I have spent much of the last few weeks travelling. For two spells, I have had the joy of helping our children to settle into new lives. In Utrecht, our daughter had already started her job and selected her apartment, and my role was the practical one of moving her stuff from the other side of the country and embellishing it with a few purchases from IKEA. Now, in Los Angeles, my wife and I are helping our son. In his case, his job starts imminently, and together we have had to find an apartment and then assist with the same moving process. Thank goodness for IKEA!
It has been an instructive few days in downtown LA. The office of our son is in an iconic modern building in the heart of the city, and he made the smart move of deciding to live initially without a car and concentrating the apartment search very close to his work. So we booked a hotel less than a mile away, half way between downtown and a gentrifying district called Koreatown, with the intention of viewing several places on foot.
My mental model for Koreatown was Flushing, a bustling Asian district near us in Queens with bursts with chaotic energy twenty-four hours per day. As soon as we started walking on Sunday morning, that illusion required rapid adjustment. There was the office, towering ten blocks to the east, and I assumed there was Koreatown, a few taller buildings ten blocks or so to the west. But where was the bustle? Even when we made it to Koreatown, the streets were wide and most buildings low-rise, and there were few people, except those passing by in the cars and parking in the many lots for shops. True, Sunday morning is hardly the busiest time of the week even in New York. But this was not Flushing. This was Anytown, USA.
Then we spent two days getting to know a whole series of micro districts, all within three subway stops or fifteen minutes on the bus from each other, all walkable, though maybe not comfortably in the midday heat. We had an immediate need to understand these micro districts as potential places for our son to live. We had to use all our senses and to look out for important clues.
Perhaps the most useful clue of all has been the density of Starbucks locations. Near our hotel there are no Starbucks at all. In Downtown itself there are many Starbucks, but the density tails off very quickly after a few blocks in any direction. One way to define the gentrified part of Koreatown is to map out where there are Starbucks and where there are no Starbucks. By this definition, Koreatown has clear boundaries; Western avenue to the west, Vermont to the east, a block north of Wilshire to the North and eighth avenue to the south.
Within the Starbucksified area, people walk with confidence rather than loiter. Other retail establishments are branded, have attractive shopfronts, but also security. There is garbage on the street, and also a few tents where homeless people sleep, but the prevalence of both is lower. The clearest sign of gentrification (apart from Starbucks) are the number of blocks that have been converted into apartments by developers and are advertising for new tenants.
Once you leave this area, the signs for tenants are still there but are haphazard and hand-written. Apart from a few fortresses of fast food chains, the retail establishments are bodegas, or thrift shops, pawn shops, or simply boarded up. Many cars are very old and look like they have been parked in the same spot for a long time. The clearest sign of a lank of gentrification (apart from the absence of Starbucks) is that everywhere seems to close at 8.30pm, even the liquor stores, bodegas and food outlets. This is not an area to be outside alone after dark.
Then there is downtown itself, a place of extraordinary contradictions. There are many high-rise office buildings a few high-end malls and some swanky restaurants. The corporate community is well served, but it is also noticeable that these establishments all employ security and do not open late. The developers have been even more active here than in Koreatown, perhaps taking advantage of some zoning changes or simply of depressed prices during the worst of the pandemic.
But there is little feel of destination or community. The grid of wide streets works against pedestrians, and for some reason the sidewalks are populated by hundreds of apparently dead e-scooters, giving the impression that a bomb has gone off and everybody has scarpered. There are also blocks surprisingly near the heart of the city with vacant lots and offering cheap parking. The rents for lots here must be miniscule compared with Manhattan.
I can’t imagine that the corporates and the high-end developers will allow the place to remain so marginally safe for very long. But how did they allow it to go so far downhill in the first place? The impression is that the corporate citizens all arrive by car and depart by the same means, using the local facilities during the day but anxious to escape within their automotive fortresses after their working days have finished. Hopefully an influx of young professionals into the newly renovated apartments will change that dynamic.
I cannot help but compare the centre of LA with the centre of Utrecht. There are clues in Utrecht too. In the less affluent areas, most retail establishments are unbranded, many offering cheap fast food, and the supermarkets are smaller and sell necessities rather than luxuries. But everywhere stays open until midnight, the streets are well-lit, and it feels safe to walk everywhere. The dividing lines seem to be more a result of careful urban planning than of wealth attracting wealth and poverty attracting neglect. I am sure that once we rent a car, we will find gated enclaves within LA of unimaginable opulence. Utrecht’s opulence is unstated and humdrum. But Utrecht’s poorer areas still have some civic pride, and the denser ones might even attract Starbucks.
We will fulfil our mission, guided by the abundant clues and thankful that our son has a budget that allows him to cluster with the up-and-coming rather than the down-and-out. There will be many advantages for him in LA, and, thanks to Uber, he might be able to enjoy them without needing to buy a car.
But there is something sad about this city, and for me it does not reflect well on its residents, its politicians, or its nation. Our hotel has a few European tourists in it. What will they say about America when they go home, after having worked out the need to retreat to their room after 8.30pm (and hopefully having not learned that the hard way)? Even the LAPD seem to have given up on this district, resorting to helicopters for any patrolling that we have seen.
Searching for root causes, an important culprit is the car. The centre of Utrecht was built before cars existed. New York has such constrained land that the car has not been allowed to dominate. But in LA the needs of the car determine the city. It has sprawled and sprawled, and hence segregated and segregated. Because of cars and roads, nowhere has the human density to build a true community (like Flushing). And the car has enabled most residents to become blind to the misery around them. They can simply drive around the worst districts, or in the worst case drive through them with the car doors securely locked. As a concept for a city, I can imagine little worse.
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