One day, bitches: the future of the Los Angeles Metro

-- Ned Raggett (ne...), June 15th, 2005.

Vik, you're also saying some incredibly offensive things about certain groups of Angeleno's. The comments border on hate speech as far as I'm concerned.

Also, the Bounty has survived far worse than Eva Longoria (and has more famous semi-regulars).

I'm more interested in hearing your (hopefully a bit elaborated) opinion on why there is no Metro, what lack-of-development led to it being this way. It's easy to claim offense, but why don't you add to the discussion and set it right then? I have civic proide but it's not that I have an excess of personal pride in that I won't be corrected - CORRECT ME CHOW! SET ME STR8 (good luck w/ that)

http://www.visitwesthollywood.com/whpress/images/map.gif

The black line is The City of West Hollywood. The classic definition of the Fairfax district is not within the city boundary at all. Also, Fairfax continues for many miles south going through many different neighborhoods.

It seems like you're reading the most hysterical accounts of why people vote for what and taking it at face value, or you're making sweeping generalizations based on hackneyed assumptions about a person would or wouldn't want something in their neighborhood. Even if it is a NIMBY attitude, I find it difficult to blame a person for being self-centered at a highly local level (and I don't even necessarily believe that is what's going on regarding potential Metro extensions).

I think it's fine to discuss this and I'm really happy you brought it up, but I also think that you're jumping to extreme conclusions (perhaps in jest?).

The funny thing is that nobody really talks about the eastside. Fairfax may not be the westside but you definitely don't live in East LA. It's like everybody wants to define themselves into a no-mans land. Or I guess it's just the natural instinct to assume that your neighborhood is the center of town.

Doesn't NY have a similar thing with uptown and downtown where those terms are all relative to where you live?

"totally" meaning if you cross the street you're in one of two other neighborhoods?

Kyle, tell us about your Memorial Day weekend in LA!

oh, also, the knitting factory soundguy was an ass who made all the kids who got onstage to dance get off, and cut the band off, and cussed at everyone.

Are you quoting Picard?

Kyle, I think this actually has something to do with the physical layout of the Hollywood Knitting Factory. Seriously.

"totally" meaning if you cross the street you're in one of two other neighborhoods?
-- gygax! (gygax0...), June 15th, 2005 3:43 PM.

If you cross the street, you're in Beverly Hills.

Walter: when did I say that ALL - ALL the city's transportation problems are the fault of the westside's racist white yuppies? I'm blaming them for repeatedly voting against the line travelling through their communities, but what else? Thanks for distorting everything I said on this thread.

Spencer: yesterday you were trying to argue that Fairfax is not in West Hollywood, and I proved that it was w/ that map. And now you're saying that I said that _all_ of Fairfax Avenue is in Weho, but I didn't...I was just saying refuting you when you said upthread that "Fairfax is Hollywood," - and the we figured out you were talking abt the Fairfax DISTRICT - and that was the misunderstanding there. I thought it was all settled and cleared, and I even apologized abt this yesterday, so why bring it up again today? To add to your list there to show how I'm wrong/inaccurate abt so much re: LA?

It seems like you're reading the most hysterical accounts of why people vote for what and taking it at face value, or you're making sweeping generalizations based on hackneyed assumptions about a person would or wouldn't want something in their neighborhood.

And it seems like you're trying to deny what's a very simple, clear and well-documented fact. Yes wikipedia can often be wrong, but Spencer, this is not a "hysterical account" or a "hackneyed assumption," -> people in the gated communities in West Los Angeles have continuously voted against a Metro line in their area since they'd prefer to keep people from other neighborhoods from commuting to and from near their residences and businesses. Why? Because they think this'll keep down the drugs and gangs/ crime (ironic w/ all the drug use in, say, those "gatherings" in Bel-Air). Because they think this'll keep their property values down (ironic w/ all property vales skyrocketing right now everywhere). Oftentimes, the voting fell down along racial and socio-economic lines. This is all quite well-known, and falls easily within Los Angeles' historic pattern of racial geographic marginalization (with just a few precedents being the construction of the 110 freeway to keep the African American community on one side, and the "white flight" of the 50s and 60s to the Valley, from southern and central Los Angeles).

