My mother rented a salon on 54th Street in 1985 and bought the building in 1995 for $60,000. When she passed, every developer on the Westside wanted to buy it. Here is why we said no, what it cost, and what it's becoming.
People ask me why I do this work — the probate files, the inherited houses, the families arguing in a kitchen about whether to sell Mom's place. The honest answer is on the corner of Crenshaw and 54th.
My mother, Lucretia Clark, opened Renaissance Hair Salon at 3409 West 54th Street in 1985. She was a tenant. Ten years later, when the building came up for sale, she and the owner of the wig shop next door bought it together for $60,000 — $30,000 each. Her half came from my father, Henry Clark, who put up money from his own family's estate so that his wife could own the place she worked.
That building was her second home for thirty years. I swept floors there. I answered phones there. When I named my brokerage in 2009, I named it after her salon.
My mother passed on February 14, 2015, at home, in the living room where she used to do hair. Within months the offers started. Developers, mostly from the Westside, who a few years earlier didn't see any value on Crenshaw Boulevard. Now they did.
I understood the math they were doing. What I also understood was that my mother's Social Security check had been $800 a month. The building was the wealth. If we sold it, the wealth left the family and left the neighborhood in the same signature.
So we didn't sell. We bought.
Owning half a building with a partner who had walked away from it years earlier is not ownership. It took six years, a family probate, a pandemic, bank turndowns — the rents were too low and the tenants were businesses, so no lender wanted the refinance — and more counteroffers than I care to count. On July 2, 2021, my sister Bridgette and I closed the buyout of the other half through our family company, Regenaissance LLC, with a bridge loan a Destination Crenshaw contact helped us find at 8% when the developers were offering 12%.
That difference — four points — is the kind of thing nobody tells a family sitting on an inherited property. It's why I tell them now.
We took the project through the City ourselves, with Praxis Development Group as our development partner. Not every neighbor cheered. One community council member told me my mother wouldn't have wanted this — that it was a money grab. That one stayed with me, because the whole point was the opposite.
On December 15, 2022, the Los Angeles Planning Commission approved The Clark on 54th unanimously. Six stories, 48 apartments, six of them reserved for very-low-income families, 2,100 square feet of ground-floor retail, a mile from the K Line. The commission's words: "More projects should be like this one."
Over $100,000 of my own money into mortgage payments, entitlements and permit fees before a dollar comes back. Fourteen months of carrying a $10,900 mortgage with tenants who had stopped paying. A relocation bill north of $80,000. Weekly meetings for four years, on top of running a brokerage.
I'm not writing that for sympathy. I'm writing it because when a family asks me "should we just sell?", I owe them the real cost of the other answer.
The Clark on 54th is one of very few family-led developments on the Crenshaw corridor, and to my knowledge the only one still owned by the family that bought the land. I don't say that to be special. I say it because it should be normal.
Most families who inherit property in South Los Angeles sell within a few years, usually to the first cash offer, usually for less than it's worth, usually because probate feels like a wall and nobody explained the doors in it. The doors are real: you can hold, you can rent, you can build, you can transfer to the next generation without triggering a reassessment if you do it right, and yes, sometimes selling is the right answer — at the right number, to the right buyer, on your timeline.
That is what the Legacy Home Review is. It's the conversation I wish someone had had with my mother in 2013 when she first talked about building.
Ownership is power. Let's build.
Jamial Clark is Broker/Owner of Renaissance Realty Group (DRE# 01292443), managing member of Regenaissance LLC, and developer of The Clark on 54th at 5365 Crenshaw Boulevard. The Los Angeles Times told the family's story in December 2024: "On Crenshaw Boulevard, a family chooses to build, not sell."
Broker/Owner of Renaissance Realty Group and developer of The Clark on 54th, 48 apartments rising on the Crenshaw corridor lot his mother bought in 1995 after ten years as its salon tenant. Certified Probate Specialist. He writes every post here from his own files and his own neighborhoods — not from a content farm. Ask him about your property →
Every one of them is a dot on the Ownership Map. Read the The Crenshaw Corridor ownership brief →
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