Westward Ho!

Housing Inspection

Since August, my neighbors and I have complained about the conditions in our university-owned apartment building -- gates that don't lock properly, rusting metal, rotting wood on door frames, broken exterior bricks, smelly/dirty carpeting (I got mine replaced), holes in the walls (I bought spackle the day I moved in), broken bike racks, a hedge out front that homeless people were using as a naptime area (we got this removed), not to mention problems with crickets, roaches, waterbugs, mice, and at least one snake (the pest-control issue is being dealt with case-by-case, but something much more comprehensive needs to happen). But we've been collectivizing and reaching out to various people, and later this morning, at last, the big guns are coming in: the Los Angeles Housing Department is inspecting for code violations. What that means is...

Properties that do not meet City and State codes regarding issues of maintenance, use, or habitability are cited with a "Notice to Comply". Property owners are generally given 30 days to have the required repairs completed. A re-inspection is performed to verify that the corrective work was done.  

If repairs are not completed within the time period specified on the Notice to Comply, the owner will be summoned to an administrative hearing at the Housing Department to determine the reason for non-compliance and when the required repairs will be completed. If further enforcement steps become necessary, the file may be forwarded to the Office of the City Attorney as a criminal complaint.

The news came in the form of a flyer on my door Tuesday morning, one day after an internal inspection by the university's housing office -- I don't know the overall results of that survey, but the checklist they left behind on my kitchen counter suggests that I've been doing my part to keep things up to whatever their departmental code is. (Basically, my smoke detector works and there aren't any immediate fire hazards or accumulated garbage -- but then, I'm paranoid enough that I take out my trash nearly every day now.)

My fear is that our building will just squeak through the LAHD inspection and our housing people will continue to do the absolute minimum and spend the least money they can until they can get us out of here in May (when our contracts end) and start work on the extensive teardown/renovation/miracle transformation they have planned.

What's Wrong With This Picture?

Planetizen has just published its 2007 Guide to Graduate Urban Planning Programs, ranking the top 25 schools in the U.S. and Canada. (The top 25, both overall and by reputation alone, were all in the U.S.). My school did well enough -- number 9 overall on a list populated by Berkeley, MIT, and some Ivies -- but the results are definitely skewed towards the coasts, with a few outliers in the Great Lakes, Ohio, and the western coast of Florida. It's a bit sad that our major universities aren't better-distributed across the country. I think our fixation on Ivies (and maybe the top California schools?) has created a brain drain on parts of the U.S. that desperately need that intelligence. Moreover, cities in the inner South and New West (Phoenix, et al) are only going to move further towards complete privatization and increasingly piss-poor social services unless someone steps in and gets people thinking about public planning, civic engagement, and issues that are more important than just protecting property values and shutting down adult bookstores. I realize that the deck is stacked against universities that don't already have built-in "reputations" -- and many of those less-famous universities are in those critical geographical areas, e.g. Nevada. But with Nevada's population growing tremendously, what can it do to retain bright students and put a school like UNLV on the map for more than just sports? Because the image above troubles me.

Two Items

1) I saw an odd MTA house ad on the bus today. It was pimping its website's intermittently useful Trip Planner. Nothing odd about that, but the sample destination address the ad showed was "Fairfax/La Brea." I know they don't mean to imply that Fairfax and La Brea intersect, seeing how the two avenues are both north/south (and don't have a little arc intersecting them the way Glendale Blvd/Silver Lake Blvd do) and are separated by at least ten smaller streets at any given longitude (rough estimate: I spent 5 seconds looking at GoogleMaps).

I'm still new here, so forgive me, but if "Fairfax/La Brea" is one of those cutesy real-estate neighborhood designations I haven't heard it yet -- but it could just be a lazy conflation of the Fairfax District and Park La Brea.

I just typed "Fairfax/La Brea" into the Trip Planner with Union Station as the starting address, with a departure time of Sunday at 10:00 AM. It recognized Union Station and for the former it came up with "NO LOCATION" and this message: You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'brea-ycoord) AS subdwalk, hdsgn1 AS dhs, MIN(freqx) AS dfr.

