Jefferson Park

LANLT purchased 1.86 acres of a former oil drilling site, but the story doesn’t begin with us.

Open Date

2028

Location

1375 West Jefferson Blvd, LA, 90007

Size

1.86 acres

The Jefferson Park & Affordable Housing Project will transform a 1.86-acre former oil drilling site in South Los Angeles into a vibrant, community-serving space that combines much-needed affordable housing with a new 0.75-acre public park. Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust (LANLT) serves as the lead agency for the park’s development and community engagement.

The current phase focuses on environmental testing, shallow soil remediation, and a robust community engagement process to ensure that local residents shape the design, programming, and long-term management of the new green space. Planned park features include play and fitness areas, gathering spaces, and native habitat zones that will restore ecological health to this long-contaminated site. This work lays the foundation for safe, inclusive, and sustainable redevelopment that centers community voices and environmental justice.

Executive Director Tori Kjer speaking to guests at a celebration of the closing
of the Jefferson Blvd. oil site on February 24, 2024.

From Oil Field to South L.A. Oasis

By Kate Martin Rowe

At the end of 2022, the Los Angeles City Council voted to ban all new oil drilling in LA and phase out existing drill sites, which will affect twenty-six oil and gas fields and more than 5,000 wells in LA, according to the city’s planning department. While critics complain this is insufficiently ambitious for a city that still relies heavily on oil and gas, we at the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust believe it’s an important step toward decarbonizing LA’s future.

LANLT envisions a radical green future for all of Los Angeles where parks stand in place of oil fields, and our new Jefferson Park Project is a manifestation of those big dreams. At the end of 2023, we closed on the $10 million purchase of 1.86 acres of land at the former Jefferson oil drilling site. As director Richard Parks of the Redeemer Community Partnership wrote to us, “We are delighted that decades of malign neglect, sacrificial zoning, and environmental racism have finally been brought to a close. Families are beginning to receive beauty for ashes as a plan to transform the former oil drill site into a community park, affordable housing, and community center takes root.”

A Park Won by Community Organizing

This story doesn’t begin with us though. It begins in 2013 with Sentinel Peak Resources asking the city of LA for permits to drill three new oil wells at the South LA site. After suffering years of health ailments and other impacts on their community, community members jumped into action to fight this plan from the oil company. Redeemer Community Partnership, a community development organization, along with other community groups and the environmental coalition STAND-LA, which had been working to shut down other drill sites around the city, began organizing residents to demand city protections from oil drilling in their neighborhoods (protections that wealthier communities like West LA had enjoyed for decades). The community ultimately succeeded in winning more regulation, but before the new protections could be implemented, Sentinel Peak decided to close the site altogether in 2018.

The community wasted no time getting to work again, this time advocating to buy the site and realize their dreams for it: park land and affordable housing. Parks says Redeemer Community Partnership reached out to LANLT to help broker a deal with Sentinel Peak because they didn’t think the company would “negotiate in good faith” after the years-long fight they’d had over regulations. With LANLT’s experience in developing parks and brokering land acquisition deals, he believed we had the skills and knowledge to help. He was right! But we didn’t do it alone. It’s with heartfelt gratitude and respect that we first recognize the years of work this community and organizations like Redeemer Community Partnership put in to make this land available, and also offer hearty thanks to our real estate broker, the pro-bono lawyers from Latham & Watkins and Seyfarth & Shaw and Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer who all helped make this deal happen.