Quote:
Originally Posted by craigs
Meh, I read the LA Times every day and articles like this one are merely a part of the mix--and appropriately so. As the recently departed public historian Mike Davis correctly noted over the last four decades, the Los Angeles dialectic is one of boosterism versus a darker realism about the fundamental forces that shape this place. For example, for many longstanding reasons, there aren't enough homes for everyone who wants to live here, so prices are inflated--which prices lots of people out. We cannot begin to fix that problem if we ignore it because it isn't boosterish enough.
|
Sorry if I came off as wanting the LA Times to return to its early 20th century role as a civic booster and shill for LA developer interests. I only mentioned the boosterism to contrast it with recent barrage of negative stories about people who have left the city for greener pastures elsewhere. And I agree that we shouldn't ignore LA's housing issues, or the state's as a whole. I just don't think a story like this sheds much light on the problem. It is at best analysis by anecdote. Contact a bunch of people who left LA and ask them why they left. To me it's obvious that the major issue is the cost of housing, though people in other stories may also cite guns, woke culture and the state's slide into socialism. But this story really doesn't address how the housing became so expensive, or what the city and the state can realistically do to make it cheaper.
Other recent LA Times stories have taken a less anecdotal approach and have done a better job analyzing root causes. A series of stories a week ago showed how LA was both the most over-crowded and most sprawling metro in the country. These stories cited the prevalence of single family zoning, the hostility to public housing that grew after WWII, the move to downzone in the 70s and 80s, and the fact that LA is a city with both high and very low paying jobs. Median household income in LA County is slightly lower than Cook County's while housing costs in the latter are 60% cheaper.
https://www.latimes.com/california/s...ng-los-angeles
https://www.latimes.com/california/s...-united-states
These stories, especially when they detail the real effects of decisions made decades ago, are more useful than interviews of LA expats living in the Salt Lake City suburbs.