Los Angeles Is a Suburban Hellscape Disguised as a City
The devilish details of the City of Angels
The Spanish claimed the area where L.A. is located in 1542 and named the settlement el Pueblo de Nuestra Señora Reina de los Ángeles (the Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels). A lot has changed since and I think the angels have left. Something that is rarely mentioned in L.A. is that the Spanish stole the land from the Tongva and Chumash peoples, native groups that had lived in this sea side, inversion-layer-prone basin for over 1,000 years. Their name for the settlement under Los Angeles today was Yaanga, meaning “place of poison oak.” Perhaps this early name was a warning for what the city could — and would — become.
Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city. — Dorothy Parker
I used to call L.A. home and I might again some day. I spent my entire 20s and most of my 30s in the city, have many close friends there, and have amazing memories from my nearly 20 years living in the city during two different stints as recently as 2018 — both in Santa Monica — but I also lived for a year or so in Los Feliz and for a couple years in the flats of Beverly Hills — boy was that boring.
There are things that I like about L.A., most of them tied to nostalgic feelings about my past, which strangely is how a lot of people think about the city, I think. This is a city that destroys its past — instead of relishing and preserving it — so perhaps people feel so nostalgic here and when thinking about it there because they’re personal past has somehow been destroyed, too, by the continual grind of the city.
I could cry thinking about getting my dog Sammy in West L.A. and taking her on walks in the rain with my boyfriend (still is) in Los Liones Canyon and Topanga on rainy days when no one else was out. I think of things like getting pizza and sitting behind Wildflower Pizza on Main Street in Santa Monica, or wild parties in Venice lofts, and countless fun nights in the Hollywood Hills house of my German photographer friend. Part of the sadness surely comes from the fact that both Sammy the sighthound and Daniel the photographer are dead. This happens as you get a little older. But I think it’s more than just general loss. I think Los Angeles takes our pasts from us. It covers over them — gives them plastic surgery — and presents itself as new to new generations — ever more bland than the last. So in that way, it’s like a gaslighting abusive spouse. It knows you know that it stole your past, but it won’t say it out loud.
It used to be people moved to L.A. to be film directors and producers, actors, writers, and cinematographers, or to work at one of the studios — deciding which film projects get green lit. Today, it’s professional YouTubers and TikTokers and aspiring porn stars from what I can tell — though the sex workers don’t even have to move here anymore because they can perform from their own bedrooms.
Los Angeles is the home to the real Skid Row, a place of utter sadness and desperation that the city does literally nothing to solve. The term “skid row” has become ubiquitous with meaning a place where unhoused people live in squalor, but L.A. hosts the original namesake. Skid Row is famous for “housing” one of the largest stable populations of homeless people in the United States — about 8,000 to 10,000 individuals who live in garbage strewn and diseased conditions on filthy streets in tents, many of them mentally ill and/or addicted to one or more drugs. Violence is commonplace, both amongst the local population, and by people who come to harass them. The police are essentially scared of the area, and they have no real economic incentive to keep the area safe, so they ignore it, like they do much of the city.
What does the city do about Skid Row? Nothing. Literally nothing. In fact, since I left Los Angeles in 2018, there is no good news about the unhoused population of the city. They are now everywhere — so much so that residents manage to ignore them — shutting them out of their vision and their thoughts. To actually think about these people, many who are homeless through no fault of their own — would be too depressing, I guess. It would be like admitting your city in a failed state, which it essentially is. To think of this issue too much may be shattering to the psyche. Homeless people live under overpasses, alongside train tracks, on the beach, and on sidewalks right outside of corporations like YouTube and Snapchat. You can watch the clean, pressed, highly paid employees of these places literally step over these people on their way in and out of work — or when they walk down the street for lunch at a café where an espresso with unconventional milk costs $6. It seems no one cares. If they did, would this situation really be allowed to continue?
Is a city really a city if you have to spend an hour or more in traffic to do basically anything? I tend to say no to this question. This is a city where people will move across town simply because they got a new job. It is unrealistic to live on the east side and work on the west side, for example, because the commute can be 1.5 hours. I used to live in Santa Monica and I had a writing workshop at 7pm on Monday evenings. My friend would pick me up at 5:30pm and we’d usually get there just in time. Does anyone enjoy sitting in traffic? No, but at least this is the one equalizer of this city of such rich and such bottomless desperation. Even rich people have to sit in traffic, although they’ve surely got better sound systems in their cars — and they’re not worrying about overheating, as I often was in my 1988 Volvo station wagon.
