New Geography

Tag: Los Angeles

  • A Little Genius for the City’s So-Called ‘Art World’

    There’s a little girl – maybe 10 or 12 years old – whose family owns a store just a couple of miles from Downtown Los Angeles. She spends a lot of time at the place after her nearby school lets out for the day, sort of helping out but mostly just hanging around where her older relatives can see her.

    I call her “Little Genius” because she’s always reading a book or busy at a computer or making paper dolls or working on some other challenge.

    Little Genius is Asian/American, the daughter of immigrants, and I think the flavor of academic prowess that comes with the nickname makes her happy in part because it makes her elders happy.

    It’s not just a nickname, though. I don’t know if Little Genius will grow up to be a great scientist or legal scholar or fill some other lofty role in our society. I do know, however, that she has the soul of an artist. Her paper dolls are much more intricate than the typical cut-outs. She recently put some craft clay and left-over cardboard from around the store together to make a scaled-down village occupied by little pigs. “The Pig Empire” went on display at the store for a few days, and plenty of customers enjoyed the work. Count me among them – it interested me, drew me close. I wondered about her motive and the inspiration for her little village.

    I thought about Little Genius when 13th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Eric Garcetti recently spoke of using $2.8 million in city funds to forge greater links between the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in the gleaming Bunker Hill district of Downtown and the many ethnic and immigrant and blue-collar folks who live in nearby areas.

    Garcetti pulled off a different sort of art – for a politician, anyway. He plainly spoke some truths that seldom get much of a genuine airing in our city. His brush strokes were bold, but applied with enough finesse to avoid offending anyone but the unduly sensitive. He said he’d like to see MOCA draw more visitors “who have never interacted with art in the visceral, provocative way that contemporary art can serve.” He called MOCA an institution with the potential to “set in motion a civic dialogue that’s been lacking in Los Angeles,” adding that that he hopes to see a variety of efforts focused on linking the museum to local schools, senior citizen’s centers, and everyday working folks by offering programs that appeal to them, and which they can readily attend.

    Perhaps this seems a mild triumph of rhetoric, but art in our city is in such a state of withdrawal that Garcetti’s comments amounted to some useful provocation of his own. Hundreds of thousands of persons live within a short distance of MOCA. Many of them labor hard – for some it’s a downright struggle – to maintain themselves in the city. Not many of them, or their children, are getting to MOCA.

    Garcetti’s comments also gave a reminder that museums and galleries might serve as reflections or repositories of art, but they should not be the exclusive province of what many refer to as the “art world.” I will go a step further – making clear that these are my thoughts and not Garcetti’s – and say that the moment artists, their patrons, and institutions such as MOCA come to believe that there is a distinct “art world” they lose touch with art itself.

    Art is a reflection of culture. Our culture is all of us, all mixed up. Great art engages all of us and helps us understand this culture of ours. How can anyone claim to be an artist while carving off a separate “art world” of limited membership?

    They can’t.

    That’s the best reason for all of us to take seriously Garcetti’s recent comments. It’s time to call on MOCA to make new and stronger efforts to reach Little Genius and the teeming mass of others who might not be members of the so-called “art world” but nevertheless serve as the heart and soul of our culture – also known as the real world.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • Tough Budget Math for City Politicians: Bad Economy + Human Nature = More Cops

    Our economy is going to get better some day, step by step. But it’s bad right now, with a full recovery likely a matter of years rather than months away. Public officials should plan accordingly, keeping in mind how the vicious cycle of a bad economy turns typical decision making on its head.

    Start with a look at a virtuous cycle – the opposite of a vicious cycle – for a point of reference. Look back to the early 1990s, when President Bill Clinton got a tax increase through the U.S. Congress. A lot of folks were genuinely concerned about our federal budget deficits and national debt back then. The tax hike signaled that the federal government had grown serious about getting its finances in line. That quelled fears about inflation, and sent interest rates lower.

    The relatively low cost of borrowing benefited businesses just as new strides in technology were reshaping our lives and helping keep inflation in check. The tech sector’s growth sparked other segments of the economy, leading to more payroll taxes, sales taxes, property taxes, capital gains taxes, etc. The federal budget came into balance, and then went into surplus. Public officials had plenty to divvy up from the virtuous cycle.

