The City of Inglewood and the Los Angeles Rams are now partners with a promising future and a commitment to providing first-class entertainment. Five years ago both franchises were a disaster. The Rams were in St. Louis and at the bottom of the NFL with a 2-14 record. Inglewood was on the verge of suffering a financial collapse.

After the dust had settled from the league announcement in January of this year that Inglewood would be home to the Los Angeles Rams and three months later learned that it would host Super Bowl LV in 2021, Mayor James T. Butts, Jr. shared a compelling story. Defying the odds, the city is forging itself into a positive force on multiple levels.

When Butts took office on February 1, 2011 the City of Inglewood was six or seven months away from cash-flow bankruptcy. The city held less than $11 million in its wallet. The biggest liability was its lifetime medical cost: a $330 million unfunded liability over 30 years.

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Part 1,  Part 2,  Part 3

City of Champions is now a city under construction.

With the Los Angeles Rams heading back to town, Inglewood is in the midst of building a new football stadium; high-profile residential, retail and office developments; and three light-rail stations on the next major Metro line.

Throw in a transit-oriented plan to revitalize downtown's historic Market Street and an air of suburbia, and it's not hard to see why this South Bay city is being rediscovered by L.A. home buyers.

Not that anyone ever really forgot Inglewood: This is a city where history has been made - in sports, in aviation and in the Southland's fraught relationship with race, decade after decade.

That history stretches back first to the Native Americans who settled the area around Centinela Springs, and then to the Spanish who displaced them.

It was World War II, and the coming of the defense industry to the South Bay, that jump-started Inglewood's growth from a rural community to a city in its own right.