Los Angeles is nearly built
out. The last empty bits of the metropolis are already being fitted
into a titanic grid of neighborhoods that extends, except for
mountains and coastline, 60 miles from south to north and from the
Pacific Ocean deep into the desert.
The closing of the
suburban frontier in Los Angeles ends a 100-year experiment in
place making on an almost unimaginable scale. And because of its
notable failures, I’m grateful that it’s nearly over.
Still, all those miles of suburb reflect an enduring
consensus about the way ordinary people ought to be housed,
beginning with turn-of-the-20th-century belief in the power of a
“home in its garden” to improve the lives of working people, and
ending in the 1950s with affordable, mass-produced housing for
average Joes.
There are, of course, plenty of toxic
places to live in the McMansion wastelands and bunker suburbs of
the West, but that’s not the sort of suburb in which I and
most Californians live. Where I live is in an ordinary house on a
block of more tract houses in a neighborhood of even more of the
same.
I’ve lived here my entire life, in the
957-square-foot house my parents bought in 1946, when the idea of
suburbia was brand-new, and when no one knew what would happen when
tens of thousands of working-class husbands and wives were thrown
together without any instruction manual and expected to make a fit
place to live. What happened after that was the usual mix of joy
and tragedy.
There are Westerners who wouldn’t
regard a house like mine as a place of pilgrimage, but my parents
and their friends in Lakewood did. They weren’t ironists;
they were grateful for the comforts of their not-quite-middle class
life. For those who came to Lakewood, (and still come) the
aspiration wasn’t for more, but only for enough.
Urban planners tell me that my neighborhood, like many others in
L.A., should have been bulldozed long ago to make room for some
better paradise of the ordinary, and yet Lakewood’s tract
houses stubbornly resist, loyal to an idea of how a neighborhood
can be made. It’s an incomplete idea, but it’s still
enough in Lakewood to bring out 400 sports coaches in the fall, and
600 to clean up the weedy yards of the disabled on Volunteer Day in
April, and over 2,000 to listen to summer concerts in the park.
I don’t live in a teardown neighborhood, but one
that is making some effort to build itself up.
If other
Westerners are as lucky, this kind of suburbia — with its
5,000-square-foot lots and pedestrian-friendly streets — will
endure in the West’s growing cities, even though, to
suburbia’s furious critics, my piece of Los Angeles is the
epicenter of sprawl.
But even that’s not accurate.
Density is one measure of sprawl, and the Los Angeles metropolitan
region, with more than 7,783 people per square mile (based on 2000
census data), has one of the highest densities of all major metro
regions in the nation. In Lakewood, entirely built out in the
1950s, the density has always been greater. Today, it’s 8,000
persons per square mile.
Density, now that Los Angeles is
built out, is increasing fast. This brings us monumental traffic
congestion, long commutes and bad air quality, the downside of what
other urban regions in the West face, even if their goal has been
something different.
Thirty years ago in Portland, Ore.,
for example, voters adopted strict growth limits to prevent
“Californication” of their landscape. Recently, a statewide vote
pushed the pendulum the other way, toward more rights for
landowners to develop their property.
And here’s
irony: Although it’s never noted by the “smart growth”
cheerleaders, for whom L.A. is the future to be avoided: The
regional authority that manages development in Portland and three
adjoining counties concluded, after a 1994 study of the
nation’s 50 largest urban regions, that “with respect to
density and road per capita mileage, (Los Angeles) displays an
investment pattern we desire to replicate.”
The density
of Portland’s metro area is about 3,500 per square mile. The
city’s master plan for the year 2040 calls for increasing
density to about 7,000 per square mile, just like Los Angeles
today. So built-out Portland will be another L.A., with the same
traffic congestion, unaffordable housing and over-hyped light-rail
transit system.
Given the overwhelming preference for
neighborhoods that look an awful lot like mine, it’s easy to
predict that other metropolitan areas in the West will also look a
lot like Los Angeles.
Welcome to the future, Westerners:
It’s L.A.
D. J. Waldie is a contributor
to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He is the author of
Where We Are Now: Notes from Los
Angeles.
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