerospace firms that closed shop as defense contracts dried up. In May of that year, Oscar Mayer, a leader in the meat-packing industry, closed its Vernon plant. The decline of heavy industry terminated an “economic safety valve for thousands of residents who either could not or did not want to go to college,” the historian Rodolfo Acuña lamented.Footnote ³⁰ The GM Van Nuys plant had been a stalwart for thousands of workers, but it was one in a sea of factories throughout Southern California that supported a largely nonwhite, blue-collar workforce. As Acuña saw it,

In a city in which manufacturing was concentrated in predominantly nonwhite, working-class, and immigrant communities, it was clear that fighting to keep plants open, or at least finding commensurate employment, would be the challenge facing Los Angeles's leaders in the century's last decade. It was also, for that matter, an issue of economic and racial justice.

January 1991 brought one of the biggest layoffs in the history of GM Van Nuys.Footnote ³² “We're all depressed about it,” stated Richard Ruppert, the Local's shop chairman. GM spokeswoman Kathy Tanner assuaged their worries: “The business plan is to convert Van Nuys to a flex plant to produce a variety of models for West Coast markets.”Footnote ³³ A day after GM announced its Van Nuys layoff, councilmember Richard Alarcón sent a memo to Mayor Bradley reiterating that the plant manager, Barry Herr, held that the long-term goal for the plant was not closure but conversion to a flex plant.Footnote ³⁴ Local politicians had faith that GM would find a way to avert closure. Either the company would update the auto plant from an assembly division to a more nimble production facility, or it would find another model for its Van Nuys workforce. Politicians reckoned that GM, too, believed that production should stay near the biggest consumer market.

Yet two months later, GM announced that it would eliminate the second shift altogether. Closure seemed a fait accompli. “We're here to express our anger,” Mark Masaoka, a unit chairman and former organizer in the Campaign to Keep GM Van Nuys Open, protested. “This is an orphan plant and we're building an orphan model,” he continued.Footnote ³⁵ Masoaka's words resonated across the Local. As the sole remaining auto assembly plant in Southern California, the Van Nuys plant workers had little recourse. In the past, laid off or idled workers could get jobs at the nearby Lockheed plant in Burbank. But Lockheed was also downsizing its operations and moving most of its production out of California. There were few places to turn.Footnote ³⁶

By the summer of 1991, workers’ fears came true. It was Friday morning, July 19, when GM officials ushered the entire day shift into the back lot. A spokesperson from Detroit announced that the Van Nuys plant would cease operations and close permanently in August 1992. “It was like a blow to the chest,” said Johnny Nieto, a fourteen-year veteran. “It's a shocker to say the least,” Jess Pacheco added. Rather than decompress that evening at Opies bar or Chevy Ho's, as was custom, workers retreated to their homes to tell their spouses and children. Although the workers had a safety net—a recently signed three-year contract that guaranteed them 85 percent of their take-home pay for 36 weeks—there was no doubt that GM's announcement sowed seeds of uncertainty and displacement. As one twenty-four-year veteran, recalled, the announcement of closure caused crises among many couples and families; separations and divorces increased.Footnote ³⁷ Bruce Lee, the UAW western regional director, called the closure “a total betrayal,” while democratic representative Howard L. Berman denounced the “devastating news, not only to [the plant's] employees but to the community at large.”Footnote ³⁸

News of closure created a media maelstrom. A choir of voices emerged to editorialize the closing of the forty-five-year-old plant, and to weigh in on its replacement. Bob Baker of the Los Angeles Times claimed “L.A.'s Booming Auto Industry Now a Memory.”Footnote ³⁹ He was right. The closure of the GM Van Nuys plant marked the end of an era. Workers watched their middle-class living evaporate and entered the industrial worker diaspora, crisscrossing the country to find work.Footnote ⁴⁰ In light of its closure, Baker eulogized the plant's postwar heyday:

The Los Angeles Times professed “The Need to Replenish Vanishing Jobs.”Footnote ⁴² As the editorial put it, “The death of local auto production—the decline began a decade ago—is a harsh reminder that our manufacturing jobs need to be replaced with new ones.”Footnote ⁴³ The predominant view was that industrial labor should be replaced by other manufacturing jobs. There was not yet a formalized trend to turn former industrial sites into those for service or retail.

Residents also opined on what should replace the GM Van Nuys plant. Eileen Barry of Lake View Terrace, a rural community northeast of the plant, wrote,

Barry saw her duty as a citizen to see that the Van Nuys plant be repurposed for environmental and humanitarian causes. It would not improve anyone's quality of life, especially those in the Northeast San Fernando Valley who suffered the environmental consequences of heavy industry for decades, that the plant to be replaced by a mall or offices would be dedicated to business endeavors.

