Tag Archives: Los Angeles

Exploring the urban and island geography of Grand Theft Auto V

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One reporter focuses less on the gameplay of the new Grand Theft Auto V and instead examines the landscape:

These are places where, within wide virtual borders, the player is granted freedom to explore. What makes Los Santos so different is its scale, interactivity and ambitions — here is a digital sandbox so habitable that the game itself comes with a large paper map that, as I explored Los Santos and its surroundings, I referred to as often as I would a map describing a real-world place I’ve never been.Indeed, not unlike a real place that offers too much, I made a small list of places I wanted to visit here and things I wanted to do: haircut, strip club, take in a movie ($20 in Los Santos), maybe ride a bike to the top of a mountain and leap off. All of which you can do. If, like me, you overbook vacations with activities, you will find plenty to do. Conversely, if you’re the kind of traveler who eventually pines for a hotel room to take a nap in after a day of playing tourist, Los Santos offers that, too…

The island itself is Ireland-shaped — curious, considering that the game’s creators are primarily Scottish and British. The north side of the island is Blaine County, with mountains at its east and west coasts and Mount Chiliad to the far north. A desert borders the Alamo Sea in the interior, and salt-water-eaten trailer parks line the northwest oceanfront, the Great Ocean Highway ringing it all. If previous “Grand Theft Auto” games offered riffs on Miami and New York City, this is basically San Francisco mashed against Los Angeles, an alternate reality where Napa Valley is a 10-minute commute from the Paramount backlot.

Tellingly, it also feels as geopolitically accurate and culturally barren as the places it satirizes: a Los Angeles of the mind, where a peek inside studio gates reveals a sci-fi movie being filmed, a bike ride into the forest is greeted by screeching mountain lions and extreme wealth and poverty are never far apart. Conversation with Los Santosians is mostly limited to real estate, celebrity chitchat and random threats, though, generally, your existence is so inconsequential to the day-to-day fabric of Los Santos that you feel like a ghost.

Sounds like a dystopian Los Angeles crossed with a strange island. What more could be needed in a virtual sandbox?

While I’ve seen academics occasionally address virtual worlds – Second Life seemed to prompt some study – it would be interesting to see more full studies of these sprawling virtual worlds that are common in some of the more popular games. Think about games like Skyrim, World of Warcraft, Assassin’s Creed, Minecraft, and others that offer interesting and often realistic settings. Yet, does this space have the same logic as space in the non-virtual realm? What exactly distinguishes these spaces from real spaces?

LA’s modernist homes threatened by hot housing market and McMansions

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The modernist homes Los Angeles are in danger of being replaced by McMansions and other big homes:

The Backus House still hovers on the same Bel Air hillside where Grossman built it. But because of the sprawling megamansions that have sprung up around the property, and because of the increasingly overheated state of the Southern California real estate market, Grossman’s elegant modernist creation—one of the few surviving examples of residential architecture by a groundbreaking woman now ranked among the finest designers of her era—may not survive much longer.

There’s an irony here. Starting in the 1920s, the combination of climate, terrain, and a young, progressive community of (largely European) architects and clients triggered an efflorescence of modern residential design in Los Angeles that culminated in the famous Case Study House Program (1945–66)—a series of experimental model homes sponsored by the local magazine Arts & Architecture and designed by some of the period’s greatest architects. The modern single-family dwelling may have been invented in Europe, at the Bauhaus and elsewhere, but many believe it was perfected in Southern California…

But a certain kind of modernist property—namely, a lesser-known house situated on a prime lot in an expensive neighborhood—is still at risk, and may be especially imperiled in Los Angeles’s current residential market, which has posted the nation’s largest increase in average sale price (20.7 percent) over the last year. “An economic downturn is always a good thing for preservation,” says Regina O’Brien, chairperson of the Modern Committee of the Los Angeles Conservancy. “A lot fewer developers are making a lot less money, and therefore they have a lot less motivation to pursue these profit-oriented flips. But the problem is that the opposite is true when the market picks back up.”…

“Most modernist homes are considered very modest by the standards of these neighborhoods, where people want far more house than they need,” says Nate Cole of Unique California Property, a Long Beach brokerage specializing in modernist architecture. “Buyers see anything that they deem a compromise, and out come the bulldozers.”