    Now we face a vicious cycle. Tapped-out consumers stop spending. Companies cut back on orders and production and payrolls. Weakness leads to more weakness. Jobs keep disappearing. Government revenues decline at every level. Budget deficits abound.

    Elected officials in Los Angeles should beware as they seek to meet those deficits with budget cuts, however. The vicious cycle is in full swing. Plenty of folks are desperate to hang on to their house, make their rent, or just get their next meal. Desperate individuals sometimes take desperate actions. Some of them lie, cheat, steal – and worse.

    This trend holds the potential to tear apart our social fabric. Examine past periods of economic hardship and you’ll see that some folks fall into cynicism, looking beyond government institutions for leadership. Some are drawn to what appears to be strong leadership but is really a criminal element sophisticated enough to exploit stress points in our societal sense of right and wrong. Yesterday’s gangsters could quickly become today’s folk heroes in a tough economy.

    That’s a particularly vicious cycle, and it will take an increased commitment to public safety to head off any such erosion to our social compact amid the current downturn.

    Now is the time for elected officials to trade across-the-board mentalities on budget cuts for a sharpened sense of priorities. They should heed the vicious cycle and find money for more cops to help keep the cynics and criminals at bay while the rest of us make an honest effort to slug our way through tough times.

    The everyday working folks and business owners who will ultimately pull us out of this mess deserve that much cover.

    The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), meanwhile, has earned the assumption that properly trained and appropriately deployed cops can do more than simply react to crimes once they have occurred. The LAPD’s recent record has earned a place for the notion that good police work can not only prevent crimes but also dispel any atmosphere of lawlessness that might otherwise take hold – with safeguards on civil liberties in place all the while.

    Indeed, it’s true that the rugged economy is pushing some of our people a rung or two down the socio-economic ladder, and it’s inevitable that some of them will resort to crime. Yet that still doesn’t mean that socio-economic factors trump cops on the beat – or that we must accept lawlessness as a natural and unavoidable by-product of a bad economy. The economic downturn means that the pool of potential criminals will grow, to be sure, but that presents a question of math rather than sociology – and the answer is more cops.

    Just in case that’s not enough, we urge our politicians to consider the bonus that’s in it for them. They should understand just how disappointed voters are with elected officials at every level. They should know that perhaps the best chance for them to recover their standing with the public is to make courageous decisions when it comes to public safety.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • A Holiday Tale for All

    A few nights before Christmas
    The middle of Hanukkah
    Los Angeles is stirring
    A City Symphonica

    Shoppers on Broadway
    Like peas in a pod
    Wishing each other
    Feliz Navidad

    Crowds keep an eye out
    For gifts that will thrill
    On Pico and Central
    On Sunset and Hill

    When down Santee Alley
    Who should appear
    But Hanukkah Harry
    And a team of reindeer

    He pulls up his sleigh
    Steps down to the street
    He smiles and he waves
    To all those he meets

    He cannot stay long
    He just stopped to say
    That Santa and he
    Are working away

    “There’s trouble around
    all through our world
    Enough to be frightful
    for each boy and girl

    So Santa and I
    Must share this year’s load
    For only one person
    It’s too long of a road

    It’s a good thing we’re pals
    Old Santa and I
    Although our faiths differ
    He’s still a good guy

    So we’re splitting the load
    All through the city
    We’ll visit all homes
    The gorgeous and gritty

    Whether Christmas or Kwanzaa
    Hanukkah or New Year’s
    We want to bring hope
    And ease some of your fears

    So if you see Santa or me
    Or perhaps another fellow
    Dressed in red or white
    Or green or yellow

    Remember that different
    Doesn’t mean wrong
    We all have our customs
    Faith, feast and song

    So be like Santa and me
    As we’re dashing around
    Look past the difference
    And find common ground”

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • City Planning and The Politics of Pollution

    Part Two. Yesterday, in Part One, Critser discussed scientific advances in understanding air pollution. Today, he addresses the social implications.

    The new science of air pollution, with its emphasis on dose-response mechanisms, may remake the traditional advocacy realm of social and environmental justice. In the past, that world has been focused on class, race and ethnicity, classic markers of inequality and vulnerability. Today, the focus is more “exposure driven.” “Dosage… may be something people who have ignored environmental justice can get their heads around,” one researcher at last month’s Environmental Epidemiology conference in Pasadena noted. “It may get people’s attention on something that affects us all.”

