In the heart of Compton, Taveon Harlston has his choice of horses.

Today, he picks Clyde, a snow-white Tennessee Walker. Next to the stables, fruit trees, and horse carriages, an improvised arena awaits in this suburban backyard.

"People always think ‘Hey, you’re from Compton, you’re probably a bad boy.’ When I tell people I’m a cowboy, they say ‘You’re pretty crazy. You’re not a cowboy,’” Harlston says.

Dressed in a plaid shirt and Wrangler jeans accented by a large gold buckle, the 15-year-old looks every inch the cowboy.

"Most kids don’t get to experience many of the things I do,” he says. “Most kids haven’t been out of Compton.”

Most residents of Compton’s Richland Farms — where Harlston rides — feel they are living a dream, having found a place where they can enjoy the country life surrounded by all the trappings of the city. But it’s a dream they say they are fighting to keep alive.

More horses than cars roam Bennett, Caldwell, Tichenor and Raymond streets. It’s one of the last surviving residential agricultural zones in Los Angeles, but it is changing. With that change, the residents say their way of life is threatened.

“In the last, say, 10 years, the city has come in and created havoc,” said Harlston’s mentor, Corrine Paige.

From the neighborhood’s earliest days, Richland Farms residents have fought to preserve their singular lifestyle. But demographic shifts, with their subsequent social and cultural upheaval, forced change. From cockfighting, to illegal dairy operations, to high water costs and tax rates, to confusion over fluid zoning laws, the tension between Richland Farms residents and the city remains a constant theme. Both sides profess to have the same goal: keep Richland Farms as is. However, each side has a different way of accomplishing that goal.

As the city pushes forward with “Birthing a New Compton,” many Richland Farms residents hope to simply recapture the old days.

The Jewel Of Compton

Known as the jewel of Compton to local residents, Richland Farms remains one of Los Angeles’ hidden treasures to outsiders.

It is as unassuming as it is unique, an unremarkable neighborhood at first glance. But then clues begin to emerge: a harem of hens in a front yard, a Spanish-tiled roof on a sprawling ranch house, and, quite suddenly, a group of riders coming around the corner, tipping their hats as they pass.

Behind the houses, the Farms really come alive. Spacious backyards typically stretch a half-acre or more, and residents house horses, along with other livestock. The rules are a little different within Richland Farms, a neighborhood whose history is intrinsically linked to Compton’s own.

In 1888, Griffith Compton donated his land to Los Angeles County for incorporation as the City of Compton, but not before requiring that a special parcel remain zoned for agricultural use. Many of the sprawling ranch homes that line Richland Farms have remained in the same family for generations. However, the neighborhood, like Compton itself, has undergone several changes throughout the years.

Populated almost exclusively by white ranchers in the 1940s, Richland Farms opened up to African Americans in 1948 when the courts struck down a tangled web of deeds that excluded blacks, among other races, from occupying certain properties in the area.

Developers seized the opportunity to cash in on a new market and built affordable housing designed to cater to aspiring middle-class African Americans. Compton’s population changed seemingly overnight.

As African Americans began moving in, whites left in droves for the then-undeveloped Rancho Palos Verdes. Eventually, Compton underwent yet another shift in demographics: Latinos, attracted by the city’s affordability, started trickling, then pouring, in. According to the State Department of Finance, Latinos now make up nearly 60 percent of the Compton’s population, with blacks comprising the other 40 percent.

The changing face of Richland Farms has contributed to inevitable tension with the city, particularly over parking and land-use issues.

“Fight back!”

He speaks with pleading fervor, one part salesman, another part street preacher — imploring his neighborhood to mind his warning: “This is the time to fight back! Do the right thing and come to the (city) council meeting,” he yells through a loudspeaker perched above his black Toyota 4Runner. It slowly rolls down the street. Lloyd Wilkins scans for neighbors.
“If you don’t come, it’s put up and shut up.”