There are several issues at work:

1. It sounds like there are questions about individual property rights versus community-wide preservation efforts. Should property owners be able to cash in during a good housing market? This is a common issue across all sorts of communities debating teardowns and historic preservation.

2. These modernist homes are part of southern California’s image. Elsewhere, modernist homes might elicit more negative reactions but they are part of LA’s coming of age narrative. Part of the argument here is that the replacement homes don’t really add much to LA’s character.

3. Who exactly is supposed to pay to preserve these houses? As if often the case with preserving homes, supporters of the modernist homes are hoping for buyers who want to preserve and fix-up the homes. But, if those people don’t come, it is less clear what might be done.

4. The irony: a down real estate market is good for historic preservation. Not only might the old buildings survive, it might be easier for those interested in preservation to purchase the homes. But, who would wish for leaner economic times simply in order to preserve buildings? All of this suggests historic preservation might be partly about timing and having the opportunity to purchase property that might not be as marketable.

Is this Beverly Grove (LA) home a McMansion?

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As debates continue over McMansions in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Beverly Grove, Curbed LA takes a look at one home for sale in the neighborhood and a brief yet lively discussion ensues in the comments on whether the home is a McMansion. Here is the description of the home (and plenty of pictures to help you arrive at your own conclusion):

Just in time for the City Planning Commission’s vote on an anti-mansionization ordinance for the Beverly Grove neighborhood, this fine specimen hits the market. It looks like just the thing neighborhood activists are trying to prevent, though since no square footage is given, we can’t be absolutely sure. Taking the place of an (admittedly unlovely) 1927 house, this typically boxy number–or “modern, cutting edge and rearranged design with retro reclaimed wood accents,” depending on your perspective–has four bedrooms and four and a half bathrooms. Like so many of the new houses in this area, there’s an openish floor plan, loggia, small pool and spa, a nice array of balconies, and name-brand kitchen. It also seems to have kinda low ceilings upstairs, but maybe that’s just the pictures playing tricks. It’s on the market for $2.799 million.

Not having the square footage means an important piece of information is missing. Here are a few of the comments on whether the home is a McMansion (each new paragraph is a new commenter:

Normally I’d be banging the drum for keeping the neighborhoods original in style and scale, but I don’t think this one is too bad — it at least has some visual interest and doesn’t seem too overbuilt for the lot — wouldn’t object if this were my neighborhood…

Let’s not go crazy with calling anything larger than average a McMansion. It may be out of scale, but it doesn’t use mismatched home depot pre-fabbed design elements…

This house is at the high end of the lot to improvement ratio for Beverly Grove – its not over improved. But, this type of concrete and glass, shoe box design is just not appealing! Just look at the house across the street in the view photo. It has all kinds of architectural finishings that appeal to the eye, clay tile roof line, arched carports, corner rotunda, custom picture window etc…. This house looks like the lego house my son built when he was 4. Maybe that’s why its appealing to some, it resembles the lego structures built during childhood! I don’t blame the neighbors for being pissed!

The discussion primarily focuses on the design of the home. Since it doesn’t seem unnecessarily large or take up all of the lot, a number of people commented for or against its unique modern style. On one hand, it seems cohesively modern, not a mish-mash of styles for which McMansions are often criticized. On the other hand, it does appear different from the other homes of the neighborhood (of which we have one picture).

One takeaway: the term McMansion can be used as a pejorative term for a home one doesn’t like even if it doesn’t fit the “classic” definition of a McMansion.

