An LA Minute

Very initial impressions of LA and thoughts on desirability and quality of life

So I guess I kind of get it:

I was in the Venice neighborhood of Los Angeles this weekend for a small colloquium on urbanism and in particular the question of new cities and greenfield development. This location didn’t have too much to do with the topic, except in the sense that the topic exists in part because of places like this location.

I love this bit from the Wikipedia entry on Venice:

All the caveats: I only spent a weekend here, I was in a fine hotel, and apparently some homeless encampments on the beach have been taken down—one of the other attendees who knew the city better was even surprised. There were a lot more homeless people here six months ago, he said. I’ve heard people say you can’t even walk on the beach anymore because of the homeless. That doesn’t appear to be true, though perhaps at some times and places it has been to some extent.

At first I thought I might be writing something like my Seattle impressions here. Seattle had mass homelessness and open drug use like I’ve never seen anywhere, and I found it shocking, especially as an East Coaster. I found the juxtaposition of the bougie, gimmicky businesses with the emptied-out downtown and desperation on the street to be not just hypocritical but unnerving. I thought about whether a normal family with a young kid would be quite eager to go eat at a breakfast joint called Biscuit Bitch.

So when I saw Mao’s Kitchen (“This casual Chinese eatery serves up country-style dishes with a side of Mao-themed humor.” Hmm…“Over 60 million served—we’re making up for it!” How about Pol Pot’s Culinary Fields? Fidel Castro’s Bay of Roast Pigs?) and a breakfast sandwich shop called Eggslut (free-range eggs, of course, though maybe even those are known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects), I set my expectations rather on the low end.

All the caveats, again. But I was wrong.

The thing about Seattle is that it wasn’t just host to a chaotic street scene. It felt weirdly small for all the cultural weight it seems to have. Like a big small town. Don’t get me wrong, I’m the small town guy, but I just found myself wondering, why the heck exactly does everyone talk about Seattle? (Other than Amazon, but maybe that’s the point.) The good answer is the outdoor recreational opportunities. And maybe some people pay money to see a volcano out of their office window.

What was different driving through LA from the airport to the beach was that I got it. I get why people like it here. The people really are fit and beautiful. The restaurants are good. The weather is great. The ocean sits between the mountains and the palm trees. The city is famously spread out and traffic-choked, but it has the same kind of distributed, unselfconscious diversity as the older D.C.-area suburbs that I always write love letters to.

There’s something about the messiness and rough edges that make cities like this and the older, denser suburbs feel alive. And also like you’ve discovered something. There’s a dreariness, but also a delight, in finding an amazing restaurant that’s helping an immigrant family start climbing the ladder, just sitting there in a crummy old strip mall. And there’s an opportunity for a kind of commerce there that is lacking in many, many places.

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I didn’t see anywhere near enough to write my LA impressions, but I can definitely understand a little better why people “put up” with all the problems in this state. I’ve heard the question of why do people tolerate it? The antisocial behavior on transit, the mass homelessness, the taxes and the overregulation and the insane home prices? The plastic straw bans and the performative school renamings and…this:

Warning! Food is served at this restaurant!

Now, plenty of people don’t put up with it—lots of them are now Texans, Nevadans, and Idahoans—but it’s a lot easier to tolerate all that stuff when everything is drawing you to stay. If there’s some kind of “desirability number,” and weather and food and commutes and crime and housing costs and everything goes into it—well, I’d certainly take my mass homelessness and traffic jams and unaffordable housing with palm trees instead of rain half the year.

In other words, “progressives like disorder” or whatever sorts of things you hear alleged are missing an appreciation of what people really like about California.

There’s an interesting deeper question there, actually: when a place is really desirable, does that make it more difficult to deal with problems? Is California at some psychological disadvantage in fixing these things because the place is just so damn nice? In other words, getting the quality-of-life stuff right and even things as fundamental as housing might just matter more where places need those things to be competitive in desirability.

It makes me think of the old Avis car rental ad: We try harder. That was a brilliant bit of ad writing, but it also captures a real truth about human nature. I remember thinking about this when I was in Cincinnati. It’s obviously a city which hit hard times and is still climbing out of a slump. But I picked up a sense of energy, ambition, hunger. A greater tolerance for risk and a greater appetite for doing things. We try harder.

This is another one of those areas where I think about our human tendencies and how cities replicate them. How can great cities summon that same sense of energy when they no longer quite need to? Because you can always fall to number 2 again.

But maybe, here, that wouldn’t be so bad.

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Related Reading:

That Damned Elusive Parking Spot

What A Strip Mall Can Be

Urbanism Without Cities

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