Returning from my trip to Arizona, I began comparing my city (a suburb of Los Angeles) to the Phoenix/Mesa/Tempe area of Arizona. I observed some drastic differences that got me thinking about my quality of life here in Los Angeles.  Let me preface this by saying that I’ve lived in the Los Angeles area for over 33 years and consider it my home. But, I began thinking about what makes a city run smoothly, remain clean, and how cities keep up with their population growth.

A few things that really stood out when I was visiting in Arizona, that got me comparing it with Los Angeles, are the following:

• Roads and traffic
• Cleanliness
• Air quality
• Cost of living

Los Angeles is a sprawling city of too narrow roads and freeways with endless tail lights as far as the eye can see. Our potholes are almost as famous as New York’s, they can swallow whole SUV’s in a matter of seconds. Our population is larger than the Phoenix metro, by about 5 million. But in contrast, the  roads in Arizona are 6 lanes wide and newly repaved. Their highways are smooth, wide, and the city is continually adding more connections and highways to link their also sprawling communities making traveling around the city pleasant. The difference between these two cities, at least with city planning, is that Phoenix is anticipating a larger population – they are thinking ahead. Los Angeles, being an older city, never planned on so many people inhabiting the area. By the time our population had swelled to current numbers, we were land locked and unable to expand our highways. Obviously, geography does play a part. We are slightly more mountainous than the Phoenix area. Yet, for the amount of money I pay in auto registration and insurance, I feel shortchanged in the quality of roads I travel on.

Another drastic difference I noticed while in Arizona was the clean road sides and NO graffiti. Phoenix either has a terrific road side crew of maintenance people, or their population is more conscientious of throwing trash out their car window. Los Angeles, on the other hand, is littered with garbage from one end to the other. Our road side crews can’t keep up with the amount of trash, and somehow people can’t make it into the trash cans! Graffiti is another problem in our city, everywhere you turn you can find graffiti somewhere on a wall or side of a building. Again, in Phoenix I didn’t see one dab of spray paint anywhere. Unless their roadside crews are also constantly repainting walls and buildings, their population must be less likely to “tag” their turfs. As a city with one of the highest sales tax rates (almost 10%), I think my money is getting lost in the shuffle. It surely isn’t being invested in keeping the city clean.

California was one of the first states to implement zero emissions on their vehicles. Yet, in Los Angeles, you’d never know it. Our air is frequently a warm shade of beige. The coastal fog combined with factory and auto emissions equals smog. Considering our population is very health-minded, it’s ironic that we have the worst air quality in the nation. While in Phoenix, I noticed that I couldn’t see the air. This is a good thing, because air is supposed to be clear! I know that during their sweltering summers, their air quality isn’t as good as during the winter months, but at least they have a period of clean air.

Finally, there is the cost of living comparison. I’m always flabbergasted by how inexpensive other cities are compared to Los Angeles (except New York, of course). For example, the sales tax in Phoenix is just above 6%, that’s almost 4% less than L.A. Groceries, restaurants, and gas are much less as well. And homes? Well, let me just say that because of all the new communities popping up in Phoenix, you can nab a new home for under $100,000. The home prices are posted on all of the new development signs, ranging from $99,999 to the low $200,000′s. Finding a decent home for mid- to low- $200K in Los Angeles county is a near impossible feat. (I do want to touch more upon home developments, but I’ll save this for another post).

My comparison between these two cities made me realize that my husband and I need to move out of Los Angeles county. We are currently considering Ventura county, or moving just north of Los Angeles. We still want some of the benefits of being near a large metro, like the opera, shopping, the Getty Museum, and a variety of restaurants. We also like the idea of living within an hour of the beach, even though we really aren’t beach people. So, with a county population under 1 million, traveling around town will make life much more pleasant. Bike riding will also feel safer as many of Ventura counties’ cities have marked bicycle lanes. As we begin planning our move, I’ll be keeping these items in mind when choosing our new “home” city.

What do you like about your city? What do you dislike? Have you recently moved because of similar problems? Do you see your city becoming run down? How does that effect your psyche?