Barry's words underwrote the sentiments of Mayor Bradley and a cohort of other democratic politicians, including Congressman Howard L. Berman and Assemblyman Richard Katz, who saw the plant's announced closure as the last straw in an alarming exit of manufacturing firms from the area. On August 6, 1991, Bradley invited federal, state, and local politicians, economists, transportation experts, business, and labor leaders to a meeting about the GM plant closure. The meeting's “discussion items set an agenda for the future and create[d] a unified plan to help those workers who have lost their jobs, while reversing the trend of economic erosion in the Los Angeles basin.”Footnote ⁴⁵ After the August 8 meeting, Bradley, Berman, and Katz pleaded with the GM CEO, Robert C. Stempel, to “ensure that the General Motors Plant site remains an economically vital element of the community.”Footnote ⁴⁶ The meeting bolstered their conviction that the Van Nuys plant was still a profitable entity: “We are not convinced that the Van Nuys Plant operation cannot continue to be economically feasible. Recognizing that more vehicles are sold in Southern California than any other region of the United States, we believe General Motors Corporation should give greater consideration to preserving the Van Nuys plant operation.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Bradley's letter voiced the general outlook of Los Angeles city leaders that GM Van Nuys had not only untapped profit-making potential but also a responsibility to produce its goods near its best-selling market.

Bradley and his administration organized a task force to monitor and address the ramifications of the announced shutdown.Footnote ⁴⁸ They hoped for the plant's persistence as an auto assembly factory but would “work collaboratively to find the most effective plant site use” if closure was irreversible. If talks failed, Bradley would create a private–public partnership to repurpose the plant as a hub of railway research and development.Footnote ⁴⁹ It was always his goal to see that the site be devoted to industrial use. Bradley requested Stempel's cooperation on several occasions but was ultimately disappointed by the GM CEO's resistance to work with the city to find an alternative industrial use for the plant.Footnote ⁵⁰ On October 23, 1991, Bradley announced his administration and the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission's hope that the Morrison Knudsen (MK) Corporation might purchase the GM plant and convert it into a state-of-the-art assembly plant of rail cars. Unlike GM, which seemed simply to abandon the area, “[MK] made a major commitment to the Los Angeles economy.”Footnote ⁵¹

Representatives from the private sector were involved in the discussions, as well as key stakeholders in the site's future, but the priority of the Bradley administration and other democratic representatives was that the plant be used for manufacturing purposes.Footnote ⁵² By December it was clear that Bradley and his democratic allies could not persuade GM to reconsider its plans for shutdown. The politicians held a press conference to relay their discontent. “I did not find General Motors willing to reinvest back in Southern California to the extent that Southern California has been willing to invest in GM,” Assemblyman Katz bemoaned. Footnote ⁵³ Los Angeles commuters had been loyal GM customers for decades and helped make its Camaros and Firebirds the company's hottest selling models.Footnote ⁵⁴ Democrats like Katz insisted that General Motors had a duty to hire and manufacture in the region.

For Katz, the scheduled closure of one of his district's longest running and most productive manufacturing firms presented an important political opportunity. In 1990, he announced a possible 1993 mayoral run, and in November 1992, he was up for re-election. A successful bid to keep the GM Van Nuys plant open—and stand up for the blue-collar workers who lived in his working-class district—would shore up his popularity. It was no wonder that Katz “made no attempt to conceal his bitterness about [GM's] decision” at the December 17 press conference.Footnote ⁵⁵ But Katz had detractors like Ernest Dynda of Agoura Hills who decried his seeming opportunism:

Dynda's invective spoke for an emergent political polemic: What had caused, and who was really to blame, for the flight of industry from the city? For constituents like Dynda, moderate democrats like Richard Katz failed by not incentivizing corporations like GM to stay or by not maintaining a more pro-business stance. Environmental regulations and high taxes drove industry away and left areas like Panorama City in a state of social and economic distress. Dynda's words reverberated for the remainder of the decade, as politicians from across the political spectrum clamored to fill the void left by heavy industry and to “revitalize” the communities left reeling from its absence.

Urban studies scholar Joel Kotkin indicted the city's “psychological deindustrialization,” a process by which “business and political elites lose their fundamental faith in their community's ability to compete successfully in the global economy.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Yet based on their memorandum, task force, and public statements, neither Bradley nor his leading officials fell prey to “psychological deindustrialization.” They maintained that Los Angeles County was still a hub of industrial productivity and attempted to forestall the area's economic erosion. Whether it was willful blindness or political maneuvering, the Bradley administration did not accept industrial flight as a predestined outcome of economic restructuring. There were still options and steps to take to ensure the continued existence of high-paying manufacturing jobs.

Some, including Kotkin, were less convinced that the retention of heavy manufacturing was worth aspiring for. At question, rather, was how the city might rebound from the era's irreversible economic shifts and how its residents would re-emerge in the post-Fordist era.Footnote ⁵⁸ Kotkin directed his critique toward those who “largely devalue market capitalism as a way out of the economic malaise.” As he wrote,

Kotkin endorsed a vision for Los Angeles that embraced revitalization through ethnic-owned businesses, entertainment, international trade, tourism, and high-technology electronics. He argued for growth in the garment and textile industries, which, he said, “should continue to expand, fostered by a steady influx of labor, skills, and capital from overseas.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Kotkin's response to the city's shifting economy did not address how the city might support its new “working class,” including many recently settled undocumented migrants filling the city's service sector. Kotkin's words underscored the neo-recovery partnership that would eventually create The Plant and the grafting of neoliberal ideology to community revitalization.

