![]() Residents walk dogs they go out at night. The change, say community members, is palpable. Along the way, blacks became a minority in Compton, which is 60 percent Latino today. Fridays, an outbreak of Starbucks and a natural-food store. Alongside the liquor stores and check-cashing stands are signs of middle-class aspiration: a T.G.I. There are fewer gunshots and more places for kids to go after school. ![]() But the number of homicides is at a 25-year low, slashed in half from 2005. The community is still poor, and unemployment is more than twice the national average. Two decades later, Compton has a new lease on life. The image of Compton as a defiantly violent ghetto was crystallized by the rap group N.W.A., whose 1988 album, "Straight Outta Compton," went multiplatinum, even though it was banned by many radio stations the record even attracted the attention of the FBI, which felt the group was inciting violence with its song, "F- tha Police." In 1989, a 2-year-old was gunned down in a drive-by as he wandered his front yard a 16-year-old was shot with a semiautomatic weapon as he rode his bike. murder capital, per capita, surpassing Washington with one homicide for every 1,000 residents-and the details were numbing. ![]() Drugs were rampant, and street-gang tensions had escalated into what historian Josh Sides describes as "a brutal guerilla war." The city became the U.S. It was prime real estate-except that, well, it wasn't.īy the 1990s, the mere mention of the name Compton had become so toxic that the nearby southern California suburbs had the city of 100,000 erased from their maps. Lampposts that once illuminated new cars and sale signs stood darkened, some tagged with gang graffiti. Surrounded by an eight-foot steel gate, the once-bustling auto dealership had become a haven for the homeless a place where people dumped trash, loitered, caused trouble. For nearly a decade, the entrance to the city of Compton, Calif., just off the 91 Freeway, was a huge, vacant lot, overgrown by weeds.
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