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ChineseLos Angeles: The City That Wishes She Weren’t
I’ll never understand LA. Not that it’s a bad thing - there’s a lot of things I’ll never understand, like why Ben & Jerry’s Phish Food is just that good. But really, some things just don’t make sense. The big “this makes no sense” in LA is the fact that people seem to forget that this is a major city. I’m sorry, guys, this ain’t Des Moines. With all apologies to Des Moines.
The LA Times this weekend had a couple of articles that you could only describe as “idiotic.” The best one: Letting Gridlock Loose on LA. Money quote:
During the hour-and-20-minute ride, she reads, sleeps or stares out the window, watching miles of motorists stuck on the freeway. Then, she becomes one of them.
At Union Station, Reliford heads for a parking lot where she has left a second car. She ventures onto the freeways for the final 15-mile, hourlong journey to Santa Monica, where she manages library services for MTV Networks.
My first response: What the fuck?! Why not take the BBB#10?! The fare would HAVE to be cheaper than keeping a second car at Union Station! I’m stunned!. And even if she’s going to respond “The #10 doesn’t run late,” well, the #720 runs until after your last Metrolink train, no matter what line you’re on!
My second response: Live closer to your job, for chrissakes!
My third response: This is the only city that I’ve lived in that is consistently opposed to economic development! Anywhere else would be happy to have more jobs, more opportunities, more revenue, a more prosperous city. But in LA, because people are obsessed with being able to drive their car at all times, at any speed, at no cost, we strangle our own economy.
It’s crazy and infuriating. Honestly, I sometimes think that SoCal voters are, on the whole, idiots. Between Proposition 13 and preventing money from being spent on subway construction, people seem to think they can have it all - they can have good jobs, a good economy, a major city with all of its benefits, and yet have no traffic and perpetually subsidized highways, all while refusing to tax themselves. Frankly, you get what you pay for, and SoCal, up until recently, has chosen to pay nothing - in response, we get nothing.
If you want to have a major urban city, be prepared to pay for it, to pay for transit improvements, to deal with non-stop construction, to deal with traffic, to pay to live closer to your job. On the other hand, if all of that annoys you, well, I hear Des Moines is nice
Discussion
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It still boggles my mind that so many parents believe that the benefits of having a bedroom for each kid and a couple thousand square feet of grass behind one’s house outweigh the immense educational and emotional harm caused by extreme commuting. A parent who spends 13 hours a day either working or getting to/from work cannot be an active participant in his/her children’s lives. Unfortunately, the Progressive-era shibboleth of the built environment determining the outcome of a child’s life (rightly derided by Reinhold Niebuhr as “the doctrine of salvation by bricks”) became so ingrained into the nation’s fabric throughout the 20th century that I fear it will be impossible to convince people like Ms. Reliford that spending time with their children is more valuable than giving them a backyard.
The preceding article in the series also points to the need for road pricing. The guy who was most screwed by traffic was the copier repairman who lives in Silver Lake (a great location for someone who needs to go all over Los Angeles County, BTW) and had to switch to the overnight shift so he could see his kids. Night shift work literally takes years off your life; no full-spectrum light box in the world can fully make up for the fact that humans are not a nocturnal species. If there were something resembling marginal cost pricing on freeways and major arterials, the repairman could cruise the freeways at 1970s speeds while passing on the congestion tolls to his customers.
Try not to blame the people. The voters are our only hope to turn this around. Don’t expect enlightened city planning as long as carbon companies have trillions in fixed costs to sustain.
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btw… don’t fall for the “road-pricing” hoax. It is like of the idea to inspect individual autos for pollution….annoying to the owner and covering up the the fact that the the auto itself IS the pollution.
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I don’t even know where to start with this nonsense.
I know lots of people who can take the bus door to door and yet chose to fight traffic on the Westside. When I pointed out to someone recently that she can take BBB7 (which is only half a block from her house) in Santa Monica to her job in Century City (again, half a block walk from Pico), she confessed to never actually notice there is bus service on Pico - like how can you miss those blue buses… it’s those slow moving big things on the right lane that you always cut off while trying to get in front!
Since then, she has been using the BBB7 several times a week and loving it. The ride takes the same amount of time as driving but less stress (unless we get those bus lanes that’s been promoised, which will make bus much faster). But she is a rare case… most people I talked to at work about taking BBB still have never tried it - and this is in Santa Monica/Weat LA… supposedly populated with green, open minded, alt-commute ready people. Yeah right…
BTW, the Sunday LA Times had the story on people’s commute which I read and it made me angry… Angry not because these people were taking so long on their commute but because except for one guy, these rest of them could literally take transit from door to door.
i think people just need venture out of this country, to another metropolis . to see how incredibly easy it is to get around in a non-american city. in constantly amazed by the planing and systems of other cities. only to return home to the in-20-years-we-will-have-another-subway city
Great article!