Last night, something scary happened. My husband and I left in a hurry to run some errands and thought we had closed our garage door. Of course, not closing the garage door may not seem too terribly scary, but our garage faces an alley where no one can notice strangers coming or going. Our alley has a few people who roam up and down collecting cans and a guy who drives up and down collecting things made of metal. This is all fine in my book. But last night, as we drove down our alley and headed back to our garage, I realized we had left the garage door open!

I love our bikes!

My husbands first words out of his mouth were, “Our bikes are gone!” Gasp! I thought, “My bike is gone? What will I do? I love my bike.” My husband starting searching through his tool boxes to see if anything else was missing or had been touched. To our surprise, nothing else was missing. So, we assumed someone, or two people, quickly saw two bikes, hopped on them, and rode off into the setting sun. What a great Christmas present those bikes would have made! My first reaction was that I needed a new bike. Yes, this is silly, but two days a week a ride my bike to work. One day a week I ride my bike to school and avoid having to pay for parking. And many days a week I ride my bike to Starbucks. I needed a bike!

My husband thought it would be best to drive around the neighborhood and see if we could find the assalients. As we were driving off, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that our bikes were in our backyard. Our backyard? I hopped out of the car and raced through the garage door  into the backyard. Sure enough, there they were, safe and sound. Relieved and confused, we parked them safely back in the garage and closed the door.

While eating dinner, we discussed who could have put those bikes there. I initially thought it might have been our next door neighbors who had been pulling in to their garage as we were pulling out of ours. Maybe they had noticed we hadn’t closed the door and decided to be helpful. My husband thought it might be the nice old lady who walks her dog down our alley that wrangled the bikes into the yard. I couldn’t picture her doing this with her dog on the leash, our bikes are heavy and she is elderly.

Later that night, we listened to a voice message on our answering machine that solved the puzzle. Our neighbor, three doors down who frequently hangs out in his garage, left us a message explaining the whole scenario. The elderly dog walking lady noticed our garage door was open. Not being able to figure out how to close the garage door herself (she would have had to push the button and run to beat the door), she talked our neighbor into moving the bikes into our backyard. He also couldn’t figure out how to close the garage door from the inside, had left it open and looked up our phone number to leave us a message (this is a neighbor who lives behind our house, so we are really alley neighbors.)

Thank goodness for friendly neighbors! I would hate to have to find a new bike or go without one for a while. It has become my second mode of transportation and I love riding.

I haven’t written about houses in a while, yet they are frequently on my mind. Small houses, large houses, cookie-cutter houses; so many choices, but what can I afford? So far, I can’t afford anything yet. My husband and I are still working on saving for a down payment. We’ve made progress, though:

• Paid off $6,000 in credit card debt
• Paid down $1,700 on our line of credit
• Gotten my student loan out of default
• Saved $5,000

Every month we accomplish some small goal towards owning our little house in the valley. While we are hard at work saving for our down payment, we often talk about what we like about the houses in our neighborhood and adjacent neighborhoods. This keeps the objective of our goal in mind and it will hopefully save us some time when we begin searching for homes.

A house for sale in my neighborhood, 1951

Our current neighborhood, where we rent a house, is compiled of 1950′s mini-ranch style homes. Due to their small size, all hovering around 1,000 square feet, I wouldn’t call these homes ranch-style at all. However, I came across a very old brochure of our neighborhood and that is how the original developers marketed these homes. If I were to redesign their brochures, I would have called them more cape-cod or cottage style homes. Our rental house is basically a large square shape, with 3 smallish bedrooms, 2 teeny-weeny bathrooms, one long living/dining area, and a decent sized square kitchen. In contrast, ranch style homes are frequently more rectangular in shape and long.

Our neighbor, who has been camping in his tent while his rebuilds his house, has decided to disregard the neighborhood architecture and appears to be building a Mediterranean-style mansion that takes up the entire lot. As I have been watching the progress over the last several months, I’m a bit taken aback by his choice in design. When the house is finished, I’m afraid that it will stick out like a sore thumb. This is something I’ve taken into consideration when thinking about what kind of house I would like to purchase. There’s something to be said about consistency within a neighborhood.