On this particular Tuesday, the City Council indeed will be witness to hundreds of Richland Farms neighbors upset that they have to purchase a permit to park along their own streets. Otherwise, the 24-hour “no parking” policy applies.

In the passenger seat, translating for the Latino residents, is Elizabeth Ramirez.

Ramirez’s family moved to the neighborhood 20 years ago to build what she describes as a thriving dairy business, which they ran from their backyard. But the city of Compton confiscated each of her father’s cows in 2006 in a crackdown on illegal businesses, she said. The cows, Ramirez said, ended up in Palmdale, neglected and abused.

Her father “was stripped of who he was. Everything,” Ramirez said.

Selling unpasteurized milk, with the addition of alcohol to kill any existing microbes, is a tradition in Mexico, according to Ramirez.

Zoning laws allow for Richland Farms to raise large animals as pets, but not for profit — a concept the Ramirez family finds difficult to reconcile with.

"There was a profit made; I’m not going to lie,” Ramirez said. “But why not use the land to help you out?”

Compton Mayor Eric Perrodin admits he’s had to use code enforcement and both the sheriff’s and health departments to enforce the law.

When Ramirez tried to right the situation and obtain a license for her family’s dairy business, city officials told her she would have to own at least 75 head of cattle to do so, as per county law, she said. At the time, her family owned “around 10 head of cattle,” she said.  The family’s acre of property could not sustain the 75 head.

Wilkins and Ramirez represent the pro-active side of Richland Farms -- the town hall meeting regulars, the extremists, the gadflies.
But they are hardly alone in their concerns.

The Official View

Representing Richland Farms on the Compton City Council is Councilwoman Yvonne Arceneaux, a homeowner and resident of the farms for more than 30 years. For more than half that period, she has served on the council. She is on the cusp of becoming its longest-serving member in history.

Despite escalating criticism against the council, Arceneaux says she only wants to preserve the place where she raised her three children, where they themselves used the property to raise a cast of cows for the local 4-H club. Throughout her time living in the development, cows, horses, tropical birds and even a mule roamed the backyard.

"I can’t express the importance of it,” she said. “It is most important that we maintain this area as an agricultural zone so youth can continue to benefit from programs and this kind of lifestyle. It’s so unique. As long as I’m on the council, I will fight hard to keep it as it is.”

But her concerns are real. Real animal abuse is escalating, she said.

“When you have too many animals in a small space, they can’t run. They can’t exercise,” she said.

She cited one especially troubling situation in which 30 large animals were discovered in a small space, trudging through mud — some unable to move.

While some abuse the zoning rules and keep backyards bursting with an over-abundance of livestock, others are much less conspicuous.

Backyard Brawl

Take, for example, the Santillons. Their home sits in a 37,000-square foot lot, clean, well-manicured and securely fenced, not unlike one of the wealthier homes one might see in Pasadena.

Stephanie Santillon, a preteen, translates for her father, who moved the family from a home off Rosecrans Avenue in Compton to Richland Farms in order to keep animals.

"We have had a lot (of horses), but they’re not ours,” Stephanie said. “We rent out our back as stables.”

Her father said there have been multiple times when the neighbors have banded together “so they wouldn’t take our animals.”
As the backyards transform into rental units, more and more visitors enter the farms, parking along the streets.

"If we don’t address it, it will get out of hand,” Arceneaux said. “We won’t be able to control it.”

The complaints are wide in scope.

For property owner John Green, the lack of zoning education, and nitpicky enforcement, is driving much of the conflict. To resident Jorge Rios, it’s the rising water rates, which spiked from $1.38 to $2.20 per 100 cubic feet from the 2008-09 fiscal year to 2010-11.

But Charles Davis, who served as the city clerk for more than 30 years, said they’re both wrong. It’s a culture clash, he said.

Culture Clash

"The cockfighting was a bitch,” Davis said.