Blythe Street and the Restructuring-Generated Crisis in the Northeast San Fernando Valley

GM's planned closure of the Van Nuys plant came amidst a climate of economic malaise and an “increasingly negative image of the city in the national and local media.”Footnote ⁶¹ But no image was as pernicious as that painted by the local media and residents who denounced the blight surrounding the GM plant, especially Blythe Street. By the early 1990s, Blythe Street, a two-block residential neighborhood that ran perpendicular to Van Nuys Boulevard and the GM plant, had become a symbol of all that besieged the Northeast Valley—and by extension the city of Los Angeles—in the era of economic restructuring: “Police call Blythe a ‘supermarket’ for drug dealers. Local public health officials say it is a ‘hotbed’ for communicable diseases. Although some of the area's apartment buildings are well-maintained, most are run-down and a few appear to be little more than dank dungeons.…”Footnote ⁶²

Blythe Street was also the wellspring of the Blythe Street Locos, a gang founded in the 1980s that the media and police surveilled constantly. As one reporter described it:

Disparaging and racialized portrayals of Blythe Street had saturated the pages of the Los Angeles Times and the Valley Daily News for decades.Footnote ⁶⁴ Even before the announced closure of the General Motors plant, Blythe Street had been the target of high-scale law enforcement, including Operation Cul-De-Sac, which involved placing barricades on street ends to deter drug trafficking.Footnote ⁶⁵ Such contemptuous depictions of the street's residents, primarily recently settled migrants, reinforced the “Latino Threat Narrative” circulating throughout Los Angeles in the early 1990s.Footnote ⁶⁶

The impending closure of the General Motors plant exasperated public fears. It led one resident to call for a jail to be put in its place: “We in the West Valley know that the Van Nuys General Motors Plant is in a very high crime and dope-infested area—the perfect place to build a prison. That's where most of the crime in our Valley is, so why not house the criminals in their own area?”Footnote ⁶⁷ Besides its abject racism, the op-ed bolstered the narrative that prisons were the remedy to deindustrialization and mass incarceration the solution to poverty.Footnote ⁶⁸ Such a process was already afoot in other deindustrializing suburbs of Los Angeles like Lynwood, where Lockheed, which once operated and employed in the thousands, would eventually be replaced by the Lynwood Regional Justice Center.Footnote ⁶⁹ No authority seemed to entertain the suggestion, but there were calls from community members and city officials that at least a portion of the auto plant's site be dedicated to law enforcement.Footnote ⁷⁰

Blythe Street typified to the public what was at risk for the community when the plant closed. Without the plant to draw workers and business, the surrounding area seemed vulnerable to even greater decline. The fate of Blythe Street, and the city's response to it in the post-1992 era, became entwined with the overall revitalization of the community and the redevelopment of the GM auto plant. Racialized and criminal depictions of Blythe Street, its residents, and its struggles obscured decades of municipal divestment in the Northeast San Fernando Valley. Perhaps Blythe Street was beset by unlawful activity, but its residents deserved far more than barricades and perpetual police surveillance. What they needed, however, was up for debate in much the same way that the public soon deliberated over its response to areas most impacted by the Los Angeles Uprising, just a year later.

The LARZ: The Los Angeles Uprising from the Perspective of Panorama City

Given how the media skewed its coverage of the events spanning April 29–May 4, 1992, few people have a clear sense of how the Uprising impacted areas outside of South Los Angeles. The Northeast Valley, especially the immediate community surrounding the GM Van Nuys plant, was within the overall geography of the Uprising. During those six days, the neighborhood of Panorama City became a locus of looting and arson. In his vivid auto-ethnographic account of economic restructuring in the Northeast Valley, cultural geographer Stefano Bloch observed how during the days of the Uprising,

Bloch's recollections convey the priority given to retail spaces like the Panorama Mall. The National Guard's flanking of the commercial center, a relic of its postwar identity as a white suburban enclave, demonstrated to young residents that the spaces popularized by locals (liquor and convenience stores in particular) were disposable property. By contrast, commercial institutions were structures to protect. The premium placed on the Panorama Mall during the Uprising presaged the civic outlook of the post-1992 era. It was as if the Panorama Mall was a fortress of community empowerment paving the way for revitalization in the neoliberal era.

Although news coverage of the 1992 Uprising glossed over areas like Panorama City, local and state politicians were aware that the damage extended beyond South Los Angeles (Figure 1). With Rebuild L.A., a Bradley initiative to leverage private funds to rebuild South Los Angeles, already afoot, democratic Assemblywoman Marguerite Archie-Hudson of the state's 48th district introduced AB38X, a measure to create the Los Angeles Revitalization Zone (LARZ). LARZ was a five-year, place-based community economic development program designed to give tax breaks to businesses “that rebuild their facilities and create jobs for residents who live in the riot-torn neighborhoods.”Footnote ⁷² Policy makers pursued a policy response that “focused on economic development and community self-determination through community development and small-business enterprises.”Footnote ⁷³

Figure 1.