    Other new observations are recasting ancient (and highly suspect) urban-suburban dichotomies as well. If one parses the science of small, regional temperature increases—the kind we may see more of in the future—and how those spikes “activate” ultrafine particles, one discovers a disturbing phenomenon: The combination of heat and UFPs makes airborne plant pollens more inflammatory. Such was the finding of Italian researchers studying how traffic emissions and high temperatures in Naples fortify the toxicity of urtica, the common allergen known as the nettle plant. One wonders how the same combination remakes the lovely sage and chaparral environment surrounding Southern California suburbs, even when the region isn’t burning. It is a disturbing prospect for those who believe they have escaped inflammation by exchanging big cities for exurban greenlands.

    What, besides moving to Iceland, can be done? Few have thought more about that, at the practical level, than Andrea Hricko, an associate professor of clinical preventive medicine at USC, where she is trying to translate epidemiological data about pollution into practical public health policy. For years, Hricko’s focus was the Port of Los Angeles and the neighborhoods and schools surrounding that diesel-saturated realm. What she found were huge spikes in childhood chronic diseases, especially asthma, as well as other heart and lung problems. She and others succeeded in getting one school relocated—pushed back from the most truck-intensive route near the Alameda Corridor—but even that victory was a lesson in the unintended consequences of regulation.

    “Come over here, you have to see this,” she said to a visitor one day in her crammed office on the medical school campus. On her computer appeared a picture of a group of kids playing soccer. In the immediate background loomed trucks belching the substances that eventually make the port air so heinously foggy. “See, this is where the school was. This was supposed to be the buffer zone, but… being that it is also rare, unoccupied space, and LA schools have so little recreational area, it is now a defacto playground. So you have kids better protected inside, but doing their deepest breathing part of their day right on top of the trucks.” It’s a perfect public health storm, she notes, because “getting kids outside and exercising more is a huge priority in the obesity-diabetes crisis.”

    Hricko’s focus on the ports, arguably the octopus of contemporary industrial Los Angeles, has taught her some hard lessons. You can always get a regulation that says, for example, don’t build a school within X distance of a freeway, but you can rarely switch the scenario around, say, with a ruling that says don’t widen a freeway when it is within X distance of a school. The same is true of building a new rail yard, as is the case just north of the port today. For years, area residents waged war with the railroad and the port to simply locate the new yard closer to the water, which would have drastically reduced the number of short, emission-intensive trips by trucks, and thus hopefully cut down the high rate of respiratory disease in the area. The solution, instead, was to go ahead and build the yard right by the homes, with a promise by state regulatory agencies to install new, high efficiency filters in all area homes. While that protects the children while they’re inside—and, it would seem, suggests a possible boom enterprise for the filter industry—it’s far from an ideal solution. “They’re still spending most of their time outside, and we still need to get them to exercise more while they’re out there. It’s a frustrating exercise.”

    Hricko has also wondered if the same impasse won’t obtain in the arena of the low-income housing juggernaut led by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. One recent hearing concerned an affordable housing complex proposed alongside the 5 freeway near East Los Angeles. As Hricko tells it, that project would be sandwiched between one of the most emissions-choked portions of the freeway and the mass transit Gold Line, which would run just behind it. “There was all kinds of talk about filtering, etcetera, but the real question was never brought to the fore: Perhaps this shouldn’t be considered for housing in the first place.” She notes that a member of the LA County Public Health staff made precisely this point… privately.

    One can understand why. Affordable housing is an important, unmet need in Los Angeles, one with a substantial political establishment behind it and a charismatic mayor in front of it. There is, as a result, an understandable reluctance to get in the way of the parade, especially after years of political impasse. The mayor recently upped the ante and proclaimed a new $5 billion housing initiative, much of which would center on building new housing near mass transit stations. The essence of this transit pod strategy has a fairly sustainable logic: If you can get people to live near mass transit, you’ll dramatically reduce one of the biggest single factors in urban pollution: the numerous short, one-to-five mile trips that people make every day, whether to work or to the store or to pick up the kids at school. You’ll also reduce traffic jams.