The “Big Parade” in Los Angeles really highlights the city’s lack of walkability

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A Los Angeles writer started an event called the “Big Parade” that makes use of a number of staircases in the city. But, this event serves to highlight the city’s overall lack of walkability compared to other big cities around the world:

Koeppel’s early obsession evolved into a piece for Backpacker magazine called “I Climbed Los Angeles” that ran in June 2004. It’s since developed into an annual event called the Big Parade — a two-day, 40-mile urban hike from downtown Los Angeles to the Hollywood sign that covers 100 public stairways along the way. For this year’s parade, the fifth, Koeppel expects several hundred people to join him from around the country…

The parade’s secondary mission is to encourage a sense of community. Koeppel says the parade keeps pace with the slowest walker; he describes it as a simple “walk with neighbors.” The event is free, and Koeppel has even rejected sponsors to keep things as casual as possible. Each day’s walk is divided into segments, with a main loop of five or six miles, and participants are invited to come and go as they please.

“The majority are people who have not walked more than five or six miles in L.A. in the streets in their entire lives,” he says. “Taking them and showing them what L.A. is like on foot — showing them secret passages and landmarks and things they never see from outside the window of their car — has been just really fun.”

Koeppel, who’s known beyond Los Angeles for his celebrated book on the history of bananas, maintains that his purpose in starting the Big Parade isn’t to prove that Los Angeles is a walkable place. He denies the axiom that nobody there walks — rather, he says, nobody seems to walk when you’re looking out from a car window — and sees the city’s infamous sprawl as simply an opportunity for pedestrian exploration. The Big Parade, he says, “is a way to reestablish the presence of individual propulsion within that sprawl.”

So the “Big Parade” is a pedestrian cry in a wilderness of cars and vehicles…

Two things in particular intrigued me in this story:

1. Walking can involve building community. This reminds me of Jane Jacobs’ famous axiom about “eyes on the street” or her thoughts about “public characters” who are out and about and known in neighborhoods. Places like Los Angeles simply don’t allow for much informal encounters on the street level. But, a group of people walking together or near each other can engage in conversations in ways that are very difficult to do in cars. (This also reminds me of an idea my dad had years ago about putting scrolling sign boards in the back windshields of cars so drivers could deliver messages to each other. I imagine the ratio of destructive versus encouraging messages would get high pretty quickly…)

2. The article suggests a number of the staircases were constructed for homeowners who wanted to get off the streetcar and make the trek up to their house. This is a reminder of the extensive streetcar system that Los Angeles once had. How might the city be different today if those streetcars had survived or had been replaced by a similarly spread-out system of mass transit? As historian Kenneth Jackson explains in Crabgrass Frontiers, streetcars had a number of factors working against them. However, these staircases are a suggestion of what Los Angeles might have been.

How much driving time is saved by the completely synchronized LA traffic light system

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I noted the synchronization of all Los Angeles traffic lights a while back but a new piece in the New York Times describes how much time the new system is supposed to save drivers:

The system uses magnetic sensors in the road that measure the flow of traffic, hundreds of cameras and a centralized computer system that makes constant adjustments to keep cars moving as smoothly as possible. The city’s Transportation Department says the average speed of traffic across the city is 16 percent faster under the system, with delays at major intersections down 12 percent.

Without synchronization, it takes an average of 20 minutes to drive five miles on Los Angeles streets; with synchronization, it has fallen to 17.2 minutes, the city says. And the average speed on the city’s streets is now 17.3 miles per hour, up from 15 m.p.h. without synchronized lights.

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who pledged to complete the system in his 2005 campaign, now presents it as a significant accomplishment as his two terms in office comes to an end in June. He argued that the system would also cut carbon emissions by reducing the number of times cars stop and start…

“If we reduce average travel time in Los Angeles by 20 percent, then we will see more people traveling,” Professor Moore said. “It’s money well spent, but part of the benefit is not speed, but throughput.”

These seem small fairly small changes, a few minutes for each average trip, but these would add up over time for individual drivers. Additionally, small improvements in a complex system like LA traffic could have very beneficial outcomes for the whole system.

But, as the article notes, these reduced times may not last long because more people want to drive. This is a rule of road construction: if you add lanes or improve traffic flow, more people will likely get on the road, limiting the benefits of changes. Sychronization of traffic lights may speed things up but there are larger issues at hand including the number of cars on the road and too much reliance on streets and highways to get people where they need to go.