I’m not taking about the current cookie-cutter style homes that developers are now building. The ones that have only 4 different models and appear in an AABB pattern within newer communities. I’m talking about slightly older communities that have had time to change color schemes, add on rooms, and have some sort of variation in design (even if it is just a matter of moving the placement of the garage.) These homes don’t seem like duplicates of each other, and there is more detail in the architecture, whether it’s the fake birdhouse-style homes or the added scalloped trim around the porch. Older homes may need more work, but this can mean fixing it up to my liking and adding features I think are important, like a solar-heated water heater.

Here is a snapshot of an older block not far from where I live. You’ll see that the homes have taken on unique changes over the years:

Changing neighborhood architecture

Hopefully by this time next year, I will be reporting back that I own a similar style house.

Yesterday I posted questions I had about how the suburbs were created and why they were patterned on a grid-system. Well, I started reading a terrific book to quell my curiosity about urban planning, published in 1961 by Jane Jacobs, titled The Death and Life of Great American Cities. I’ve only read the first couple of chapters, and yes, it is a book that is almost 50 years old. However, most communities were built around this time, so many of Jacobs’s points are still current today.

The first few chapters discuss the importance of bustling sidewalks and short blocks. She described how in New York City, the safest streets are streets that have multiple uses with lots of pedestrians. For instance, the street might contain a grocer, a dry cleaners, a deli, a florist, and a restaurant or bar that is open late. This gives people on the streets a destination to go towards all day long and even into the night. The movement of these strangers gives individuals a common feeling of safety, even though they don’t know each other. The inhabitants in the area know each other, if only by acquaintance, and this adds to that feeling of community. Jacobs’s points out that it doesn’t matter if there is a park, or grass nearby, that’s not what makes the area safe. The short blocks and cohesiveness of the area provides that feeling.

When a city “revitalizes” an area they feel has become run down, they often build expanses of spaces that people don’t use. The fewer the people, the less safe the area becomes. The taller the apartment complexes, the less connected the people living in them feel to the block. Current urban planning is based on a Garden City plan that is over 100 years old. It was a utopia-driven plan with the goal being to thin out the city of London. It didn’t work then, and it doesn’t work now.

When a sidewalk becomes desolate, there are fewer eyes watching it because there is nothing to watch. It becomes, as she says, “…a gray, dull area.” Who wants to watch a gray, dull area? No one. As this happens, the sidewalk becomes a little less safe since no one is watching.

This got me thinking about my neighborhood. I grew up in the suburbs and still live in the suburbs. Jacobs’s states that her observations and research don’t include the suburbs since she focused on dense cities. Yet, much of what she says about cities, holds true for the suburbs. For instance, when I was growing up in the late 1970′s and early 80′s, I played out side on the sidewalks and in the street. There were plenty of kids outside, with parent’s eyes watching from inside our homes. We felt safe in numbers. We felt safe because we could see our parents peeking out from kitchen windows.

There was a huge shift in the late 80′s and early 90′s, a fear of strangers and the beginning of a two-parent working household. This lead many children inside or to the backyards. In my community, our backyard fences are frequently 6-feet tall. Today, I rarely see children playing on the sidewalks or in the streets in their neighborhoods. Since fewer children are venturing out of their houses, there are fewer eyes watching, making the neighborhoods seem less safe. In my opinion, this not only is affecting the safety of communities, it is affecting children’s social skills.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I right in saying that neighborhoods, whether suburban or urban, need eyes watching? Does a bustling sidewalk equal safety?

I’ve always had a curiosity about how a once rural section of town transformed into a suburban area. What was the initial motivation to create suburbs? How did city planners affect the overall layout? Why did they choose a grid layout?