Even if it is a NIMBY attitude, I find it difficult to blame a person for being self-centered at a highly local level (and I don't even necessarily believe that is what's going on regarding potential Metro extensions).

Then what is going on? If my conclusions are "extreme conclusions," what are your conclusions? And it really sounds like you're trying to either be an apologist for NIMBYism there - I DON'T find it difficult to blame anyone for being so self-centered that they'd vote against public transportation for any reason with the staggeringly high cost it exacts upon our city's environment and public health. The racial issue is almost a moot point here, but it only makes it embarrassingly worse.

I think you're unforunately taking offense to some of the things I may say abt the westside, and you're letting that color your responses to my thoughts on this thread.

I think it's fine to discuss this and I'm really happy you brought it up, but I also think that you're jumping to extreme conclusions (perhaps in jest?).

I'm entirely and thoroughly surprised that you're trying to make it sound like I'm taking any sort of "extreme" position here, when I'm pretty much spouting what I'd assumed is general knowledge. I'd like to be proven wrong, if you can show me anything that amounts to hard evidence as to why certain groups voted which way.

Also, I've said this before, but I still don't get the KF hate. It just seems like any old concert place to me.

Frederique Krupa
Spring 1993

Los Angeles: Buying the Concept of Security


Los Angeles's walled communities provide professionals from the real estate, entertainment and technology industries with an escape from the problems of the disenfranchised that lie beyond their well protected enclaves -- with tall gates, private security forces and 24-hour a day electronic surveillance. Los Angeles's form originated around the idealized concept of the detached single family home, made possible by the automobile. LA has become America's archetypal decentralized metropolis. Now the second largest city in the United States, LA's 3.4 million people sprawl evenly over 70 square miles, an area roughly a quarter larger than New York City with half New York City's population. Eighty two different language groups make LA in certain respects an even more cosmopolitan gateway city than New York City, which only has 55 language groups.1

In the 1980s, LA replaced New York City as the most popular point of entry for immigrants, shifting the demographics from a predominantly Anglo-Saxon population to one that is 40 percent Hispanic, 37 percent Caucasian, 13 percent African-American and 10 percent Asian and other races.2 The social polarization also shifted in the Reagan Era with affluent households (making over $50,000) nearly tripling from 9 percent to 26 percent, while the poor population (making under $15,000) increased from 30 percent to 40 percent. Correspondingly, the middle class was reduced by nearly half, from 61 percent to 32 percent.3 Protecting the lifestyles and property values of the upper and middle classes by keeping out undesirables has lead to increasing privatization -- and militarization -- of entire neighborhoods, while increasingly repressive actions by the infamous Los Angeles Police Department4 serve to keep the poor in their place.

...

Los Angeles's most dramatic growth occurred only in the last seventy years, developing with the automobile culture and the growth of the national highway system. LA resulted with today's familiar low-density amorphous developments of single family homes. But until the 1920s, LA had developed in much the same way as other cities, growing up around Henry Huntington's "Pacific Electric" mass transit system that first opened in 1901. The mass transit system, once the largest in the world, operated over 1,114 miles of tracks and carried an average of a quarter-million passengers a day.5 Though the city was decentralized from the start, downtown Los Angeles prospered enormously as a transit hub, creating a traditionally dominant urban center. Henry Huntington wisely purchased large areas of land around his tracks and prospered enormously from the suburban housing developments that he built around the lines. Other developers had to pay him subsidies to get crucial rail links that would guarantee successful developments.6

By the 1920s, the automobiles began crowding out the streetcars downtown. Commutes became unbearably long and the cost of home ownership around the streetcar lines became prohibitively expensive. Automobiles and additional street infrastructure were seen as a means of curtailing limits to the expansion of the suburbia. The paradigm of the single family house was upheld by would-be homeowners and the civic elite whose enormous wealth was largely derived from real estate speculation -- from selling each homeowner a plot of land, a house and a mortgage. The oil industry and corporations such as Firestone Rubber had strong interest in the dominance of the automobile over mass transit. With no resistance from civic leaders, a bond act was overwhelmingly approved in 1926 to build an extensive street and freeway infrastructure, and a mass transit rehabilitation proposal was easily defeated.7 By allowing the mass transit system to slowly decay, Los Angeles essentially sacrificed its downtown.

In response to the Depression in the 1930s, homeowners threatened with foreclosures on their high-interest, short-term mortgages were assisted by Roosevelt's 1933 Home Owners' Loan Corporation (HOLC). The HOLC refinanced over a million mortgages into what has become the industry standard: the self-amortizing (paying off both the interest and the principal) thirty-year mortgage. The rationalization of mortgages was at the center of the National Housing Act of 1934, which created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA). FHA mortgages financed and insured up to 90 percent of a home's value, suddenly making homeownership accessible to over 50 percent of the population. More importantly, developers could borrow FHA funds, as well as funds from the burgeoning savings and loans, to comfortably complete entire projects, including street construction. This master-community-builder approach was a major factor of Los Angeles's enormous development after the Second World War.8 As Robert Fishman put it, "The growth of Los Angeles was not only explosively rapid; it was also virtually unhampered by previous traditions and settlements. The city was surrounded by seemingly unlimited land, supported by a massive influx of people and capital, and led by an elite wholly committed to suburban expansion."9

Unlike traditional cities, class division in Los Angeles has never depended on proximity to its urban center as much as in other cities. Instead, class divisions are based on altitude. The less fortunate live in the flatland, named the Plains of Id by Reyner Banham,10 while those more fortunate locate themselves in the hills for purer air and better vantage points. Development in the foothills west of the meandering Los Angeles River (converted to a concrete-lined storm sewer by the Army Corps of Engineers in the 1940s) began in the 1920s as affluent, planned communities. If a cliched aspect of LA's good life exists -- conjured up in the movies that originated there -- it is based on the image of these well publicized communities: Beverly Hills, Westwood, Brentwood, Bel Air, Santa Monica, Hollywood and Silver Lake. Developed by Alphonso Bell in the 1910s, Bel Air, one of the original gated communities, was so exclusive that Bell refused to sell homes to "movie people", (i.e. Jews).11 Built on the 3,300-acre Hamel and Denkel Ranch after a failed oil-finding mission, the 1913 master planned community of Beverly Hills, designed by New York architect Wilbur Cook, was incorporated as a separate city by the Rodeo Land and Water Company before any construction even took place.12 Beverly Hills became the preferred residence for those in the entertainment industry because of its proximity to the studios in seedier Hollywood.

...
When explosive growth of the decentralized metropolis threatened the very qualities that were being sold as the rights of homeownership -- secure property values and low-density unspoiled open space -- voluntary homeowners associations and later, the homeowner-led slow-growth movements coalesced. Los Angeles's homeowners associations (HAs) began in 1916 with the Los Felix Improvement Association which created the concept of deed restrictions for new planned communities. Los Angeles pioneered deed restrictions and zoning for expensive single-family homes, with racial and social exclusion clauses and minimum costs and sizes for construction of new homes.13 The creation of HAs, which Mike Davis refers to as the White Wall, put 95 percent of the available housing out of the reach of Asian and African-Americans in the 1920s.14 Although the United States Supreme Court finally ruled against racist deed restrictions in 1948, the Gary case of 1919, established by the California Supreme Court, allowed the HAs to file suits against non-white homeowners, including film stars like Hattie MacDaniel. Should "trespassing" minority homeowners attempt to defend their homes, Ku Klux Klan-type vigilantism prevailed.15

Because incorporating a small group of people as a separate city for the benefits of highly restrictive zoning was an undertaking only the most wealthy could afford, most middle class communities located themselves in county areas that were undertaxed and unincorporated. The Lakewood planned community, modeled after Levittown but twice the size, was threatened by annexation to Long Beach in the 1950s. The developers, Weingart, Boyar and Taper, devised the "Lakewood Plan" to incorporate it without the traditional vital-service costs of creating a separate city. Los Angeles County allowed Lakewood to lease its fire, police, sanitation, library and maintenance services at cut-rate prices, subsidized by the county's funds for the services. The communities retained their zoning privileges, while their services were subsidized by county taxpayers. To offset the loss of real estate taxes, the county gets money for existing infrastructure and for services that would normally have to be provided.