    The problem, of course, is human nature, and the naughty desire by poor people, especially in Los Angeles, to be like the rich people, driving whenever and to wherever they want. Compounding this, for the scheme to work, we still must get from the station to work and people will use a car to do that. “For Antonio’s plan to work, you’d basically have to make it a condition of ownership that you don’t have a car. Or, that if you are going to buy this housing, you have to work somewhere on the trainline,” Hricko said with a knowing smile. “Because if you don’t, you still have people driving. You’re defeating your purpose before you ever get started.”

    That’s one realm where a leader like Villaraigosa, with his celebrity status and megawatt smile, could lead by example. But that hasn’t happened so far. Mike Woo, who describes himself as a supporter of the mayor, says “I want to say that I think the mayor’s people are on top of this. I wish I could say that. I really wish I could say that.” Woo notes that there is a slightly bigger time window for solving the housing crunch than is popularly acknowledged. The Planning Commission’s most recent staff report holds that meeting the need for housing in most transit corridors for the next 8-10 years does not require raising the density of housing.

    That’s a rare breather, Woo says. Let’s make the most of it.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • Will The New Air Pollution Science Choke City Planners?

    Part One of A Two-Part Series

    Not long ago, Michael Woo, a former Los Angeles city councilman and current member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission, took up a case pending approval by that body: a mixed housing-retail development near the intersection of Cahuenga Boulevard and Riverside Drive. Like many of the remaining buildable sites in the city, the property is right next to a roaring motorway; the windows of some apartments would look right out onto the 134 Freeway. To Angelinos, who have grown up in a car culture, it was hardly a remarkable proposal. But Woo, perhaps one of the brainier members of the city’s political elite—after losing a mayoral race to Richard Riordan in the early 1990s he became a professor of public policy at University of Southern California—had a problem with it, and he couldn’t quite let it go.

    Just a few weeks before, the Commission had witnessed a lengthy presentation by a scientist who’d been studying how living within 500 yards of high traffic corridors—freeways and some particularly busy streets—substantially raises the risk for a number of chronic diseases. “We were all sort of sitting there, looking at this proposal and discussing it through the conventional lens we normally use, when I said, `Wait a minute. Didn’t we just hear a pretty compelling argument about this the other day? Can we talk about that for a minute?’ It struck me that it was impossible to read those studies and then continue approving housing that sits that close to freeways.”

    The Commission then asked for the developer’s point of view on the issue. “As I recall, the only real mitigation that they brought up was almost comic,” Woo says. “Their idea was, you know, we’ve got that covered: We’re going to make sure that residents can’t open the windows that face the freeway.” The project was approved.

    Woo doesn’t particularly fault anyone in the exchange, because the implications of the new science of air pollution—much of it driven by pioneering work at USC, the University of California at Los Angeles, and California Institute of Technology—are utterly mind boggling. No one has quite calculated exactly how much buildable land would be excised from use for housing and schools if this growing body of work were to take hold in the policy realm, but, as Woo said, “We can’t hide from this issue anymore. The hard science on the subject is compelling. It makes you fundamentally rethink some pretty key parts of how, where and why we’re building housing in such locations.”

    For decades, pretty much everyone “knew” that smog—usually measured as ozone, the gas that forms from sunlight’s ionizing effect on air particles—caused all kinds of health problems, principally those associated with the lungs, like asthma. But the truth of the matter is that, until ten years or so ago, no one knew how that happened; they didn’t know the “mechanism of action,” the intricate physiological processes that lead to chronic airway inflammation. Epidemiological data was confounding, because some high ozone communities showed lower rates of asthma than low ozone communities. Also, smog levels—measured as ozone—were going down, while asthma rates were going though the roof.

    One suspect was what researchers called fresh emissions, comprised of ultrafine particles, or UFPs, which are so small that they can penetrate the furthest reaches of the lung’s bronchial branches and set off the systemic inflammation that causes respiratory disease. Thus, it was possible to have lower ozone levels and still have increased levels of inflammation, or as USC Professor Robert McConnell notes, “You could have cleaner horizons but still have increasing inflammation to people who live closer to where the particles are being produced.” McConnell has been leading the federally funded Children’s Health Study in Los Angeles for over a decade. “I tell people that I’m studying how pollution causes asthma, and people look at me and say, `I thought we already knew that,’” says McConnell. “The fact is that we assume risks that aren’t there, and we’re ignorant of risks that are there.”

