Santa Monica’s message to people evicted long ago for the 10 Freeway: Come home
LOS ANGELES — Nichelle Monroe’s ties to Santa Monica run deep.
Her great-uncle is said to have been the first Black baby born there more than a century ago. Apartments and other buildings in the beachfront city were designed by her architect grandfather, Vernon Brunson.
Monroe remembers when her grandparents would drive her by the intersection of 20th Street and Michigan Avenue and point up an alleyway to where their duplex used to be.
In that spot today looms the 10 Freeway, which cut through Santa Monica’s Pico neighborhood as it was built to stretch to the Pacific. Monroe’s grandparents, along with about 600 other predominately Black families, lost their homes.
More than half a century later, Santa Monica is offering a chance for some of them to come back. Starting in January, the city will offer affordable housing to those forced out by freeway construction and those removed in the late 1950s when the city bulldozed another Black area, Belmar Triangle, to build the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium. Children and