The 1956 Bradley-Burns Act allowed local governments to collect a one percent sales tax for their own use, so the new minimal cities with their new decentralized shopping malls were able to finance their city government without increasing property taxes. The 26 county-subsidized minimal cities that appeared between 1954 and 1960 also encouraged suburban separatism and local control - by zoning out service-intensive low-income renting populations. The resulting suburban exodus left the older parts of the city with little tax base for the predominantly poor population. The 1980 Census showed that while the county was 13 percent African-American, 53 of its 82 cities, 30 of which were Lakewood Plan incorporators, had African-American populations of one percent or less.16

If the first forty years of Los Angeles's history focused on the creation of "Bourgeois Utopias," as Robert Fishman calls racially and economically segregated suburban communities, the last thirty years have revolved around their defense. When the foothill's drawing points threatened them with overdevelopment, homeowner-led slow-growth movements entered the political arena. Unlike its counterpart in Northern California, the slow-growth movement was not rooted in environmentalism but rather the protection of property values and land-use control. If environmental concerns came into discussion at all, it was because the residents regarded the open space of their sprawling subdivision as important as Yosemite Park. Drastic real estate inflation made buying a house in the foothills just about impossible for anyone but the most well-to-do. The Federation of Hillside and Canyon Homeowners, founded in the gated colony of Bel Air in the 1950s, affiliated a dozen other communities to make sure that NIMBY development went elsewhere. When the gated community of Hidden Hills -- whose residents include Frankie Avalon, Bob Eubanks and Neil Diamond -- was threatened with a Superior Court Order to provide 48 units of senior citizen housing outside the gates, they complained that the old people would attract drugs and crime.17 The Federation has since grown to over 50 affiliations and, with its massive financial and legal powers, took on an even broader role than HAs ever could.18

In West LA, gates are erected around established neighborhoods of single-family bungalows. Depending on the HA's social class, the neighborhood fortification can vary from chain link fences and automatic gates -- prone to frequent malfunction -- for the middle class, to iron gates, masonry walls and full-time security guards for more prosperous communities. Each individual home often has a fence demarcating its property, so if an HA has a tight budget, gates can be erected between different enclosed properties to cut off the street to pedestrians and vehicles. Older gated communities have the aesthetic advantage of having developed gradually. While certain neighborhoods contain modest looking homes, many have been substantially altered and expanded, adding variety to the "public" street. The inflated land values for minuscule homes on small lots have also created more streetscape diversity by encouraging the construction of large new postmodern homes. Styles range from Santa Fe to Deconstruction. Color schemes for the older homes are more varied than the monotonous new gated communities being built by developers in the San Fernando Valley. It might even appear that style in LA is reserved for westsiders. Generally, only truly privileged members of society can afford to move into homes on the westside, much less tear one down and rebuild a new one, so the rest are forced to move farther and farther inland.

Aside from the riots of 1943, 1965 and 1992, few Westsiders really noticed the flourishing minority communities, as the pleasantly insulated affluent communities and autotopic lifestyles made entire sections of Los Angeles easily invisible. The slow, orange Regional Transit Department (RTD) buses, serving only those too old or too poor to drive, provide transportation for the immigrant workers that tend the households of the Foothills residents and serve as a reminder that the city really runs on cheap immigrant labor. The large, empty, unshaded sidewalks and precariously timed traffic signals lead David Rieff to comment, "The impression is inescapable that the advertisements you see on benches all over the Westside for Jewish funeral chapels are really a message aimed at anyone foolish enough to expect to survive as a walker in Los Angeles."19