    What caused the sea change in pollution epidemiology—the ability to link exposure to tail pipe emissions and chronic diseases—is as much a story of ingenuity at the lab bench as it is one of persistence against conveniently indolent regulations. At USC, engineers over the past 20 years have invented ways to concentrate particles from the freeway, assess their specific toxicity in human doses, and then test various theses with lab animals genetically engineered to physiologically respond like humans. They have also developed ways to track real-time daily human exposures to ultrafine particles. On any given day in Los Angeles there are mobile smog units measuring how pollution ebbs and flows on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis. There are people wearing “personal ambient pollution” backpacks to track how individuals experience different loads of smog throughout their day, part of which may be spent in a low-pollution environment, part in a high. Through modern genomics, we also now know that several highly prevalent gene mutations make some people more susceptible to pollution, and that others make them less susceptible.

    At all three universities, engineers in the aerosol sciences developed machines that could accurately measure not just ozone—a rather crude measure of air toxicity—but also specific toxins, known as ultrafine particulate matter, or UFPs, of less than 2.5 microns. It is stuff so small that it can reach the bottom of the airways; there, it can over-stimulate the so-called inflammatory cascade of the body’s native defense system and turn it into a disease called asthma. At UCLA, cell biologists, toxicologists and lung and heart specialists have even been able to image what happens to the human cell when it’s exposed to high levels of ultrafine particles. It is the kind of image that can make one utterly despairing, but one that also might clue modern physicians, medical researchers and environmental scientists on how to better focus on the issue and perhaps mitigate it.

    A few examples of new directions within the science:

    Ultrafine Particles, Diesel Exhaust And Asthma: A growing consensus holds that, infants, young children, and expectant women experience substantial elevations in risk for deficits in lung function growth when living near high volume motorways. There is less consensus on the recommended buffer zone, ranging from 75 meters to 500 meters.

    Ultrafine Particles And Heart Disease: A growing body of laboratory experiments and human observational work links heart disease, especially the process leading to atherosclerosis and heart attack, to air pollution. Recent work at UCLA and USC on lab mice parked next to the 110 Freeway has suggested an alarming thesis of causality: That chronic exposure to high levels of ultrafine particles may make us more likely to get heart disease because it makes HDL—the so-called “good,” form of cholesterol that “cleans up” the bad form—dysfunctional.

    Diesel, Ultrafine Particles And Alzheimer’s: Work coming out of Mexico City, increasingly LA’s sister city in the environmental sciences, documents how amyloid plaque, one of two suspect brain proteins associated with Alzheimer’s, increases with exposure to air particles, especially in children and young adults.

    Diabetes, High Blood Pressure And Obesity: A small but growing body of research shows that being fat and breathing smog is really bad for you. Worse, high exposures may accentuate existing diabetes and metabolic syndrome, the perfect storm of high cholesterol, high blood sugar, and high blood pressure.

    Air Pollution, Expectant Mothers, And Infants: UCLA researchers have repeatedly demonstrated a consistent, dose-dependent relationship between expectant mothers living in high traffic-emission-adjacent housing and premature births, low birth weights, birth defects and respiratory diseases. In a recent report, the UCLA Institute of the Environment concluded that the problems were of such magnitude as to “require drastic changes to motor vehicle and transportation systems” over the next decades.

    In Part Two, Critser explores the politics of pollution.

    Greg Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin 2003), Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies (Houghton 2005), and Eternity Soup: Inside the Quest to End Aging (Random/Harmony 2009).

  • L.A.’s Big-Bucks Plan for Upper Floors on Broadway Overlooks Facts at Ground Level

    City officials and private business owners recently gathered to celebrate the extended holiday hours of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) Metro Red Line train service between Hollywood and Downtown. Private businesses put up $50,000 or so to pay for the Red Line to run an extra two hours — until 3 a.m. — on weekends through December 27. The local business community also came up with private funds for free service on city-operated DASH buses that will offer connections to late-night Red Line riders and others.

