Though South Los Angeles lies near the city’s booming downtown and the ascendant neighborhood of Inglewood, it has seen little development in past decades. The area was hit by bouts of racial violence in the 1950s and 1960s, setting off a “white flight” that was followed by an exodus of African-Americans after the city’s 1992 riots. Now mostly Latino, South Los Angeles’s two City Council districts are the poorest in the city.
“You had high rates of poverty, dropouts; the infrastructure was bad,” said Curren Price, a city councilman who represents a South Los Angeles district. “Trash in the alleys, streets neglected.”
By contrast, U.S.C.’s student population is markedly wealthier, and more diverse. Many of the schools…