Couldn’t agree with you more.
It’s amazing how many people commute to work 20, 30, 40+ miles away from their homes, think that it’s totally justified (I like the beach, I want a backyard!), and the LA Times isn’t pointing out how ridiculous that is.
Peter: Absolutely - another economic effect is the effect on people whose jobs requires driving - repair people, delivery people, etc. Manhattan is filled with delivery trucks and couriers (although couriers often use Vespas or bikes, especially if most of their runs are below 14th Street). Those people aren’t immune to the traffic, and because we can’t quickly courier things between, say, Century City and Downtown, that’s one problem, and yet another drag on the economy here. It’s even more important here, when you have Industry people who have to shuttle between Warner Center, Burbank, Santa Monica, Culver City, and Downtown, not to mention the remaining studios in Hollywood and Midtown.
Not only that, there’s huge value to raising kids in a city - more diversity, more opportunities to learn. Having said that, even I’d be reluctant to send a kid to LAUSD through high school…
Jeremy: Not even out of the country, just NYC, Boston, or San Francisco. Sure, Muni and BART or the MBTA aren’t perfect, but they work, and they attract riders in all demographics.
There are a few problems for those who want to live closer to their jobs that does not come up:
1. Job sites tend to relocate. I know one person whose wife’s job was near her home, but then it moved further away. A few years later, it relocated to another area.
2. Distance is not the only factor. If the company has good benefits (insurance, etc.), that must be also factored in with the cost of a commute. Also, how long one has been employed there. Once you reach a certain age (regardless of the law), it’s VERY hard to start over.
3. Some people whose jobs relocate are very close to retirement. Their houses are paid for and the idea of taking on another massive bill before their income shrinks (not to mention living in an area they do not like) is neither pratical or realistic.
4. Housing prices have also gotten so high that even if they could sell their current house to live closer (ESPECIALLY if the company has relocated to a High Income area) would still create a fiancial hardship.
5. Decent schools. As one of the posters said, the LA Mummified SD is not a good place to send kids. As for Prop 13, I say BULLS#!+. The Political Powers that be are only using it for an excuse to give themselves an unlimited source of money (which they think they are entitled to) to fritter away on Garbage (like the multi BILLION $$$ monstrocity next to the Disney Center, or golden parachutes for mid-level admins). As the child, sibling, and friend of several teachers in many states, I have seen this shell game FIRST HAND!!! Pols pimp the schools, PT, and Police, etc, then above said funds gets sucked into some black hole.
1) OK, you’ve identified the exception to the rule. Fair. I doubt that’s the case for the most people in LA.
2) But that’s why people shouldn’t be buying houses on the other side of the state from their jobs - if you’re planning on being at your job long-term, you need to either move closer or stop whining about it. If you work on the Westside, you don’t need to live in Riverside - try Torrance or Long Beach if you’re priced out of the Westside.
3) Wanna give me a idea of how many of “people whose jobs relocate [that] are very close to retirement?” I’m going to guess that it’s not a huge percentage of drivers. You’ve identified a subset of a subset. If you can prove me wrong, feel free.
4) Which is why people should stop opposing density! Housing costs would fall if there were more apartment and condo towers for people like me that would prefer to live there. But instead people squawk about “traffic” even though it’s a critical mass of density would address the problem. Vertical housing is overpriced per square foot because it’s still so rare.
5) I’m not even going to dignify this with a response. Strike that. I’ve worked for the City - like any organization, it has its inefficiencies. However, it’s a mistake to think that they’re “wasting” money. LA is, at its heart, a fairly poor city with a wealthy minority. That doesn’t create a huge tax base, but it does create a huge need for services. By the way, that “multi BILLION $$$ monstrocity” as you so artfully call it, is yet another thing to drive the LA economy. It’s just this kind of thinking that keeps LA as backwards as it is. So thank you for making my point for me.
You don’t have to leave the country to see city’s that do alternative transportation better than Los Angeles. New York, Chicago, Portland are all standard bearers for how to move folks from A to B without a car. Seattle, DC, hell even Tempe and Salt Lake City put LA to shame.
I’m putting my neck out here, and I am going to defend LAUSD from the perspective of a former student. And I have attended several programs, though not any magnets.