Onion: “Pretty Cute Watching Boston Residents Play Daily Game of ‘Big City'”

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The Onion says this about Boston:

Boston residents once again hustled and bustled their way into the nation’s hearts this week as they continued playing their adorable little game of “Big City,” a live-action role-playing adventure in which Bostonians buzz about their daily routines in a delightful hubbub of excitement as if they lived in a major American metropolis.

Inhabitants of real cities across the nation smiled in affectionate amusement as Bostonians put on their big-city clothes, swiped their Charlie cards for a ride on one of the MBTA’s trolley-like subway cars—charmingly called the “T”—and rushed downtown for “important” business meetings at the John Hancock Building, the South Boston Innovation District, and other pretend centers of global industry and commerce…

According to enchanted onlookers who live in actual metropolitan areas, Boston residents are particularly endearing when they get all dressed up for a night at the theater; eat a big, fancy dinner at the Prudential Center’s top-floor restaurant; and read The Boston Globe, whose reporters get to play a game of Big-City Journalist each and every day…

Sources went on to call the city’s darling nickname, “The Hub,” a great, hilarious touch, as though Boston were an actual locus of anything vital whatsoever.

I don’t know if Boston residents have an inferiority complex. But, the article also mentions a Chicago resident suggesting they also play “Big City.” This reference to Chicago might have a grain of truth in it; Chicago leaders and residents occasionally worry about whether the city is keeping up and is still a global city. Presumably, the only people who don’t have to play “Big City” are residents of New York City and Los Angeles – and this is perhaps how residents of the two largest US cities see it.

Los Angeles “the first major city in the world to synchronize all of its traffic signals”

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Los Angeles, famous for its roads and highways, is now leading the world in having all synchronized traffic lights.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa was expected to flip the switch on Tuesday on a final traffic intersection system that will result in the synchronization of all of nearly 4,400 traffic signals in Los Angeles.

KNX 1070?s Pete Demetriou reports L.A. is about to become the first major city in the world to synchronize all of its traffic signals…

Officials said the completion of this project will increase travel speeds by 16 percent and reduces travel times by 12 percent…

Signal synchronization also dramatically reduces carbon emissions by 1 million metric tons a year due to less idling at intersections, according to officials.

Less congestion and greener? Sounds like a win-win.

It would be interesting to know the final costs and logistics involved from the full project. The article suggests this project was part of the planning for the 1984 Summer Olympics but was not completed until this week. If this is such a great benefit for the city, what is stopping other cities from doing the same thing?

Repeat argument: Washington D.C. is the real second city in the United States

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Aaron Renn argues that Washington D.C., and not Los Angeles or Chicago, is the real “second city” in the United States:

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the Washington metropolitan area overachieved on a variety of measurements versus its peer metro areas—that is, the rest of the ten largest metros in the country, plus the San Francisco Bay Area (which federal classifications divide into two, neither of which would make the Top Ten on its own). Among these regions, Washington ranked fourth in population growth from 2000 to 2010, trailing only the three Sunbelt boomtowns of Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston (see “The Texas Growth Machine”). Washington is currently the seventh most populous metropolitan area in America.The region has performed even more impressively on the jobs front. Since 2001, Washington has enjoyed the lowest unemployment rate of its peer group. Over the course of the entire decade, it ranked second in job growth, trailing only Houston. That wasn’t just because of the federal agencies and gigantic contractors of Washington stereotype. The region has also been a hotbed of entrepreneurship—much of it, to be sure, dependent on federal dollars. During the 2000s, it had 385 firms named to the Inc. 500 lists of fastest-growing companies in America, according to Kauffman Foundation research—by far the most of any metro area. From 2000 through 2011, according to rankings developed by Praxis Strategy Group, Washington’s low-profile but powerful tech sector had the country’s second-highest job growth, after Seattle’s. The region is also one of America’s top life-sciences centers.