2) I'm doing the AIDS Walk next Sunday, in and around West Hollywood. Here's my donation page -- the proceeds go to AIDS Project Los Angeles and other HIV/AIDS nonprofits. (The walk's 6.2 miles, and yes, we cross both Fairfax and La Brea Avenues -- on foot, so who needs that stinky Trip Planner anyway?)

On a more serious note, HIV/AIDS is still a real crisis in this country (and in the larger world), despite the deafening silence on the issue from career politicians and the mainstream media. It's great that events like the AIDS Walk(s) do their share in keeping the epidemic in the spotlight, albeit for short bursts of time. I wish more could be done (I wish we could wipe the whole f-in' thing out; I also wish I could go back in time and prevent Ronald Reagan from being born), but the total monies raised by this walk will go a very long way indeed -- toward research, education, treatment, counseling, advocacy, and fulfilling such basic needs as groceries for HIV-infected people and their families. Please donate a few dollars if you can. (That link again.)

Dome Day

A quick note to pass on word about a benefit that Chaki's band Mystic Defender is playing -- the purpose is to generate enough money to preserve Dome Village, "a non-profit organization which offers a structural alternative for homeless people unable or even unwilling to live in traditional shelters or return to the 'mainstream' life style." The 20 Omni-Sphere geodesic domes that make up the village were designed by a one-time student of Bucky Fuller. The site's landlord, responding to the shocking surge in downtown land values, has raised the tenant's rent by 700 percent, or as a Downtown News article states, from "$2,500 a month (plus $10,000 in annual taxes) to more than $18,000 a month."

While I don't agree with the across-the-board assertion of founder and soi-disant Republican Ted Hayes (who himself is homeless) that homelessness is a choice and a full-stop rejection of mainstream values, I appreciate that countercultural ethic (I've been learning about the street politics of the post-neoliberal world and trying to steal material from Neil Smith's The New Urban Frontier: Gentrification and the Revanchist City for an upcoming paper). I'm torn between applauding the hyper-romanticized outlaw nobility of the hobo/squatter aesthetic and the fact that Hayes' survivalist-wackjob philosophies trivialize the very real plight most homeless people have, namely mental illness and addiction and just plain horrible circumstances. His project's emphasis on self-sustainability and personal responsibility is admirable though -- if a little uncomfortably like a bizarro-world Ayn Rand. But for those homeless people who have all their mental faculties intact and didn't get their legs blown off in a war and have even a smidgen of optimism about their future, Dome Village's "workshops in computer literacy, jobseeking, legal issues, and children's theatre, a community art program, two cricket teams, [and] community garden programs" may very well prove useful.

Discovering L.A.

There's so much I'm still discovering in this town. Tonight I finally get to check out one of the hipster "urban pioneer" outposts of the still-sketchy New Downtown, a bar called the Golden Gopher (which I've seen a few times from the 37 bus as it goes east on 8th). I don't go out much at night (the plight of the carless in L.A.), so I'm always really grateful when I can coordinate an evening get-together with someone who does have access to a car.

In this case the coordination at the top level was done by the Associated Students of Planning and Development, the student-run organization that puts together extracurricular social, professional, and academic events. I've been attending some of their meetings and am starting to get involved with their "scholarship committee" -- as far as ideas, I've been thinking about how to use the (physical) city to help make first-year planning students more passionate about and invested in what they're going to be spending (at least!) the next few years doing.

I love the enthusiasm and commitment my professors (and their favorite theorists/leaders/crackpots) have, and how there's a spark there that transcends the drudgery of academia. My fellow students are quite intelligent, but it seems like a lot of them have just come out of undergrad and still have this sort of "college" context for what they're doing -- looking at all this as a bunch of cumbersome homework and Supreme Court opinions to be memorized and grades to be gotten, and you can tell who the older students are, the ones who've been out in the field or on the battleground, by the glint in their eyes and the shake in their fists when they talk about bureaucracies, interest groups, personal heroes, sworn enemies, bungled decisions, and brilliant ideas.

