LOS ANGELES — Developer CIM Group has backed out of plans to buy the iconic Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza shopping center, following pressure from black community leaders who argued the purchase represented gentrification and was a threat to South L.A. and its economic interests.

When CIM announced its purchase plans in April, co-founder Shaul Kuba said the company believed it to be a “pivotal location in a well-established Los Angeles community, centrally located.”

Now that CIM is out of the deal, the Crenshaw Subway Coalition is continuing its effort to find alterative ways to develop the mall, garnering support from more than 150 community organizations and leaders, as well as 10,000 signatures, who would like to see the community buy the mall and surrounding properties, Goodmon said.

“This fight on the mall pushed us to make public what we’d actually been working on for the past year: the launch of an impact fund to acquire apartments and single-family homes in our community, to take them off the speculative real estate market, to place them into the Liberty Community Land Trust, to make our community permanently affordable to us,” Goodmon said.

Former City Councilman Robert Farrell said he and others will continue to speak publicly — as they did against CIM’s purchase — to highlight the role of public pension fund investments in the gentrification and displacement of black communities.

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