Then there’s economic output. During the 2000s, per-capita GDP grew faster in Washington than in any of its peer regions except the Bay Area. Today, Washington’s per-capita GDP is the country’s second-highest—again, after the Bay Area. Unlike Washington, however, the Bay Area hemorrhaged jobs over the course of the decade. Related to Washington’s impressive output is its astonishing median household income, the highest of any metro area with more than 1 million people. A remarkable seven of the ten highest-income counties in America are in metro Washington. And during the 2000s, per-capita income rose in Washington faster than in any of its peer metros.

Finally, Washington’s population is the best-educated in America. Almost half of all adults in the Washington region have college degrees, the highest proportion of any metro area with more than 1 million people. The same is true of graduate degrees: almost 23 percent of Washingtonians hold them…

But what solidifies Washington’s emerging status as America’s new Second City isn’t its economic performance or its emerging global-city profile. Both of those are secondary effects of the real change in Washington: the increasingly intrusive control of the federal government over American life.

Washington has changed in recent decades and Renn highlights some of these shifts. Three things strike me about his analysis:

1. Washington still lags compared to Los Angeles and Chicago in being a world city. According to the 2012 A.T. Kearney Global Cities Index, New York is #1, Los Angeles #6, Chicago #7, Washington #10, and Boston is the next American city at #15.

GlobalCitiesIndex2012ATKearney

This may not be a huge gap but L.A. and Chicago particularly have edges in business activity, human capital, and cultural experience while Washington has the clear edge in political engagement.

2. The choice to build a new capital in the United States back in the late 1700s is still having far-reaching implications today. Imagine New York City as both #1 global city and center of US government. While Renn argues the federal government in Washington is helping propel it up the rankings of cities, I wonder how government centers will fare in the future versus business and trade centers like New York, L.A., and Chicago (which aren’t even the state capitals). We might then benefit from a cross-national comparison with other countries that have similar set-ups.

3. Renn has made this argument before. I wrote a post titled “Washington D.C., not Chicago or LA, the real “second city” of the United States?” back on April 7, 2012 based on Renn’s piece on newgeography.com titled “The Great Reordering of the Urban Hierarchy.” So Renn is making this argument…is anyone else?

h/t Instapundit

Sociologist says portrayal of Iranian-Americans on “Shahs of Sunset” isn’t so bad

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The second season of Shahs of Sunset began last night on Bravo and a sociologist looks at how it portrays Iranian-Americans:

Iranian-Americans talk about white people in surprising ways. Reza Farahan, the show’s gay, mustachioed breakout star, is also its racial id. Whether hollering at “yummy white hos,” asserting “a white guy [can’t] make a Persian man jealous” or assessing a rack of gingham-checked bikinis as “the white section … Persians wouldn’t be caught dead in that,” Reza says things about race no Iranian has ever said before — on TV, that is. The paradox is that Iranians and other Middle Easterners have been (often happily) categorized as “white” in the U.S. since their earliest arrival in the 19th century. Recent efforts among these groups to gain federal recognition as “Middle Eastern” are reflective of internal and external cultural shifts. For example, in my survey of 500 freshmen in my Introduction to Sociology course at the University of California, Santa Barbara, over 75 percent of the students perceived “Middle Eastern” to be its own racial category.

Iranian-American kids and parents are more tightly knit than a carpet. The ubiquitous presence of elders on “Shahs” predates the Osbourne/Kardashian formula for compulsively watchable family drama. Multiple generations of Iranians have always lived on top of one another in apartment buildings, as neighbors in small villages and within the same compounds in posh suburban areas. Here in the U.S., a 2005 study found that second-generation Iranian-Americans cite “parental love and care” as the most important “Iranian” value to pass on to their own children. This contradicts the portrayals of abusive, authoritarian Iranian parents from films like “Not Without My Daughter.” Season two of “Shahs” explores the terrain of Iranian-American filial love even further as bohemian singer Asa Soltan Rahmati struggles to pull her refugee parents out of financial hardship.