A map of the damaged building sites. The circle marks the area surrounding the GM auto plant. “Reports of the Ad Hoc Committee on Recovery and Revitalization,” Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, folders 18, box 825, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

In early September, 1992 the LARZ bill cleared the Assembly 27 to 2, leading State Senator Charles Calderon (D-Whittier) to call AB38X “the only major bill to come out of the Legislature to attempt to rebuild the community.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The bill stipulated that eligible areas were those with a zip code or a census tract that contained two or more damaged structures, that included an area zoned either commercial or industrial, and either contained or was adjacent to census tract(s) that qualify as a High Density Unemployment Area (HDUA) (Figure 2).Footnote ⁷⁵ Tax incentives in the LARZ would include income tax credit for hiring construction workers who live in the zone and sales tax credit for the purchase of building materials to replace or repair damaged structures. In addition, banks and other lending institutions would receive a tax break on the net interest income from debt payments.Footnote ⁷⁶

Figure 2.

A map of the proposed revitalization zones. The circle marks the area surrounding the GM auto plant. “Reports of the Ad Hoc Committee on Recovery and Revitalization,” Tom Bradley Administrative Papers, folder 19, box 825, Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA.

Although the LARZ emerged in the wake of the 1992 Uprising, its provenance lay in the place-based development programs that had proliferated in the United States since the 1980s. Policies to reduce and eliminate urban poverty have been a feature of U.S. policy stretching back to the rise of industrial capitalism. But it was not until the early 1970s when British urban planner Peter Hall introduced the term “enterprise zone” as a mechanism to stimulate growth in low-income neighborhoods. Enterprise zones operated by guaranteeing low taxes and eradicating governmental interference for businesses in geographically designated areas.Footnote ⁷⁷ They migrated to the United States in the early 1980s when Representatives Jack Kemp (R-NY) and Robert Garcia (D-NY) sponsored the Urban Development and Enterprise Act.Footnote ⁷⁸ Throughout the 1980s, many states, including California, experimented with enterprise zones in order to generate private sector investment in economically distressed areas.Footnote ⁷⁹ Yet in the aftermath of the 1992 Uprising, Los Angeles policy makers backed the LARZ, as many had the city's other enterprise zones, pinning faith on the private sector to ignite redevelopment and promote community repair.Footnote ⁸⁰ At the time, John Bryant, chairman and founder of Operation Hope, summarized the general mindset: “The inner city isn't going to be rebuilt and revitalized without the financial community.”Footnote ⁸¹

The LARZ rolled out throughout the remainder of 1992 and lasted five years. Its inclusion of the area surrounding the GM auto plant generated far less media attention than its expansion into areas scarcely, if at all, impacted by the unrest.Footnote ⁸² As it turned out, the LARZ became a controversial (and largely denounced) piece of legislation. Upon hearing that the LARZ was providing tax breaks to businesses in some of the most affluent areas of Long Beach, Assemblywoman Archie-Hudson proclaimed, “This is not what was supposed to happen.”Footnote ⁸³ Although the LARZ proved controversial, it set a precedent for the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA), which sought to revitalize poor and low income areas by incentivizing the business sector to redevelop abandoned land. Indeed, the LARZ coverage of Panorama City served a role in the replacement of the GM auto plant site. It inspired the area's representatives, especially Richard Alarcón and Los Angeles Mayor, Richard Riordan, who both took office in 1993, to not only see tax-break zones as integral components of revitalization but to see them as evidence of “recovery” for residents in Los Angeles.

“There Will be a Hole in the Valley Larger Than Hell”: The Closure of GM Van Nuys

In the weeks following the Uprising, city officials and Mayor Bradley focused on providing assistance to areas affected by the events. Meanwhile, auto workers at the General Motors auto plant in Van Nuys labored through their last summer on the assembly line.

By May, some workers had retired. Others capitalized on a contract signed in 1990 between GM and the UAW that guaranteed workers’ 100 percent of their take home pay through 1993 provided they enroll in retraining programs at different educational institutions throughout the area. Auto workers signed up for classes at community colleges and vocational schools.Footnote ⁸⁵

Besides investing in retraining programs, auto workers showed up to the plant with a mix of grief, denial, and fury.Footnote ⁸⁶ Los Angeles Times reporter, Al Martinez, whose son-in-law was set to lose his job, rued: “There'll be a hole in the Valley larger than hell.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Workers felt a deep sense of betrayal. “It ain't right,” said one twenty-eight-year veteran: “The work's going to Canada, Mexico, and the South because GM can get it done cheaper.” Workers had their own interpretations of GM's decision to close their plant, but few denied that global economic restructuring had made U.S. automobile production a dying craft.Footnote ⁸⁸ “We will become the early casualties of Bush's proposed North American Free Trade Agreement,” asserted three of the original organizers of the Campaign to Keep Van Nuys Open.Footnote ⁸⁹ Manuel Olimpio, a fifteen-year veteran, complained: “They gave us a medallion and a barbeque picnic. We don't need that. We need a job.”Footnote ⁹⁰ Cheaper labor costs, deregulation, and international competition put employees out of work. Of that, they were sure. “We're all in our 40s. What are we going to do?” asked Joan Ochoa, a fifteen-year veteran.Footnote ⁹¹ Chris Dorval, a veteran worker's answer? “Anything and probably everything.” Physical traces of workers’ resentment materialized: Cigarette butts and beer bottles were tossed into unfinished cars, and there was an unusually high rate of absenteeism.

