Rosa Sanchez entered the Los Angeles City College swap meet with a $20 bill on a Sunday last month. She emerged with grapes, strawberries, cherries, a gray sweater, toothpaste, a 16-pack of AA batteries — and $6 in change. Now, she will have to hunt for bargains elsewhere. The weekend swap meet, which has occupied a parking lot on the community college campus in East Hollywood for more than 20 years, opened for the last time Sunday.“When the community loses these important places, we all lose, ” said Sanchez, 59, a housekeeper who lives nearby. Like other swap meets, the one at L. A. City College closed at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year. It reopened more than a year later, in April. The San Fernando, Paramount and Vineland swap meets are among those that are now open. The swap meet at Los Angeles Harbor College started up again on the Fourth of July. But at L. City College, the pandemic losses were too steep to overcome. Competition from vendors who set up on the sidewalk was the final straw, said Greg Danz, president and chief executive of Newport Diversified, which runs the swap meet.“It’s very disappointing that this business is closing, and we’re not happy, ” he said. Vendors, both in the market and on the sidewalk outside, say the fees that Newport charged for a stall were exorbitant. Juan Carlos Perez, who has sold secondhand clothing and electronics at the swap meet for 20 years, said he paid $2, 000 for a prominent, high-traffic spot, on top of monthly reservation fees of $110 and daily vending fees of $100. Perez, 49, a FedEx driver who moved to L. from El Salvador in 1986, relies on the extra income to pay bills. He now has three or four months’ worth of merchandise stacked up at home and no idea where he will sell it. Vendors said they received only a week’s notice of the closure, which was first reported by the Eastsider.“If I knew they were going to stop, I wouldn’t have paid $2, 000, ” Perez said. “I can’t afford to give away that money. ”Danz said his company charged the 140 or so vendors only daily and monthly fees, not thousands of dollars for a space. The Los Angeles City College Foundation owns the site and will look for a new operator, Executive Director Robert Schwartz said. The foundation, which gets 35% of the swap meet’s proceeds, with the rest going to Newport, lost more than $650, 000 in revenue during the pandemic shutdown, Schwartz said. The money typically goes to the foundation’s operating costs and to student scholarships, including the Guardian Scholars Program, which helps foster youth with tuition, meals and tutoring. In the last year, reserve funds were used to pay for the scholars program, which includes about 140 students. In the months since the swap meet reopened, revenue has been down by more than half, with the foundation taking in about $18, 000 a month, compared with the usual $55, 000. Vendors were not charged any fees for the first month of reopening in April, Schwartz said.
All data is taken from the source: http://latimes.com
Article Link: https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-08-02/l-a-city-college-swap-meet-shuts-down-after-more-than-two-decades
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