U.S.C. Expands in a ‘Neglected’ Neighborhood, Promising Jobs and More
Once USC Village opens, Dr. Nikias is also hoping to strengthen ties to the local community, both with a raft of open spaces — the ground-floor retail and piazza-style green space will be open to the public — as well as programs
that support high school students and young people in the area.
“We, as a university, are here to stay.”
Among the commitments the university made was a $16 million fire station built on university land
and at no cost to the city, as well as a $20 million pledge to Los Angeles’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund, which is meant to offset concerns about how the addition to the neighborhood could drive up the already prohibitively high cost of housing.
As the university works to acquire the land and prepare for the permitting process for its East Los Angeles expansion, a procedure
that typically takes five to seven years, it is working with social services agencies in the hopes of helping the local community as it has tried to do in South Los Angeles
LOS ANGELES — When the University of Southern California’s campus extension opens in
South Los Angeles on Thursday, it will not just welcome 2,700 new college students.
“We saw it as, we’re going to do a project where we offer the local community an opportunity to get into our trades,” said Ron Miller, executive secretary of the Los Angeles/Orange Counties Building
and Construction Trades Council, an umbrella group representing 48 labor unions.