The madness of The City (TM) is thrilling, even on those days when I feel like strangling it with its own red tape. I get this feeling from the Ph.D.s and second-years in one of my upper-level classes, but it would be so terrific to see more of this from the younger kids, as well as more desire to just get cocky and try to conquer the sheer volume of history and information and photographic/filmic evidence and tactile, sensory stuff out there. Learn with our eyes. Learn with our feet. Our tastebuds too, maybe (when I first got here I figured out my way around town with printouts of Jonathan Gold's restaurant reviews in one hand and an MTA route map in the other).

My idea is to have groups of students and faculty do self-guided walking tours of Southern California communities by their particular planning history -- not just focusing on one pivotal event (like slum clearance or freeway construction), but a long and winding narrative that accounts for trivial changes as well as major ones, visual totems of consensus, dissent, compromise, what is versus what would have been if one small variable were different. And things that haven't changed at all, that have remained extant against all odds (not so much stuff that's been preserved by law, but places that have just... survived). It would be fun to focus on the Valley, which is just rife with secret history and the ghosts of Charles Phoenix housewives and roads to hell paved by kooky cigar-chomping land speculators. And I'm kinda thinking about touring some of the sleepier, less-trod parts of unincorporated/general-law northeast L.A. County -- like Montrose and Sierra Madre.

I hope we can pull this off (just once or twice, even). I've been a total hermit since school started and I'm dying to go exploring again.

Pershing Square (Flickr set)

A classmate and I are working on a project about Pershing Square, and since I had a free afternoon today, I went and snapped some photos, and uploaded them into a Flickr set. I'm not a good enough photographer to make the ugly parts look sufficiently ugly (and not merely drab), but I can't let my ego go for long enough to play a straight-up documentarian. I like finding the beauty in mundanity, and I think I made Pershing Square seem a lot more attractive than it actually is -- on the other hand, maybe the square is less of a design failure than I initially thought.

Maps (They Don't Love You Like I Love You, Etc.)

Quote of the day, at LA Observed's Chicken Corner: An Echo Park Blog (link courtesy of Atwater Village Newbie):

RJ Smith (my husband) on maps: “We all make private maps of Los Angeles, because the public maps we share so clearly fail us. None of them ultimately satisfies, because none of them ultimately lets us understand Los Angeles.”

(If you are a cartography trainspotter, however, boy does the Library of Congress have a treat for you.)

 

Across (And Around) 110th Street

This NYT article has a hidden joke -- author John Freeman Gill interviews a black person named Keith White and a white person named Jamie Black. The piece is one of many "there goes the neighborhood" gentrification stories the Times has published, but this one hints at something pretty interesting without having the column inches to give it proper investigation.

If every part of New York City has its L.A. equivalent, then the Central Park North and Morningside Heights analog would be Exposition Park/Historic West Adams (where USC is, basically). Central Park's northern border is 110th Street, and much like the 10 freeway out here, it's got a reputation as a cultural dividing line for a lot of people, a Rubicon never to be crossed or even approached. In real life (and to be sure, the real life of 2006), the lines are much blurrier than that. Morningside Heights, to the immediate west of Central Park North, is home to Columbia University and the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, while just southeast of CPN proper is Museum Mile (ending at 104th St.).

There's money all over that area, and never in the history of the city has it been considered one of the worst ghettos (the apartment buildings that dot 5th Avenue around Museum Mile cater to some honest-to-god wealth, in fact). But we still see the north end of the park as somewhat sketchy. The sky-high housing projects and impossibly wide avenues give it that awful '60s "urban renewal" feel; however this only represents a couple of blocks' worth of bad planning. The elegance of the mixed-income Morningside Heights, and the Echo Park- like community pride of Spanish Harlem, make this section of Manhattan lots of fun to walk through. The gentrification has happened, but perhaps because of the geography it's happening a little slower than in other 'hoods.