Soon August 27, the date of closure, arrived. At work that day, employees held back tears as they exchanged hugs and addresses. Juanita Washington, a twenty-two-year veteran, said she had been crying all day. “I'm losing all of my friends. They are like your family.”Footnote ⁹² The plant manager distributed memory books resembling yearbooks and featuring classroom-style photos of each assembly department (Figure 3). Workers lined up to see the final Camaro roll off the line. For Maria Negrete, a seventeen-year veteran, it was not until that moment that she realized it was the end. Hundreds of workers signed the last Camaro, which bore a sign on its back bumper reading, “The heartbeat of America stops here.”Footnote ⁹³ The closure of the last automobile assembly plant west of the Rockies symbolized the collapse of U.S. industrial dominance, a wrenching rupture with the West's past (Figure 4).

Figure 3.

Photo of the GM Van Nuys Auto Plant Memory book, distributed to employees on the plant's last day in operation. “Van Nuys Plant 8000 Van Nuys Blvd 91409” Facebook Group.

Figure 4.

Photo of workers lined up to see the last Camaro roll off the line. “Van Nuys Plant 8000 Van Nuys Blvd 91409” Facebook Group.

For Jim Ealy, a twenty-one-year GM veteran, the Van Nuys plant closure was his second time walking away from friends and colleagues. He had been a transplant from Southgate. Back in 1983, Ealy had the option to continue working for GM in his hometown and seized it. Footnote ⁹⁴ The closure of GM Van Nuys, however, put him and so many others who had yet to complete thirty years (the amount of time needed for retirement) in the position of taking a buyout, relocating to another state, or opting into retraining programs until the UAW-GM contract ended in 1993. Greg Joseph, also a Southgate transplant, tried his luck by driving to the Wichita Falls, Texas, GM plant, hoping to get off the lengthy waitlist there. Lois Booker, also from Southgate, simply worried about her Van Nuys colleagues. After the Southgate plant's closure, she lost a friend to suicide and watched the dissolution of many friends’ marriages.

Jose Casas who had retired from the plant the year before, arrived with his mariachi band to play a Mexican folk song often heard at funerals and farewell parties.Footnote ⁹⁵ Lingering in the parking lot, workers shared memories. Abigail Martin, for example, recalled how she was the first female employee to become pregnant while working on the line and named her son Chevy Jr. Virginia Miramontes, the first female assembly line worker, picked a rose from the bushes that adorned the front entrance of the plant: “The rose feels sad because they've been neglected in the same sense they're neglecting us.” Miramontes continued, “Some of us couldn't say goodbye to each other because we had lumps in our throats … I've left a part of me here” (Figure 5).Footnote ⁹⁶ Other workers had a slightly more sanguine outlook. In the “Fender Bender,” the Local 645's newsletter, Monica from the second shift implored her “Brothers and Sisters [to] … hold your heads high and although this is the end of the line, Be strong, think positive, new beginnings are here. It's time to move on with our families and friends. Let's keep our friendships together, don't ever let that end! For we are family you and I.”Footnote ⁹⁷

Figure 5.

Memory book photo of the Soft Trim department. “Van Nuys Plant 8000 Van Nuys Blvd 91409” Facebook Group.

Even though closure brought uncertainty, workers had some security thanks to the 1990 UAW-GM contract. The local establishments that depended on the plant's workforce for business, however, were less fortunate. City officials understood that every manufacturing job rippled out to create new jobs in the community. As Benjamin Reznik, the chairman of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association explained, “The closure of the GM plant is devasting for the area because each manufacturing job creates several other jobs for suppliers and service oriented businesses.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Yet no individual or agency gave much consideration to the bars, liquor stores, pizza joints, or restaurants facing economic hardship once the plant shut down. The owners of the Trophy Room bar, Ray and Pearl Foster, felt the plant's closure in a myriad of ways. Besides the loss of revenue was the loss of friendships and community: “When you've been around for 26 years, it's more of a friendship loss than a business loss,” Ray exclaimed.Footnote ⁹⁹ In the weeks after the plant closed, Opies bar owner, Flower Nguyen, an entrepreneur of Vietnamese descent, experienced a 50- to 75-percent drop in sales. More than that, she missed her friends. Shop owners like the Fosters and Nguyen had weathered the plant's historic layoffs. But the workers had always come back. Small businesses had witnessed an older generation retire, but then came their children. The plant's closure was definitive.

Besides enduring the emotional fallout of the plant's shutdown, small business owners contended with an increasingly deserted area. Ever since GM put the Van Nuys plant on the “danger list,” the surrounding business corridors deteriorated. Plant closure expedited the area's economic downturn by reducing real estate values and increasing retail vacancies. Residents of Panorama City, especially the Blythe Street community, experienced the plant closure as a form of imprisonment. First, the plant had a chain link fence enclosing its 100-acre lot. Charred wood and debris from the Uprising still scattered the neighborhood. And then, worst of all, the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) encaged the entire Blythe Street community by placing concrete barriers at the east end of the street leading to the plant.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The physical injunction closed off “the neighborhood to the growing drug trade, the solicitation of prostitution, and drive by shootings. Residents had to enter and exit the neighborhood across the street from the No Trespassing sign in front of the plant's entrance.” Evictions abounded. A year after the plant closed, the city attorney ordered a civil gang injunction against hundreds of Blythe Street residents, effectively barring them from the area to which they lay claim, renaming it as a “safe zone,” and driving gangs further north, deeper into the Panorama City/Pacoima border.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The area's business establishment called for private investment and a pro-business response to the plant's closure. Richard L. Paley, executive vice president of the United Chambers of Commerce of the San Fernando Valley, insisted, “We need to have our city council promote business not negate business.”Footnote ¹⁰² Paley's words reflected the outlook of California Governor, Pete Wilson, who believed that both Los Angeles and the state must rebound “business-by-business, job-by-job.”Footnote ¹⁰³ Fortunately, the LARZ had just cleared the California Senate. And though there was still no plan for the shuttered GM plant, it appeared that conditions might conspire to make the site ripe for private sector intervention. The one hundred acres of land fell within the LARZ, but several years passed before developers took advantage of tax incentives to implement any kind of redevelopment. In the meantime, Assemblyman Richard Katz proposed the first potential replacement for the plant. Katz's plan was a PPP to convert the auto plant into a Department of Transportation research and development center to help private firms produce high speed-rail lines and clean-air vehicles and to develop other advanced forms of urban transit.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