It was cockfighting — the blood sport between two roosters — and the business of selling livestock and dairy that caused the parking problem that persists to this day, he said.

Each he attributes to the Mexican culture, where cockfighting is a legal, and celebrated, tradition, and selling unpasteurized milk, sometimes with alcohol mixed in, is also practiced.

A celebrated public figure coaxed into once again getting politically involved, Davis is currently busy rushing forward with a petition against bringing back the police department.

He shoots down many a theory about Richland Farms.

On theories from some residents that the city wants to do away with the farms because it’s a case of gentrification, and that the city hopes to profit off building homes on the spacious lots: “There’s no reason for them to build on that land. That would be cost prohibitive. You have to pay relocation fees.”

But on other issues, he takes issue with the city, like the parking. The big crowds that came in during the 1990s, when he was clerk, caused parking problems then.

"The reason for that, and most people wouldn’t say it, is the cockfighting,” he said.

Davis believes cockfighting is still going on.

 "All over the neighborhood, you would find dead chickens,” he said.

Another issue is the underground dairy business.

"Even when I was clerking, it was bad,” he said. “Millions of people coming into the area. They take up all the parking all over the place. People were selling livestock and that had to do with an ethnic transformation. It went from white to black, to Hispanic.”

Originally it “was going to be the black Beverly Hills,” he said.

No matter what exactly is causing the overcrowding problems, the new parking restrictions are not the solution, he added.

While many long-time residents and government officials hope to keep Richland Farms the way it originally was under Griffith Compton, the area is transforming.

"If you just got here, you’re buying for a whole different reason than you would have 30 years ago,” Davis said.

Twenty-three years ago, a Compton real estate agent accumulated three adjacent properties in Richland Farms. She did it for her own different reason, one well-alive today, altering the lives of children across all of Compton.

A Different Kind Of Posse

“No, there are 15 horses,” says Mayisha Akbar, the executive director of the Compton Jr. Posse, a program that aims to “keep kids on horses and off streets.”

She gives a knowing smile. There are, in fact, 17 horses on the land today, two too many, according to the municipal code, at the home to Richland Farms’ largest horse arena. Upon forming the Jr. Posse, Akbar combined her brother’s and mother’s backyards with her own to form a sort of super backyard.

Her story, in and of itself, is inspiring: a divorced mom of three coming to the rescue of inner-city youth. The story of her posse has been featured by the national media: students kept away from gangs and drugs, some trained by Olympic medalist horse trainers.

Akbar fears for the future of the farms. She thinks all the land will be gobbled up by eminent domain within the next quarter century to expand the Alameda Corridor, a passageway of 25 percent of all U.S. waterborne international trade — along which Compton is strategically located.

It is but one of many theories — and that’s what they are, only theories — swirling around the Farms.

There are many groups and residents throughout Richland Farms, like Akbar, doing good every day.

Another program doing good is Queue-Up, a non-profit pairing at-risk youth with handicapped kids.

Queue-Up runs its program out of Nate Bryant’s backyard; a backyard that illuminates the very best Richland Farms has to offer.

Birthing A New Compton

JoJo, Rosey Brown, Sparkles, Princess B and BeeBee — those are the names of the Tennessee Walker Horses Bryant keeps on his property, a land rich with fruit trees.

For Harlston, the young urban cowboy who lives outside of Richland Farms in Compton, Bryant’s property and Queue-Up have changed his life.

“Most kids are ordinary. Most want to grow up to be rappers and football players,” he said while washing his horse, Clyde. “I want to grow up and to do different things.”

Richland Farms has offered Harlston a respite from the harsh realities of urban life in South L.A.

The 4-mile tract has offered many a respite. All agree, it must be preserved.

"It’s very valuable people get to keep their property and live the way it’s supposed to be lived over here, because if we don’t have that, we might as well give up and say to hell with it,” Bryant said.

It is a land so rare, it’s worth a fight.

This story was made possible with funding from Spot.us.

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