Building Dissent

Ken Goldman didn’t like what he was hearing, and he wasn’t alone. He was at a meeting at the Roxbury Park Community Center in Beverly Hills in May. City officials were presenting plans for a new $14.5 million community center. The proposed center contained something that the 75 mostly gray-haired denizens of that luxe neighborhood were there to protest: a basketball gym. The new gym would front the same thoroughfare as the town’s Rolls-Royce dealership.

Goldman is a partner in one of Reed Smith’s Los Angeles offices. His practice focuses on real estate, tax, and partnership law. He is also a well-known activist in Beverly Hills, and he made sure that the officials heard his concerns: “We need some assurance that we are not going to have weekend gatherings of 500 people.” His was a relatively calm voice in a meeting filled with angry, shouting residents. One woman was worried about the kind of people that the gym might attract for midnight basketball. Another feared that the gym would become the scene of alcohol-fueled wedding receptions. After a quiet African American eighth-grader stepped forward to defend the new community center, one elderly gentleman loudly asked the person sitting next to him, “But does she live in Beverly Hills?”