By April 1993, Katz's idea had gone nowhere, and General Motors reported that there had been no specific offers on the site. The press predicted that the plant was likely to become “one of the biggest industrial real estate white elephants Los Angeles has seen” (Figure 6).Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The abandoned auto plant caught the attention of real estate developer Dan Selleck, of Selleck Properties, a private Woodland Hills–based real estate brokerage that Dan, his father, and his brother, the actor Tom Selleck, opened.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Figure 6.

The front page of the Los Angeles Times labeling the abandoned GM auto plant the city's “White Elephant.” A framed photo of the article adorns the walls of the Woodland Hills office of real estate developer Dan Selleck, whose firm, Selleck Properties, eventually purchased and developed the auto plant into the commercial powerhouse the Plant. Dan Selleck text message to author.

The City's “White Elephant”: The Plant Nobody Wanted

Born and raised in Van Nuys, Dan Selleck grew up knowing dozens of neighbors who worked at the GM plant. As a boy, he took field trips through the plant's body shop and was scared of all the wires, guns, and sounds inside. In 1994, when Dan saw the site bordered up and abandoned, he pondered how he might help. Yet the odds were firmly against Selleck, and any other party for that matter, who expressed interest in the shuttered plant. Other deindustrialized suburbs of Los Angeles, namely the City of Commerce, Pico Rivera, and Southgate, had attempted to redevelop areas once inhabited by heavy industry, but had little success regenerating the kind of jobs the closed manufacturing firms had provided. On the one hand, there was the city of Southgate, which had purchased the ninety-acre site GM plant for $12 million in 1985 and sold it to a private developer. But by 1992, only two parcels boasted buildings. Developers believed it would take another five years to complete the entire redevelopment. (The Southgate plant's slow and long death and its paltry replacement helped create the conditions that resulted in the Uprising.) On the other hand, there was the City of Commerce, which had lost the Chrysler Plant, as well as the Firestone Tire & Rubber and Uniroyal plants. That city struggled until the private developer Trammell Crow converted the former industrial sector into a massive retail center called the Citadel.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The Citadel generated jobs, but, as Ira Gwin the city's Director of Community Development put it, “We've lost a lot our good-paying blue-collar workers and they've been replaced by quite a bit of office, retail, and low-paying, non-union warehouse workers.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ With the Citadel in mind as a model, real estate developers in the San Fernando Valley envisioned a retail complex or distribution center for the GM plant replacement.

A year and a half after closure, the one-hundred acre site still lay shuttered without any redevelopment prospects in the pipeline.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Local politicians and GM remained hopeful that a manufacturing firm would purchase the site while real estate brokers pushed for its conversion into a retail center. Councilman Richard Alarcón voiced concern: “We could swing some kind of retail operation in the near future. But we probably would lose in the long run.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ He worried about the impact retail would have on other businesses, not to mention that commercial development would funnel thousands into low-paying non-unionized labor.Footnote ¹¹¹ As a freshman councilmember, Alarcón brought new energy and a bevy of young staff members to confront the challenges facing the 7th district. Yet he also hoped that the Pacoima Enterprise Zone and the LARZ—which no city official from the San Fernando Valley had yet to leverage in earnest for revitalization purposes—would finally trigger economic recovery.Footnote ¹¹² District Seven had the lowest annual household income in the Valley and the highest number of multi-unit family housing. Alarcón looked to tax-incentivized development programs as at least one, if not the main, catalyst for community revitalization.Footnote ¹¹³ As Jim Lites of the state Assembly Taxation and Revenue Committee put it, “Everyone wants a zone, it's the ‘in’ thing.”Footnote ¹¹⁴

And then, the Valley shook. At 4:31 am on January 17, 1994, residents of the San Fernando Valley—and the entire Los Angeles County—were suddenly jostled out of sleep by a 6.7-magnitude earthquake. The damage wreaked by the 1994 Northridge earthquake was unfathomable for even those most inured to the region's shifting plates. It caused over fifty-seven fatalities, over $20 billion in damages, and over $40 billion in economic loss.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Official response to the earthquake, not all that dissimilar from the 1992 Uprising, revealed how vital private sector assistance had become within the city's “ecology of fear” and its vision of social policy, or “disaster capitalism” as some put it.Footnote ¹¹⁶ On July 12, 1994, the L.A. City Council approved a plan to include the former GM plant site in its “Northridge Quake Recovery Zone.” The recovery zone granted the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA) latitude to use property taxes from recovery areas to bankroll bond measures for public improvements and provide loans to quake victims.Footnote ¹¹⁷

