Ok but LA sucks for reasons that have nothing to do with what I want from a city and everything to do with what everyone wants from a city: walkability, affordability, good roads/traffic and infrastructure, good vibes, authenticity, public transit, and people who don’t suck.
Even people who are from LA and say “we have all that and I love LA” only mean “I love my neighborhood in LA, which is a 90 minute drive from the 7 other malignancies of highway sprawl that also call themselves LA.”
I had to temporarily live in LA for three months during which time I came to understand that LA is really a terribly place for humans to live. Yes LA “has everything” but it is all a 40 minute drive from wherever you are one-way. People in LA think driving 90 minutes round trip to go out for dinner is normal behavior because the city has so twisted their concept of “normal”
LA has very few places that are “pretty” surrounded by a hundred miles of sunbaked 1980’s low-rise stucco squalor sandwiched between freeways. It’s ugly, inconvenient and fully self-absorbed
So it’s city prices but rural Ohio transit times? Yeah I’ll stick with my 15 minute drive
But our food though, amirite?
So if someone says “I Love LA” you want them to mean that they love every single neighborhood in LA? That seems like too high a bar for any city. Agreed about walkability and traffic, though.
I mean more that it’s crazy to call them “neighborhoods” when any two have nothing in common and are completely inaccessible to each other unless you have your own car and get on the highway for an hour.
And when that’s the case, how does one even say they like “LA” (as in the whole city) when you’re more likely to travel out of state from Long Beach than to Westwood.
Hmm… I don’t really disagree, I’m just thinking it through…
Re. your first point: if neighborhoods are isolated and have little in common, then it doesn’t seem crazy to call them neighborhoods.
There’s the additional fact that some “neighborhoods” are actually cities: e.g. Long Beach is a city of its own but Westwood is a neighborhood of LA. Malibu and Santa Monica are cities but Venice is a neighborhood of LA. Compton is (famously) a city, but Crenshaw is a neighborhood. But these are all generally thought of as part of LA.
Re. your second point: I guess it’s similar to someone who lives in Boston or NYC and is more likely to travel to Europe than Alabama, but is still able to say “I love the USA.”
Neighborhoods have their own identities, but in most places, what makes something a neighborhood rather than its own town is the fact that it is surrounded by other neighborhoods that are immediately accessible. That’s why Lincoln Park in Chicago and Soho NY are neighborhoods, but they use a whole different term to identify Manhattan from Long Island and so on. Those are properly boroughs rather than neighborhoods, as they are big, physically separated, and it’s not that easy to get between them, which leads to each almost being considered its own city. And it’s still harder to get between LA neighborhoods than it is to literally cross the (admittedly very thin) stretch of ocean between Manhattan and Brooklyn.
And I don’t think there’s any similarity between your second example, looking at how someone interacts with the whole of a country, and this question of how someone interacts with their local community. Countries are of course big enough that folks might see less than 50% of their own and still love it. But it’s much harder to consider someone an expert or proud local of a “city” they don’t visit 90% of. You can be a countryman and see only 30% of your country, but you can’t really be a local and see only 10% of your city.
Well, I think if we were to resolve this, we’d need a formal definition of neighborhood, and you make a useful distinction of a neighborhood vs a borough or a town. I suspect sociologists have some useful definitions, but that’s not my field.
it’s much harder to consider someone an expert or proud local of a “city” they don’t visit 90% of.
This is a lot more difficult to get behind. People are proud of their cities for a variety of reasons; visiting 90% of it seems like an irrelevant criterion. There’s some truth to the trope of the born-in-NYC native who’s never been to the Statue of Liberty.
This is every city.
Jesus, take a pill and cope harder.
No it really isn’t. I’ve lived in two cities in my life and neither was like that. To put into context the drives LA contains approach calling Cleveland and Columbus Ohio neighborhoods of the same city.
Sure once you hit megapolis you get huge transits caused by density, but NYC isn’t nearly that bad. Chicago can be rough but it doesn’t come close. DC is delightful.
LA is uniquely “what if we built the most America megacity ever”
Haha nope. You can cross the entirety of Paris from rural outskirts to rural outskirts by public transport in as much time as it takes to get to the next neighborhood over in LA by car.
This is absolutely not every city. I’ve lived in several and not a single one compared to LA in these regards. I don’t know what you’re basing this claim on but it’s simply inaccurate.
Yea but LA is like the platonic ideal of the modern urban hellscape. It is the progenitor of the dystopian urban-planning model that affects most American cities
And poor air quality.
My inlaws live near LA, and they wanted us to move there. I looked at everything you mentioned and just said nope.
My area is better in almost every way except weather, and honestly, I don’t mind the weather. LA sucks, I really don’t know why so many talk it up…
Hate LA but the people there are very friendly and charming
Thanks!
Transplants suck everywhere, but that doesn’t mean LA isn’t a complete dumpster fire.
Elll-aeegghhh…
I used to hear a lot of transplants complain about my city too. Now they’re only hanging on by their fingernails in our housing market, they don’t.
It is somewhat a matter of internal colonialism for so much culture to be centralized in California
Ironic use of that term, internal colonialism, given my LA neighborhood has a flourishing Indian and Vietnamese community, culture and all.
“Transplants” in quite a different way than the meme pokes fun of, though! (And they certainly don’t complain about LA and their food is awesome).
inorite all these colonists invading california bringing all their culture with them
We are better off than the UK at least, where everything is based on London. Media is centered around LA and New York with Memphis and Nashville as secondary music hubs. California is just a big state with a ton of people who live there.