Los Angeles can be a good place to attend school. The media have distorted the picture of schools that every LAUSD campus resembles the worst of the worst campuses, like Manual Arts, Crenshaw or Locke high schools.
Look, the schools aren’t divided into packs of racial prison gangs. Very few schools look like “Lean on Me,” “Dangerous Minds,” “187″ or your favorite education noir film happens to be. For every miscreant and thug in the school system, you have other students figuring out ways to avoid falling into the same trap.
As for the test scores, we have to look more at the students rather than the teachers or the system. In the high-stakes testing environment, the school or the teachers take the blame. Yet children, because they are not legal adults or because their fragile self-esteem must be protected, are excused from their responsibility. You could have really great teachers, but compulsory education results in a number of children who cannot or will not apply themselves in a school environment.
I’ve been through regular schools, being bused out to the Valley from L.A. because the schools near me were so full. I did get to attend the big urban schools, in adult classes. I’ve even attended an alternative school, where the District places the troublemakers and dead-enders. I’ve seen a variety of campus environments, and they’re pretty much the same. Every class has its malingerers, its hard-workers, and the large center of pupils of average intelligence and engagement.
I will tell you this. The best behaved, most engaged students were in the alternative high school. These are students who are on probation or have been expelled from other campuses, but they took their “last chance” and began to learn. Also, the students liked the “contract” system, where they complete classes based on how much work they complete.
Damien, SLC and Portland have been able to get as much buy-in as they have on urbanization because of historical quirks (a state constitutional ban until 1919 on black residents in Oregon, anti-black Mormon doctrines until 1978 in Utah) that have left them much, much whiter than most urban areas in the country.
Unfortunately, in most of the United States “urban” is a codeword for “Negro.” We may be about to elect a black president (well, half of one, anyway), but viciously racist attitudes–displayed by liberals and conservatives alike–impact the politics of urban areas to this day. Of course, the problems of race and class are intertwined in the US. Still, as most European countries have shown, it’s much harder to hate poor people for being poor when they happen to look just like you.
Or, as every schoolteacher I’ve known has said in one form or another, schools are garbage-in, garbage-out.
There is the California Paradox.
How could our public schools be so horrifyingly bad, yet our collegiate system be the envy of the world?
It should follow that the functional retards, or funktards, California’s K-12 system churn out will contaminate the system of higher education. Community colleges, which are non-selective and massively subsidized to make it dirt-cheap to attend, ought to have students so dumb that it’s a marvel to consider how they manage not to drown while showering. Instead, the two-year schools have a combination of factors that not only help students unlearn the bad habits they acquired in K-12, but really transform themselves in two years. The transformation is astounding.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that. Those bad habits tend not to go away with a high school diploma. Additionally, getting out of community college in two years is more of an ideal than a reality. The Californians I know who spent time in the community college system often say that it’s very hard to finish in two years because of the scarcity of classes and the temptation to treat it as High School 2.0, with all the irresponsibility that entails. There seems to be a “community college lifestyle” around here that doesn’t exist to the same extent back home in Illinois: kids still living with their parents, hanging out with their high school friends, etc.
In Illinois and New York, most of the available seats in state-run four-year colleges are at campuses far from the state’s respective major population centers. There’s not much to do in Champaign or Binghamton except drinking and studying.
Yeah, that’s why I transferred from U of I to Cal. It was fun for the first semester of freshmen year, then got boring real fast. $1 pitchers were nice though!
Sadly, in the minds of many people Density = Poverty = Crime. This mindset has ALWAYS been around. It’s not going to vanish overnight.
As an apartment dweller/renter myself, so I understand the situation. Renters, regardless of income or lifestyle, have also gotten a bad (and unfair) rap.
Sorry I have to disagree. I’ve lived in other places nationwide and know people who work as teachers in these situations. Even if the Prop 13 Boogyman did not exsist, there would be another reason (excuse). In some of these places, the Admin work in 30-40 year old buildings while the students get the best possible books and equipment. However, in some places, the admin builds State of the Art offices for themselves while the schools have no functioning bathrooms, all the while crying poverty. JMHO, I think it’s a matter of who’s in charge, and where their priorities (sp?) lie.
I don’t think I’m being backward thinking. I just don’t care for the Postmodern architecture, which rubs me the wrong way.
Why is that and what data do you suggest we refer people to in order to disprove that assumption?
The funny thing is that New York City is now one of the safest cities per capita in America.
Bratton is a big part of how that happened. I remember hearing Jody Litvak of the MTA telling a story at a MTA forum about talking to someone who didn’t want a bus stop on a certain street in front of their building downtown because of the “kind of people” who hung out at the bus stop. She said she reminded this person that people in midtown don’t try to have bus stops removed. This person didn’t have a “transit” issue. This person had a “policing” issue.
Safe travel is important to people. Some people are unduly afraid of being mugged or assaulted while on transit. However, anywhere there is more density requires a more active policing presence. I wouldn’t mind seeing the police ride the buses and trains both in uniform and undercover more often. Like anything, however, this costs money.
We need to move away from the failed Reaganomic theory that low taxes on everyone, especially the already wealthy, will still bring enough money to provide quality public services (and who wouldn’t want to believe in something for nothing). Fortunately or unfortunately, Bush’s colossal policy failures has largely discredited the fundamentals of modern conservative thinking. There is no “something for nothing”. Prosperity did not trickle down, huge deficits have been run up by three conservative Presidents, and economic growth from low taxes on the wealthy did not flood the government coffers to maintain our infrastructure. Why can’t conservatives be honest. They are willing to slash our social and protective services past the bone in order to have government taxation at the derisory levels they feel willing to pay. Of course, they know the wider electorate would never stand for those cuts, so it seems they created this failed economic theory almost out of necessity. Selling the belief that low taxes on the wealthy wouldn’t jeopardize our essential social and protective services because of all this mythical economic growth and corresponding trickle down wealth was they only way they were going to get tax cuts for people who didn’t “need” them.
Quality infrastructure and quality public services cost money and need to be paid for.
As the Governator has found out the hard way, there is only so much of this mythical government “waste” out there. One person’s “waste” is another person’s lifeline and sacred cow.
Just like “The Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska. Everybody wants sacrifices to be made to reduce the budget, ONLY if the cuts DON’T effect them.
Same Story, Different Day (or Location).
Rob Dawg: I can point you to a number of studies, conducted by Allen K. Lynch among others, that show that both population density has very little impact on crime once you control for income and the proximity of a university (students tend to walk around drunk at night, making them good targets for opportunistic criminals).
Of course there’s going to be very little crime in super-low-density exurban settings like the one where you live, regardless of income level or ethnicity, but those represent such a small percentage of US population as to be irrelevant. Just remember that L.A.’s black and Latino gang cultures emerged not out of densely populated slums, but out of bungalow neighborhoods and low-density housing projects. Much of the Fairfax District, by contrast, fairly bursts with people–yet violent crime is virtually nonexistent there.
Jip: Things like the Bridge to Nowhere point to the need for depoliticization of state and federal transportation funding. Granted, technocrats are political actors too, but they can at least try to counter that with methods that have some semblance of scientific rigor.
Then why doesn’t garbage in, garbage out seep into colleges?
I could, of course, give the “Freakonomics” logic behind it.
There’s no argument that finishing community college with an AA is very hard. I needed 2.5 years, and I was going full-time. What happened is the first semester holding pattern. (It also happened at Cal State when I transferred as a junior.) The first-semester students cannot get the classes they want because they are full. They get a late date to enroll for classes. After the first semester, they get an earlier date and have a better chance of finding their desired classes.
On this we cannot agree.
I now present the Freakonomics logic on The California Paradox, specifically on the transformative behavior of two-year schools.
1. Self-selection. Colleges become the first time students become responsible for their own education. Compulsory education is, well, compulsory. Students had to show up and attend classes at the same time, attend classes designed around a board-mandated curriculum, and in most cases the decisions they made were limited to what electives they would choose or appealing to leave one teacher’s class for another’s.
This time, students can choose whether they wish to pursue further studies. Once they do, they can plan their own schedules. There’s a core curriculum of general education classes still required, but more options are given to fulfill those classes.
Since students are not required to attend college, and are expected to plan their educational path, they are more engaged to study.
2. Economic incentives. College is also the first time when money comes into play. Public K-12 education doesn’t involve a cash outlay. Private K-12 education does involve a cash outlay, but with moral hazard. Since the parents are paying for the education and not the kids, the kids take the same detached approach to education as they would in a public school because they aren’t the ones laying out the dough.
College is where students must put their money where their mouths are. This time, they get to see the lunch bill. College is tremendously expensive, and it becomes a pretty expensive day care center if students wish to pursue the “Animal House” track. Considering the price of college, students are more motivated to succeed. The price of an A is the same as an F. Obviously, students shoot for the A.
Community colleges attract more low-income students, and I would argue that because the price of college — even at the in-state rate, where the CCs’ “farebox recovery” would make Santa Clara VTA’s look like the profit margins of a software company — and they place a much greater pressure on themselves to succeed because even the heavily subsidized cost of an education is an enormous burden on them.
3. Feedback mechanisms. Community colleges serve as the bridge between high school and university life. Going to a four-year school directly out of high school can be a very daunting experience, especially when students move far away from home. There’s the isolation of starting a new social life, and the difficulties of taking auditorim-size classes. CCs help ease the transition to college life.
There are fewer auditorium classes, which are typically for introductory courses. Other lower-division classes have class sizes a little larger than high-school classes, typically within the range of 24-36 students.
CCs allow students to maintain friendships pre-adulthood, but you see very little of the cliques that form the social segregation units of high school. CCs also draw a much broader student body. The age ranges and socioeconomic backgrounds are much broader. CCs have a greater proportion of older students, student-parents, students with established careers and students of many different backgrounds. Students generally become more respectful of these differences. Also, CCs create an educational and social environment where it is more beneficial for all to cooperate. As a corollary, the social environment that sustains cliques in high schools becomes a hindrance in a college environment.
We seem to have digressed a bit here…
But continuing in the same vein, I got to be a guest lecturer at San Jose State once. I was amazed at the difference from the brats that used to show up at the sections I TA’ed at UC Santa Barbara. An awful lot of UCSB undergrads are like students at private high schools–maybe they want a good grade, but there’s no spark. The SJS students I met were curious, asked questions, and wanted to learn.
Back on track, a word of caution: don’t assume that transit will magically transform suburbanites into new urbanists! They will happily accept what the benefits of transit to *them*, like boosts to their local economy and improvements to *their* mobility, but will fight density just as hard, because they assume dense TOD’s will bring traffic (and of course, this is true, because not everyone is going to take transit, all the time), and because it will ruin their “quaint small town atmosphere”, which now happens to include a train station or whatever.
This isn’t limited to suburbs, either (looking at *you*, Berkeley).
Communities will happily let society invest billions to bring them transit, and feel no compunction to share the benefits by letting more people live anywhere near the station.
It seems that one of the real reason crime is spreading to the suburbs is… Section 8 vouchers. Incidentally, this Atlantic article actually makes the case for more concentration, since by dispersing poor people, they lose the social connections that they’ve formed in the projects and in the ‘hood, become alienated, and lose control of their kids, who revert to their previous behavior.
I actually dated a girl on Section 8 vouchers back in Boston (yay Dorchester!) Section 8 is an amazing and necessary program, and an example of where the Federal Government can do a lot of good for not a lot of money.
Having said that, if you qualify for a voucher (which involves a long waiting period), you are probably in deep financial shit. But I remember writing a letter to the editor at the LAT (it got published) lambasting the mayor of Lancaster for trying to run Section 8 voucher holders out of town because they forgot to put their dumpster back in the garage. We need to work on integrating city and suburb better, which will really help these kinds of issues. If the mayor of your town is trying his best to put you on the next bus back to South LA, it’s going to be hard to encourage the kind of civic engagement that forms tight-knit communities.
Well, a lot of Section 8 voucher holders shouldn’t be relocating to distant exurbia just because their voucher will get them a big house there and a small apartment in the city. There are few jobs in the Victor Valley, even fewer in Perris, and pretty much none in the Antelope Valley.
Section 8 needs some tweaking to make sure that it doesn’t create the same sort of spatial mismatch that it was created to eliminate.
The Militant laughs (HA!) when transplants who don’t understand this city think they’re suddenly LAologists because they somehow believe they’re infallible.
Look, your generalization of Angelenos is tired and cliched, thus exposing your inherent narrowmindedness. From someone who actually DOES understand this city, and knows more about it than 98% of the people reading this, here is the explanation:
It’s not so much as an “La thing” as it is a GENERATIONAL thing. As someone who’s been in the community trenches for a number of years, the Militant can tell you that the people you’re talking about definitely do exist, but they usually are classified under the following traits:
Race: White
Hair: Grey, White or Blue
Age: Well over 50
Economic Bracket: Upper-Income
Residency Status: Homeowner
Disposition: Cranky
Social Traits: Loves to talk, hates to listen
Nicknames: NIMBY
These old farts are known to take over many community groups such as neighborhood watches, homeowner associations, neighborhood councils, neighborhood improvement groups, local planning and land use committees, etc.
The good news is…they’ll die out eventually. They’re obsessed with a future…that they’ll never live to see. And that’s probably why they’re so bitter and cranky.
Next time you encounter them, tell them that old people need transit too, because you wouldn’t trust someone over 85 behind the wheel…and that you’re concerned with the safety of people at your local farmer’s market.