I live in the San Fernando Valley. Once a place of idyllic ranches owned by Hollywood’s elite actors and actresses of the 1930′s and 1940′s. It was a place where the famous could wind down and get away. Howard Hughes filmed the 1920′s film Hell’s Angels out of the Van Nuys airport (then called the Metropolitan Airport). Lucille Ball and Ricky Ricardo owned a ranch along side Barbara Stanwick and the Marx Brothers. Clark Gable and Carole Lombard’s Encino ranch wasn’t far from the original Tarzana ranch (owned by the creator of Tarzan), which is now the city of Tarzana. Brochures touted the beautiful Twin Lakes community, a community which no longer has a lake, in northern Chatsworth, off the 118 freeway. Calabasas, in the 1930′s,  was being sold originally as an artists colony. Now it is filled with multimillion dollar homes owned by very wealthy business owners, few artists can afford to reside in such a place.

How did it become the suburban metropolis that it is now? What happened to those original homes and ranches? Why didn’t it retain some of it’s communities original plans? There, of course, is a very long history to the San Fernando Valley area beginning with the native Tongva peoples, and the building of the San Fernando Mission during the Spanish mission period. Yet, the beginning of the suburbs start around the early 1900′s.

Prior to 1913 and the building of the Los Angeles aqueduct, the valley was very dry, a semi-arid topography that couldn’t support a huge population. After this aqueduct was completed, there was a huge boom in housing developments. Automobiles and the development of freeways helped connect this valley area to the greater Los Angeles area, an already booming city.

I found a terrific link, an article written by Charlotte Laws, Ph.D., that clearly states the problem with suburbia, or at least the Valley. Here is an excerpt from her article:

“As Los Angeles’ pastoral backyard, the Valley seemed an ideal place to realize these new notions of metropolitan community. Yet ultimately Los Angeles failed to capitalize on them. Some Progressive ideas were incorporated into the development of the older sections of the City—as the parks west of downtown will bear witness—but by the 1920s, these increasingly began to fall by the wayside. The costs of the aqueduct, and other infrastructure, were part of the problem; so too was the desire of developers, in the Valley as elsewhere, to maximize the profits on their land.

As a result, Los Angeles grew, and the Valley most notably, with a shocking lack of parks, green space or attractive public areas. The developers ignored the advice of city officials to designate parklands for their subdivisions, and by 1928, parks took up a mere 0.6% of the City. Later attempts to re-fashion the City—notably the 1930 Olmstead Plan—that would have placed park, river, and open space development at the center of the city plan, never materialized.”

This, of course, explains part of our suburban problem here in the SF Valley. My guess is that it’s not only here that we experience these problems, but in many suburban areas. Suburban areas seem like an after-thought.  A city doesn’t project their population growth accurately, then struggles to catch up with it, only to realize that their plans forgot something. That something they forgot to do is create parks and roads that are pedestrian friendly, land-locking the suburbs within their concrete grid-system.

So what happened to those ranches owned by the late actors of the 1930′s and 40′s? Some of them got razed when developers purchased their land only to build a few hundred homes. Others got re-purposed, for example, there is still an old home sitting at the western corner of a small intersection, that has been turned into a special education school. Supposedly, it was the home of Will Rogers.

Barbara Stanwick's / Jack Oakie's Northridge House

There is one home left, that of Barbara Stanwick (then owned by Jack Oakie), that still sits on its original, untouched, 11-acres. It was sold this past year, but I’m not sure to whom. About a year ago, it had been sold to a developer, but that developer had run out of money to build. My husband and I went to the property and jumped the fence (yes, we were trespassing!). I’m curious, what can I say?! We peeked in the windows of the home, it had looked like it had been redecorated in the 1970′s with blue carpeting. The dark wooden floors were still intact and in good repair. The small 3-car garages and flagstone bricks were all in good shape. The pool was also taken care of, nice and clean, with a large chain-link fence surrounding it (to keep people out). The tennis courts below the house looked a little worn. The rolling 11-acres were overgrown and brown at the time of our visit, due to lack of rain.

Luckily, I did some research and found that the home is land marked, meaning it can’t be torn down. Only time will tell what will happen to that remaining 11-acres sitting between a Honda Dealership and the aqueduct.