Additionally, any recovery zone, CRA-backed redevelopment project would utilize tax increment financing (TIFs).Footnote ¹¹⁸ TIFs performed two critical functions. First, they allowed for redevelopment projects to be funded through speculative future tax revenues. In other words, redevelopment projects could use the promise of future profits to pay for the project. Second, TIFs incentivized “municipalities toward private, commercial development rather than public, residential development.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Placing the former GM site within the earthquake recovery zone—and, therefore, available for CRA, tax-increment–financed projects—made the site much more attractive to private developers who watched as GM struggled to sell its shuttered Van Nuys plant.

Yet given the CRA's controversial history in the city, several critics railed against how much power the recovery zone would vest in the agency. Beyond the repercussions of TIFs, some feared that the recovery proposal would permit redevelopment officials to use eminent domain powers to condemn homes and businesses. As one critic put it, “When you recover, you don't recover by taking everybody's homes and businesses away.”Footnote ¹²⁰ The statement illustrated the crux of L.A.'s approach to 1990s deindustrialization and social unrest. What exactly did it mean “to recover”? Did recovery mean redevelopment through an influx of private dollars into impoverished communities and of service-oriented businesses that paid meager wages, but at least provided jobs? It seemed that few politicians questioned recovery in the non-economic sense. To what extent was recovery an effective endeavor? If industrial jobs were not coming back, then how could revitalization still provide residents a sense of belonging (as the GM plant had for its employees and local business owners), as well as stable, livable wages for the area's residents?

In the summer of 1994, GM finally reported receiving several offers for the site. One of those offers came from the city of Los Angeles itself, which offered to purchase the site via a nonprofit in exchange for a series of tax breaks. GM held out for a higher bidder but lowered the asking price from $50 to $30 million.Footnote ¹²¹ With both the LARZ and the Recovery Zone in place, the GM site was more appealing to private developers.Footnote ¹²² Dan Selleck saw his opening. For the site, he envisioned a mixed-use, part commercial, part light industrial complex. The large, boxy parcel of land seemed destined for the increasingly popular “power center” of big box chains like Home Depot or OfficeMax. The population density of the Panorama City community was also appealing.Footnote ¹²³ Dan recognized an amenable climate for private redevelopment. GM had done its due diligence by clearing contaminated soil and mitigating any environmental hazards.Footnote ¹²⁴ The city of Los Angeles, especially under Republican Mayor Richard Riordan, was eager for GM to sell the property and offered to expedite the process by ensuring that permitting and zoning would not stall in City Hall. At the time, Rocky Delgadillo, an aide to Mayor Riordan, stated, “We want something to happen there as soon as possible.”Footnote ¹²⁵ By May 1995, rumors swirled that the sale of the GM plant was “imminent.”Footnote ¹²⁶ By June, the deal was “close.” By February 1996, it was done.Footnote ¹²⁷ Dan Selleck's firm, Selleck Properties, would develop the commercial side with retail stores and a multiplex movie theater. Voit Cos, a private developer responsible for the Woodland Hills Warner Center, would take on the industrial element. The city would fund the construction of a new police substation, also to be housed on the parcel, while GM would retain around twenty-seven acres for a vehicle emissions testing center. All parties were content with the project, and as Dan Selleck later reflected, “Everyone was coming from the right place.”Footnote ¹²⁸

Just as residents, journalists, and public intellectuals surfaced to editorialize the closure of the GM auto plant, the announcement of its replacement invited a whole new round of social commentary from dailies like the Los Angeles Times:

If the closure of the auto plant had marked the “death” of the San Fernando Valley's manufacturing economy, the commercial center signified “new life.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The commercial center offered “a reason for neighbors to believe,” a “boost for a depressed community,” and a “shot in the arm.”Footnote ¹³¹ Indeed, developers claimed that the commercial center would create at least 2,000 new jobs in the “economically beleaguered area,” while the police substation would reduce “crime.”Footnote ¹³² Mayor Riordan stated that the “GM site will send a message of recovery.”Footnote ¹³³ Local residents agreed. As Greg Gagnon stated, “It's better than having open land sitting there…. Any new businesses in Panorama City should help. At least it opens new jobs … hopefully.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Small business owners, who had lost substantial profits when the plant closed, like El Taco Loco owners Antonio and Hermina Ramirez, were optimistic that the commercial development would bring back some percentage of their proceeds.

Yet as much as social commentary emphasized the retail complex's economic potential—and supported the proposed police substation—many critics also noted that the “tenants won't be creating any high paying jobs.”Footnote ¹³⁵ The commercial development would generate jobs for residents, first through construction and then through retail, but neither would bring the job security, retirement benefits, or high wages that unionized industrial labor had brought the auto plant workers decades before. In response, Alarcón and the center's developers highlighted its light industrial component, a slight concession to the demands of labor advocates who knew that commercial development could never fully replace what they had lost.