Iranian-American interfaith relationships will make you question what you think you know about the Middle East. The show’s inclusion of Jewish and Muslim Iranian Angelinos sets it apart from nearly every other depiction of Middle Eastern life on TV. In fact, religious identity is at the forefront of season one: Mike Shouhed, an Iranian Jew, dates non-Jewish women against his mother’s wishes; the whole cast engages in candid conversation about interfaith marriage; and Reza’s anguish as the child of interfaith divorce (his Iranian-Muslim mother and Iranian-Jewish father “never had a shot” due to disapproving families) is the denouement of the first season. Iranian history is similarly rich with interfaith commerce, friendship, scholarship and even marriage, despite attempts to rewrite the record. Like Reza, I know about interfaith love first-hand: My Iranian-Muslim mom and Iranian-Jewish dad remain married in the rain-soaked Tehrangeles outpost of Portland, Oregon, which makes me at least a Princess of Precipitation.

There’s much to dislike about “Shahs”: Its celebration of consumerism, the cast’s delusions of ethnic superiority and their nostalgia for a mythic “Persia” contradict truths I know as a sociologist. But admitting any degree of depth in “Shahs of Sunset” is a minority position among Iranian-Americans and apparently among academics, too. Most dismiss the show as ethnic defamation, some even signing petitions against such dangerous fiction.

I suspect reality TV faces the same issues as novels do when trying to depict reality: just how much can you cover and with how much nuance?

This makes me wonder: perhaps the bar for declaring a reality TV show good is if it is not horribly contrived and unrealistic. Also, is there any chance sociologists could be consultants for reality TV shows that do want to be more realistic?

Why Asian immigrants moved to the American suburbs

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There has been a flurry of research in the last few decades on the movement of Asian immigrants to the American suburbs, notably looking at the suburbs of Los Angeles and working with the concepts of “ethnoburbs.” Here is a fresh take on the topic from a researcher looking at what has happened in some of these Los Angeles suburbs:

The homeowners I spoke to who settled in the now-Asian ethnoburbs of Diamond Bar, Hacienda Heights, Rowland Heights, or Walnut, said that they were drawn to the country lifestyle. As one white interviewee says, “our house was backed into the wilderness… Diamond Bar looked like a ranch… a nice place to live, to raise children, (and) a clean healthy environment.” Asian American interviewees – many of whom originate from dense metropolitan areas in East and Southeast Asia, and settled in the east Valley in the mid-1980s and beyond – also sought the east Valley’s country lifestyle since the term implied wholesomeness, the setting suggested order and harmony, and the image accompanied with a single-family home connoted the actualization of the American Dream.

While scholars and researchers rightfully problematize political economies, migration patterns, and social dynamics between different racial and class groups in the contemporary ethnoburb, oftentimes post-1965 Asian immigrants moved to these neighborhoods for tangible and banal reasons. Interviewees provided various mundane and frank motives as to why the east Valley sold them twenty or thirty years ago: inexpensive new housing, reputable school districts, easy access to work, distance from urban crime and racial “others,” and by the late 1980s and 1990s, conveniences to ethnic commodities. Though classism, neatly planned neighborhoods, and country living were pivotal aspects in residents’ decisions to settle, “everyday” matters and concerns also informed how a community grew, struggled, and changed. The Asianization of the greater San Gabriel Valley is not slowing down anytime soon as Merlin Chowkwanyun and Jordan Segall demonstrate.

The contemporary emergence of California’s majority-Asian suburb, then, is not solely about Pacific Rim capital, immigrant family reunification, or Asian Americans’ “Model Minority” status allowing them to enter these formerly elite white neighborhoods. It is deeply linked to how immigrants and non-immigrants imagine, absorb, construct, and reinforce popular discourse and imagery of the American Dream, rosy suburbia, and the U.S. West. The salience of these themes influences how individuals or groups envision and build community throughout the U.S. and across generations.

It sounds like the argument here is about adding the lure of suburban culture to the structural arguments. Like others who moved to the suburbs, the cultural values and ideals attached to the American suburbs proved attractive to Asian immigrants even as some of the larger structural forces, like class, made it more possible.

A comparative element might be helpful here: were Asian immigrants more drawn to the American suburbs than immigrants from other places? If so, why?