There are very few Manhattan neighborhoods that are still significantly (if not predominantly) lower- or middle-income, and all of them are above, say, East 96th St. On the east side, Manhattan ends around 131st St. and becomes the Bronx, while on the west side, it technically ends on the U.S. Mainland -- a bit north of 225th St. in a Bronx-bounded area called Marble Hill. Harlem, though it's experienced a renaissance over the past decade (Bill Clinton rented office space there!), has such negative associations with its name that it's retained a lingering, South Central-ish stigma. (And Harlem, like the former "South Central," is a whole urban region, a state of mind.)

Doing better in the whitey-reputation department are Inwood and Washington Heights. Economically, the L.A. equivalent might be Venice (stockbrokers and gangbangers side by side), but Inwood and Washington Heights aren't beach-culture trashy (no beach), they're as rocky and cliffy and viewy and far-from-the-madding-central-city as Malibu, and as full of serene, majestic deco-era apartment buildings as the nicer parts of Hollywood and Los Feliz. Apartments are still vaaaaguely affordable there -- people I know who like the area say it's just too much of a commute to midtown and downtown, and people I know who've been there but don't really "get" cities (and will move back to Darien in six months) are turned off by all the Spanish signs and the old guys hanging out on the street. Despite a reported increase in median income, it hasn't lost it's character, and I don't believe it ever will.

Anyway: I'm not predicting the end of the world with this Central Park North condo development. It takes a hell of a lot to kill a strongly settled New York neighborhood these days -- as Bruce Ratner is finding out over in Brooklyn. Angelenos can learn from New Yorkers that one of the best forms of protest is proactivity. If you build a great, solid community that's worth fighting for, the battle will end on your side regardless of the outcome -- even if the bad guys win (and they do win, cuz they've got $$$), they'll look really stupid and the history books will not be kind to them. Compared to Ratner's Atlantic Yards project, this condo is a lone drop of piss in the ocean. Choose those battles wisely.

Is There a New York Housing Crisis?

This post makes a brief detour into NYC, since both my hometown and Los Angeles have similar policies on affordable housing. A City Journal article titled "Is There a New York Housing Crisis?" has been making the internerd rounds (originally via Martini Republic), and I stayed up late last night chatting about it with my friend Chris and marveling that the line between me-first shock-jocks like Tucker Carlson/Bill O'Reilly and the ostensibly more cerebral world of "legit" journalism and academia is such a thin, opaque one.

Conservative views, when measured out with SOME semblance of concern for humanity, can be useful as a means of keeping liberalism in check, and it's unfortunate that both sides have learned from TV that there's only everything and nothing, my way or the highway. I'm interested in good ideas, and I know that very often the best ideas are the ones that neither (or none) of the warring factions is emotionally attached to. So I tried to read "Is There a New York Housing Crisis" with an air of detachment, but then the (female) author had to get her digs in at "the dysfunctional underclass" and unwed mothers who aren't shrewd enough to find husbands to solve their financial woes. And I just felt like she rendered moot any good points she might have had and made me wanna kick her in the uterus, repeatedly.

I wasn't gonna blog about this, but I may as well.

New York's real estate market is an interesting case and shouldn't really be compared to most of the rest of the country (LA exempted, maybe). The most socially desirable part of the city, Manhattan, isn't as pricey as it is merely because of rent control -- it's because Manhattan is a relatively small and extremely narrow parcel of land with an 843-acre park in the middle of it (which is lovely, don't get me wrong). And because white-collar businesses want to be in Manhattan rather than the philistine outer boroughs with their philistine 718 area codes, they acquire scads of Wall Street and midtown office buildings that eat up yet more available land. The waterfronts (on both the East River and Hudson sides) are very valuable too, and much of it is being rezoned away from industrial use and towards "leisure." (An anti-preservationist would call for the lower-density historic brownstones of Greenwich Village and the Upper East Side to be razed for high-rises, but I think it's important for cities to have a variety of densities and differences of neighborhood character. Besides, those neighborhoods aren't exclusively brownstones; there are many beautiful, well-appointed, landmarked 8- or 9-story apartment buildings that were built between the late 19th century and the end of the '20s.)