Meanwhile, plans continued in “first gear” at the GM site. The neo-recovery partnership between Riordan's administration, Selleck Properties, Voit Cos, and General Motors ensured that no part of the renovation got bogged down in red tape. Tractors razed the plant in 1997. Recalling the sight of demolition, former auto worker Alex Gomez said he cried. The rubble just got to him (Figure 7).Footnote ¹³⁶

Figure 7.

Photo of the demolished auto plant from the Valley Daily News. “Van Nuys Plant 8000 Van Nuys Blvd 91409” Facebook Group.

Although razing the site was the first step, there were not sufficient funds from private developers, nor the requisite infrastructure, to construct a mixed commercial/industrial power center. The neo-recovery partnership then turned to the federal Economic Development Agency (EDA) for help. In addition to the $9,158,123 allocated by the city, the partnership requested $4,000,000 of Earthquake Assistance funds from the EDA.Footnote ¹³⁷ The EDA funds would be used to construct four lanes of traffic to enter and exit the center with ease; to improve grading, sewage, storm drains, and water; and to run underground power conduits.Footnote ¹³⁸ In its grant proposal, the city of Los Angeles reinforced the narrative that retail development was tantamount to community empowerment and recovery: “The GM project is critical to the revitalization efforts of the San Fernando Valley. The proposed project will benefit the Northeast San Fernando revitalization efforts through the attraction of permanent business…. The project is symbolic in its message to the San Fernando Valley business community due to the retention and creation of 2,000 highly sustainable jobs.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The underlying message of the grant proposal was that the in-progress commercial center was “critical” to the community's revitalization. Revitalization was thus tied to the attraction and permanence of private business. The narrative had changed since Bradley's days when community pride meant that children aspired for manufacturing jobs in their communities, or when companies produced goods close to their biggest markets. As a spokesperson for the Voit company put it, “I think that particular part of the Valley have heard enough about the downers, whether it's the earthquake, the riots, or plant closings … this is an example of our faith in this community.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ To be sure, retail created jobs. But South Los Angeles in the aftermath of the Uprising illustrated the limits of private sector investment. Rebuild L.A., Mayor Bradley's five-year plan to harness private funds for community repair in South Los Angeles, had been a categorical disappointment, because, as one journalist put it, “Rebuild L.A. was trickle-down economics in a non-profit.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ Nevertheless, once GM had finished cleaning the site, tenants like Home Depot, Babies “R” Us, Ross Dress for Less, Party City, and Mann Multiplex Theater started to lease at the site (Figure 8).Footnote ¹⁴² New “sustainable jobs” to revitalize the community could be found at big box stores or a multiplex movie theater.

Figure 8.

The “power center,” The Plant. The only remnant of its history as an auto plant can be seen in the Mall marquee, styled in the image of a car insignia. Photo by Julia Brown-Bernstein, November 10, 2022, Los Angeles, CA.

The Plant Comes to Life

On September 28, 1998, the first store, Party City, opened at The Plant.Footnote ¹⁴³ Those involved in the center's development praised it as a site of “replanted hopes.”Footnote ¹⁴⁴ It proved what was possible when a municipality partnered with private investors to revitalize a deindustrialized community sorely in need of resources. Yet the irony of The Plant as a replacement for the GM plant was not lost on former auto workers. For instance, Nelson Belanger, a thirty-year GM veteran who had earned $20 an hour while on the assembly line, came out of retirement to take a job at Home Depot making about $8 hourly.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ There was no denying that “revitalization” did not mean commensurate employment or economic security. But a job was a job.

The Plant catered to the needs of younger generations of Valley residents who utilized it for ordinary retail purposes. As one reporter put it, “Today, some of the young parents roaming the aisles of Home Depot or Babies ‘R’ Us at the former site of the GM factory know nothing of the dreary days after the plant closed in 1992, taking 2,600 jobs with it.”Footnote ¹⁴⁶ In the early days of The Plant, the press emphasized its low crime rates (even though the police substation never materialized) and its community feel as a “popular destination” for families. Teenagers and young adults patronized The Plant for its arcade and multiplex theater. Dean Mortelli, born and raised in Van Nuys, went to The Plant in the summer of 1999 to see the film South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ He had heard that The Plant was once the site of the famed GM auto plant, but that history seemed “ancient” by the end of the 1990s. Indeed, over the course of just a decade, the Northeast Valley's local economy scarcely bore physical traces of its industrial past.

But the question remained: did The Plant, with its 300,000 square feet of retail/shopping center space, 520,000 of light industrial space, and 3,700-seat movie theater revitalize the area? What, in the end, did revitalization mean in the neoliberal era? Richard Alarcón and Dan Selleck were proud of what they accomplished through the neo-recovery partnership that brought The Plant to fruition. For liberals like Alarcón, Selleck, and even Joel Kotkin, who had envisaged the San Fernando Valley's shift to the service economy, there was no way to return to the region's postwar manufacturing dominance. The neo-recovery partnership had decoupled the imperative that goods be produced where they were sold. Community revitalization meant service employment, and there were things far worse than that. Yet for long-term residents of Panorama City, The Plant was a site that nobody who actually lived in the area used: “What are we going to do,” one local asked poignantly: “sit at the California Pizza Kitchen, or whatever is there, and pretend like we're living our best life?”Footnote ¹⁴⁸