======

In post-liberal Los Angeles, awareness of this desperate situation is such that the defense of the privileged and middle class neighborhoods has taken on a sudden urgency. The desire of the ordinary middle class to live in socially insulated communities has created a frenzy for security fencing around entire neighborhoods, emulating the luxury, fortressed "minimal" cities that developed in the 1950s and 1960s, like Hidden Hills, Bradbury, Palos Verdes Estates, Hidden Hills and Rancho Mirage. Older communities like Bradbury, with 900 residents and ten miles of private streets, are fully enclosed with guarded entry points and served by public and private security services and are impossible to enter without an invitation from a resident. The San Fernando Valley, completely open ten years ago, now has over one hundred newly gated communities. The demand for more security is nearly insatiable. Valley contractor Brian Weinstock remarked, "The demand is there on a three-to-one basis for a gated community than not living in a gated community."36 Forest City Enterprises, owners of the 1940s Park La Brea, have cut off pedestrian access and surrounded the 176-acre gentrifying development on Wilshire's Miracle Mile with security fencing.

Gated developments in the San Fernando Valley lack any of the architectural charm that the West Side has built up over time. The stringency of new HA design codes seems to discourage expansion or modification of the homes and fosters bland subdivisions such as can be found on the outskirts of any major town. Housing designs are often modern-colonial hybrids and available in the several shades of grey or beige. Anything that might deviate from the norm is considered a reselling hindrance, so everything is carefully maintained in a perpetual banality. Neighborhoods are composed of a few housing types, sometimes available in reverse plan to hopefully make homes appear more interesting. Since the San Fernando Valley is expanding farther and farther into the desert, serious environmental problems such as water shortages and smog are threatening these developments. But nothing it seems can stop the idealization of the single family home, and no price is too great, not even two-hour commutes, for peace of mind.

Needless to say, the homes of the rich are even more security centered, borrowing design ideas from foreign embassies for terrorist-proof security rooms accessed through secret doors. The concept of total residential security would not be complete without private security companies such as Westec or Bel-Air Patrol. "Armed response" signs dot the lawns of virtually all affluent subdivisions. HAs lease complete security packages, including hardware, monitoring, patrols, personal escorts and armed responses. Demand for security against the perceived threat of minority gangs has ironically provided minority males with one of the few job opportunities left to them, besides becoming prison guards. One of the fastest growing industries of the 1980s, private security guards comprised in 1990 twice the national labor average of 1970.37 In Los Angeles alone, the security workforce has tripled in the last ten years, from 24,000 to 75,000. While working for multinational conglomerates, security guards, often minority males, are paid minimal wages depending on literacy, and applicants with prison records are not automatically turned away under California's lax licensing practice. Michael Kaye, president of Westec, a subsidiary of Japan's Secom Ltd and the leading Westside security firm, revealed, "We're not a security guard company. We sell a concept of security."38

...

Whether these security measures fend off professional burglars is highly debatable, but they do work remarkably well at alienating innocent passers-by, confronting them with signs posting death threats. By establishing a siege mentality amongst middle and upper classes, the real problems are essentially ignored. The 1992 riot was triggered by the Rodney King verdict, but the pillaging carried out by the poor was really a response to desperate economic situations. The sight of people running down the street with boxes of diapers and foam mattresses illuminated the ironies of the situation. Unfortunately, the ensuing rush to buy firearms showed nothing had really been learned.39 The trend to privatize neighborhoods is not singular to Los Angeles, nor is its racial and economic polarization. Los Angeles illustrates these principles perhaps on a greater scale than cities such as Houston or Dallas, but unless these issues are confronted in a realistic manner, periodic riots, repressive police actions, increasing gang violence and environmental degradation promise to reduce the quality of life for all citizens.

Vik, why don't you show me where the proposed metro lines cross through these "gated communities" that you make sound like everyone west of La Brea lives in.

Your Larry David moments (Warning! Blandness!)