The author, interestingly, notes that if you go into the outer boroughs, it's not difficult to find decent apartments under $1200/mo -- and it's very very true, which kinda destroys her theory that there's no middle-class housing in NYC. (I think she means "no middle class housing in Manhattan," which is her real concern for People Like Her -- all those yucky low-income minorities are free to flee for the boroughs, though.)

I also wonder about these mythical $600/mo apartments (where are they? East New York?) and whether the mojo of the free market is going to suddenly turn a $2400/mo luxury 1-bedroom into a more middle-class $900/mo 1-bedroom. Not in Manhattan. But then, this disparity isn't a problem in most parts of the boroughs. However, wealthier people can forget that if you're making $20,000 a year and struggling to eat and pay your bills, even a hundred-dollar increase in rent is a fuckin' lotta money. (And yeah, some of the hardest-working people I've known, people who want to be upwardly mobile, have needed some help on their way up. So I'm not against some sort of subsidy, as long as it's implemented smartly.)

What resonated the most with me was the high cost of upkeep of the older, more worn buildings that are harder to get up to code (or are exempt through affordable-housing variances or whatever but still need things like proper heating and insulation). Could a solution to this be a small annual maintenance fee on top of the monthly rent, which the renter would start paying upfront upon moving in? Co-op buildings have similar carrying charges that buyers pay -- the renters' maintenance fees would be affordable but would help create a sense of investment in where they live and ease the property manager's financial burden. And paying a larger sum of money once a year is easier than paying a higher rent once a month -- you have more time to set the money aside, and it eats into your usual cost-of-living a little less.

The NYC housing "crisis" is much more complicated (and less of a crisis) than the author makes it sound. The old bitties who refuse to leave their rent-controlled penthouses are all dying off anyway, and most of the housing projects and Mitchell-Lama buildings in Manhattan are up against noisy, congested highways that are long walks from the subway. Developers might be able to make some more money from the land since it's near the water, but the current residents are hardly stealing anyone's pristine country getaway.

Brand Boulevard

Fellow USC-er Peter McFerrin read my mind: we've both been thinking about Glendale lately, more specifically Brand Blvd.

I've been in that area a lot over the past month. It's an interesting ride on the 92 from my part of Silver Lake: past Fletcher, Glendale Blvd is a gnarled, winding mess before crossing the river and giving way to the linear calm of Atwater Village, which seems to end at a lonely-looking overpass (near the post office) and eventually kinda mutates into downtown Glendale. Brand Blvd opens with a flood of car dealerships, low-rent strip malls, and freestanding '70s-era Chinese restaurants, and once that's done it starts becoming more gentrified: there's the intractably immense Glendale Galleria, while an empty lot across the street, fortified by wall-high "coming soon" signs, promises "the Americana at Brand" (aka "the Grove East"). Then there's a movie theater, a CPK -- this portion of Brand is a bit thrown-together, with nothing that really unifies it (it reminds me of some half-assed revitalization attempt on a dying outskirt of Queens). After that, though... well, here's an excerpt of a comment I posted earlier.

Brand becomes this idyllic (and realistic) Main Street U.S.A.: the wide sidewalks that reward pedestrians by making them feel like the city is rolling out the red carpet for them, the cohabitation of chain stores and thriving (often ethnically owned) mom 'n' pop businesses, the way it seems like it's not really "for" one particular income group even though the high-end stuff is there if you want it, the way it's not JUST the one main street but that the urbanism spills over onto the cross streets and pulls the activity on Brand into the rest of the neighborhoood. I also like that the shopping/dining district comes to a somewhat abrupt end, which puts the brakes on the sprawl and provides a nice visual seam for the neighborhood, like wrapping up one chapter of a book so the next can begin.

The Alex: Brand Boulevard's Art Deco crown jewel:

A vintage LAPD squad car stakes out on Brand a few hours before Cruise Night: