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Seeking opinions from long time Los Angeles area resident on major changes in the area over last 20-30 years pros and cons, what changes will occur in next 20-30 years
LA will become an official suburb of .............. Mexico City!
Quote:
sub⋅urb
/ˈsʌbɜrb/ Show Spelled Pronunciation [suhb-urb] Show IPA Pronunciation –noun 1.a district lying immediately outside a city or town, esp. a smaller residential community.2.the suburbs, the area composed of such districts.3.an outlying part. Origin:
1350–1400; ME < L suburbium, equiv. to sub-sub- + urb(s) city + -ium-ium
LA's decentralized model of urban growth, where an alleged central "Downtown" is fairly irrelevant to region's economy and daily life of most residents, is arguably the most efficient urban growth model in any dynamic capitalist economy like that of US, where overall COL is much lower and daily QOL much higher than comparable EU/Asian cities....new houses, cars and fuel are much cheaper in US than anywhere else in world....and risk of criminal street violence of US' cities and poorer, older suburbs (which periodically spikes when economy is in deep recession) makes LA's car-based culture the safest, most civilized culture vs the mass transit culture of lesser, more primitive regions, like NYC or ex-US urban regions....
Decentralized growth model is also seen in comparable powerful economies like SiliconValley (where City of SF is merely an upscale residential suburb for young SiliconValley workers w/o kids)....or NYC region, where prob 30-40% of the region's billionaires live and work in suburban Greenwich and rarely visit Manhattan, except for occasional business dinners
Most cos. prefer to be located in lower-tax, lower-cost areas of an urban region, close to the safer, more spacious suburbs (w/often newer houses and closer to decent private schools) where most executives w/families prefer to live....ironically, most affluent in regions like LA often have <20min drives to their office...and many middle-income people live and work in Irvine area...or live and work in 1000 Oaks area, etc...and enjoy similarly effortless daily commutes
Well-run cos. will continue to move low-skill jobs to lower-tax, lower-cost regions like suburban Dallas/Houston....it makes little sense to have many low-wage workers in high-cost regions like LA or SiliconValley
Not sure regions like LA or NYC will expand much more than their current some 18MM populations (of each region)....taxes, costs, hassles will likely keep population stagnant or declining, as cos. and jobs are moved to lower-cost regions....many underestimate how efficient cos. need to be, esp in a more difficult, more globalized, more virtual economy, when profit margins come under pressure and more work is easily done from cheaper locales around US and RoW
Anecdotally, find that vs early '90s, LA traffic flows notably quicker on the major freeways; air is notably cleaner....and just like early '90s, house prices are in free-fall, making LA more affordable....but suspect taxes will increase until affluent taxpayers and business owners begin to threaten to relocate out of CA...
This is still the best analysis of the ever-changing LA in this thread. Great job!
LA's decentralized model of urban growth, where an alleged central "Downtown" is fairly irrelevant to region's economy and daily life of most residents, is arguably the most efficient urban growth model in any dynamic capitalist economy like that of US, where overall COL is much lower and daily QOL much higher than comparable EU/Asian cities....new houses, cars and fuel are much cheaper in US than anywhere else in world....and risk of criminal street violence of US' cities and poorer, older suburbs (which periodically spikes when economy is in deep recession) makes LA's car-based culture the safest, most civilized culture vs the mass transit culture of lesser, more primitive regions, like NYC or ex-US urban regions....
Decentralized growth model is also seen in comparable powerful economies like SiliconValley (where City of SF is merely an upscale residential suburb for young SiliconValley workers w/o kids)....or NYC region, where prob 30-40% of the region's billionaires live and work in suburban Greenwich and rarely visit Manhattan, except for occasional business dinners
Most cos. prefer to be located in lower-tax, lower-cost areas of an urban region, close to the safer, more spacious suburbs (w/often newer houses and closer to decent private schools) where most executives w/families prefer to live....ironically, most affluent in regions like LA often have <20min drives to their office...and many middle-income people live and work in Irvine area...or live and work in 1000 Oaks area, etc...and enjoy similarly effortless daily commutes
Well-run cos. will continue to move low-skill jobs to lower-tax, lower-cost regions like suburban Dallas/Houston....it makes little sense to have many low-wage workers in high-cost regions like LA or SiliconValley
Not sure regions like LA or NYC will expand much more than their current some 18MM populations (of each region)....taxes, costs, hassles will likely keep population stagnant or declining, as cos. and jobs are moved to lower-cost regions....many underestimate how efficient cos. need to be, esp in a more difficult, more globalized, more virtual economy, when profit margins come under pressure and more work is easily done from cheaper locales around US and RoW
Anecdotally, find that vs early '90s, LA traffic flows notably quicker on the major freeways; air is notably cleaner....and just like early '90s, house prices are in free-fall, making LA more affordable....but suspect taxes will increase until affluent taxpayers and business owners begin to threaten to relocate out of CA...
Blithering, babbling, boring and not an answer to the question. You must write textbooks.
Over the past 30 years Los Angeles has turned from a beautiful city into a concrete jungle. People here used to be warm and friendly. Now the transplants who think they are "all that" give LA a reputation for having rude and nasty people. My grandmother could stand on her porch and name every family who lived in every house. Today, you could live next door to someone for years and not be able to twll them from Adam. One could drive from the City to the Valley and it felt like a road trip. There were fields as far as the eye could see. Now the heat is the only way to tell when you've left the City and entered the Valley.
From someone who grew up here, LA has changed for the worst and will contiue to get worse as it becomes a victim of capitalism and progress. I can't wait to leave.
Blithering, babbling, boring and not an answer to the question. You must write textbooks.
Over the past 30 years Los Angeles has turned from a beautiful city into a concrete jungle. People here used to be warm and friendly. Now the transplants who think they are "all that" give LA a reputation for having rude and nasty people. My grandmother could stand on her porch and name every family who lived in every house. Today, you could live next door to someone for years and not be able to twll them from Adam. One could drive from the City to the Valley and it felt like a road trip. There were fields as far as the eye could see. Now the heat is the only way to tell when you've left the City and entered the Valley.
From someone who grew up here, LA has changed for the worst and will contiue to get worse as it becomes a victim of capitalism and progress. I can't wait to leave.
Having just repped CESpeed for truth-telling, I would retiterate the divide between longtime L.A. dwellers and newcomers. The latter came here for something specific, which they do find: warm weather, job relocation, entertainment biz opportunities, etc., and therefore perfunctorily tend to dispute the observations of us denizens of L.A. over the decades, like myself. But I'll be referential to L.A. since the mid-1980's, not the 50's of my youth, since the 80's appear to be the tipping point. L.A. was do-able, driveable, affordable and fun then for a far larger swath of people, not just the cocooned rich as with today.
Yes, it's population overload for the infrastructure, made worse by bad traffic-planning, its saturation point having been reached in the 1980's according to officials. It's the so-called sanctuary city laws rendering ever increasing populace of illegals invulnerable, changing the tax-base of the entire metropolis into paying for services for them instead of paying for needed infrastructure, education and welfare of tax-paying citizens. It's our provincially weirdly, unfriendly business laws, battering small operations into failure.
It's a new generation taking incredibly bad urban conditions for granted, thinking their norm is universal. But it's not. Even struggling middle classes in other cities aren't living side by side with slum conditions as we do, with gangs, debris and no comprehension of nor signage in English. Other mega-cities can juggle economic crises, growth issues, diversity and similar issues and still come up with a place of which their residents are proud to be part. Los Angeles, I'm afraid, will just continue on as the battleground it is now, in varying increments of deterioration over the years but no better in genuine quality of life issues for the majority. How rich or oblivious one is will determine how content.
There are still plenty of areas in Los Angeles that are like what you have described as far as the friendly neighborhoods. I just moved into a neighborhood in the San Fernando valley and know at least my immediate neighbors. It seems that the problem that a lot of people have in these forums is that the original areas known as Los Angeles (central and south L.A., Westlake Village, Echo Park, Hollywood, etc) no longer have too many (if any at all) white people in them.
It's not a minority's fault that white people move out as soon as they see people with brown skin move in. And for those of us who are immigrants; it is not our fault that we have to live in neighborhoods that are modern ghettoes when we first come to this great country. There are those immigrants who settle in dirty, poor areas and don't bother to clean it up because even the worst of neighborhoods is an improvement from living in a mud hut. But there are also those of us who educate ourselves and manage to make it out of those neighborhoods. We go to school to learn the language as soon as we find a place to live and a job. Once we learn the language, we continue to go to school to better ourselves and we teach our children to do well in THEIR schooling instead of allowing them to fall into the traps of drugs and gangs.
How have I seen L.A. change in the past 20-30 years? I've seen the same situations moved from one area of the county to another through gentrification. It would be wonderful to see a system where the good people who are forced to live with riff raff are allowed to stay in a neighborhood that is being "reclaimed" but they get pushed out just as quickly when those neighborhoods become too expensive. It seems that the only true crime in this country is being poor.
And for everyone who is constantly complaining about the traffic in certain areas of this county, keep in mind that the reason why the subways haven't been built there is because the people who have lived there for ever didn't want "those (which to me is 'us') people" coming into their neighborhoods even though it's "those people" who work for them.
The numbers I've seen show that about 1/3 of adults in L.A. County never completed high school. There's only one major metro area in the country with a larger percentage of high-school dropouts: Miami.
I wish I had hope for the future, but I can easily picture the percentage of high-school graduates in L.A. County drop down to 50% within the next 20 years.
Yes, it's population overload for the infrastructure, made worse by bad traffic-planning, its saturation point having been reached in the 1980's according to officials.
That sounds interesting, fastfilm. If you have any links to that information, I hope you'll post them here.
Where have many of of the middle class white families from the 80's-present moved to??? I know you can't judge anything by what you see on TV, but the LA portrayed in films of the 1980's looks alot more middle class. Today seems like everywhere you go in LA many of the people keep their nose up, that and traffic are my only complaints. If I had a bazillion illion tillion babillion dollars I would still take the time to hold the door for someone, or say hello.
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