People in L.A. judge bus riders as lower class people — as maids and losers. They may not say it as bluntly as that, but they think it as they drive past crowded bus stops — often without covers of any kind from the relentless sun — in their electric cars. Ask an Angelino what bus route you need to get from Westwood to Koreatown and no one would know. No one except for the people who are already riding the buses.
And even if you have your own car, in L.A., you will be judged for having a car that is too old, too dirty, too large, too flashy, too cheap — but generally not for it being too expensive. You regularly see assholes in $120,000 cars. What does that say about someone?
For some reason, people in L.A. seem to hate trees. Or shade of any kind. Despite it being sunny over 300 days per year. Every time I leave the house in the city, I seem to find more trees hacked down, hacked up, or just generally ruined in its ability to provide shade to the working class people — many from Latin America — that actually use the sidewalks of the city.
Saying L.A. has a lot of “fake” people is sort of a cliché at this point, but I’m sorry — it couldn’t be more true. These are people that sit around thinking about their hair and the whiteness of their teeth. Of course I’m not talking about the average worker in the city — people with rich lives just like anyone anywhere on the face of the earth, but you know what I mean. I lived in both the west side, and in Los Feliz, which is considered “east” in the parlance of modern L.A., and these are very shallow people. Not only are they shallow, they’re selfish, they’re mean, they’re self involved. I saw more than one European friend arrive here — with hopes to make it in Hollywood — become disenchanted with the city in days or weeks. My friend Maya — a French makeup artist with a hilarious, killer personality — withered within says in the city, as promises from American friends didn’t come to fruition and she found herself walking miles in the hot sun because she didn’t have a drivers license and a bus driver refused to provide information to her about what bus line to take.
Hollywood types run the city. They vampire the money and passion from the creative types, who are the beaten dogs of the city — well except for the top tier celebrities who rule the roost. Angelinos are more impressed by celebrity and celebrity sightings than anyone else on earth, from my experience. It’s like they’ve been systematically retrained to respect and honor the celebrity system.
Did I mention the water of Los Angeles is stolen? Yes, it is stolen from the Sierra Nevada mountains and Northern California, using back room confidential deals that were signed over 100 years ago. The water will run out, but people in L.A. go on watering their gardens and having their cars washed weekly — a favorite L.A. afternoon activity. This is a city with a date with an apocalyptic destiny if there ever was one. One day soon, dust will come from turning on the tap, and when there’s a fire burning, this won’t be good.
Los Angeles is built for cars — in fact, it is the slave to the automobile industry. The city thinks it can right this wrong by encouraging everyone to drive electric and electric-combustion hybrids around the city, like Jetsons buzzing around their outer space home. But as most people now know, the electric car is a lie. It doesn’t solve environmental problems — it simply creates more — and it does nothing to solve the traffic issues that seriously degrade life in this geographically giant city. It also does nothing to address the seriously third world levels of wealth inequality that manifests as transportation inequality in the city. Poor people take buses and drive Ubers — the rich drive Teslas and take Ubers when they’re drunk — and it seems this calculation will never change.
When you drive or fly into Los Angeles, you see that it sprawls on forever. Even in an airplane, there’s an hour of of until you land along the Pacific Ocean. When driving, it’s more like 2–3 hours of sprawl, depending on which direction you’re entering from. When I do this, I often wonder: who are all these people, and why do they want to live here? There are so many other places in the country that are greener, less crowded, less expensive, and just generally more pleasant — especially than the Inland Empire of L.A., as this inland area is known. Much of this region gets to 110 F on an average summer day and it doesn’t rain for six month stretches, leaving it arid, the air polluted, and there’s very little in terms of public space.
L.A. is a place famed for its murders: Sharon Tate and the rest of the gang on Cielo Drive, the Black Dahlia, and Robert F. Kennedy. People romanticize these murders and their locations, taking tours with grisly names and themes. Is violence really something we should be celebrating and capitalizing?
Finally, time passes in strange and mysterious ways in L.A., which must be at least partially because its seasonal difference are subtle and almost every day is identical throughout the year. Decades can tend to escape you here, with very little accomplished in the span of time. I think it was film director Mike Nichols who said something like: You sit down in L.A. when you’re 30 and by the time you get up, you’re 50.