    There’s room to question the timing of those moves amid an economic slide. Yet there’s just as much reason to see good sense and courage behind efforts to kick-start economic activity in the face of the frozen confidence of consumers. The effort falls within the realm of a privately financed gamble, too, so that’s fair enough.

    It’s another thing altogether for our city officials to take such chances on an economic stimulus program, as they apparently intend to do with a plan to make $150 million a year available for loans to property owners along the Downtown stretch of Broadway.

    The plan, as stated by 14th District Los Angeles City Councilmember Jose Huizar, is to provide incentives for property owners to renovate some of the long-empty upper floors of buildings along the thoroughfare, where many of the structures have few tenants besides ground-floor retailers.

    Huizar has noted that the empty spaces provide no jobs and little tax revenue, and that he hopes to reverse that by lending money to property owners from a pool of federal funds. The funds would finance renovations in hopes of drawing commercial tenants and jobs to the upper floors on Broadway.

    It remains unclear why any of the property owners who didn’t see incentives to renovate their properties during Downtown’s recent boom years would find reasons to do so now. It’s also unclear what sort of tenants would fill the empty spaces. It could be several years before we see anything resembling a hot economy in these parts.

    Again, there is always room for bold ideas that are counter-intuitive. Fortune magazine launched in 1930 — just four months after the stock market crash that signaled the Great Depression — and the publication has done just fine all these years. There’s also room to figure that renovations take awhile, and such work along Broadway might be ready just as the economy picks up.

    This economic mess of ours is big and immediate, though, causing extreme difficulties for folks everywhere. There’s some irony here, because you can get a picture of the pain by walking along Broadway. Don’t bother looking at those empty spaces on the upper floor. Take a gander at the ground floors, where many of the retail shops that buzzed with customers just a short while ago have closed, and those that remain face uncertain prospects.

    It’s enough to make you wonder whether $150 million might be better spent on something other than loans to property owners on the hopes that renovations will someday bring jobs from somewhere to the upper floors along Broadway.

    Meanwhile, there’s never been a better chance of getting a change on the rules that come with federal funds. That should be enough for Huizar and other city officials to re-think their plans. They should consider that Broadway — while it’s not everybody’s cup of tea — has been one of the busiest commercial streets in the city for years. It’s a place where merchants sell, workers earn, and shoppers spend.

    Maybe the action is mostly bargain retail on the ground floor, but Broadway is a working street — and we need all of those we can get right now.

    So why not focus ways to help retailers hang on, and draw more to fill the new gaps at street level? How about renovations for storefronts, with merchants allowed a voice in the process? Or more cops for the area to help improve the atmosphere for shoppers? Or aggressive promotions of the retail scene? All of that might even entice a few more mid- and upper-scale merchants to set up shop on Broadway, sparking some organic changes in the marketplace.

    Pick a program, but keep in mind that this is no time to overlook — quite literally — Broadway’s long-standing role as a street-level heartbeat of our city.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • Glimpsing Reasons to Give Thanks in the City of Angels

    This is one tough Thanksgiving coming up for a lot of folks in Los Angeles, where so many have been left vulnerable by the economic downturn.

    This place of ours, this city, looked good for the ride just a few months ago.

    Now it looks different.

    There are different faces on our streets. Some are new, out of place, in a daze over where they have landed.

    Some others are the same folks we used to see, but they look hungrier now, or less healthy.

    There are different faces in the stores and restaurants, too. Merchants look worried, and their employees seem just as wary.

    Friends and neighbors, shopkeepers and strangers — everyone, it seems, looks different these days. Concern has crowded out confidence.

    But look a bit closer and you’ll start to see something else, a certain characteristic that resides somewhere among the worries. The initial shock of the economy’s dive is wearing off. Resolve is beginning to show in folks’ eyes, offering a down payment on the promise that optimism will return in time.

    It will take some time, to be sure—and not every story will have a happy ending as we work our way through the economic storm.

    I am quite certain, though, that the vast majority of us will make it through, and that we’ll find the capacity to aid those who fall hardest.

    I am confident of this because I have learned quite a bit about the people who make up this city. I have seen what can be accomplished when resolve digs in against uncertainty.

    I received a reminder from a man at a bus stop on Broadway not long ago. I’ve known him for years because he has spent years working as a janitor at a Downtown office building that I have occasion to frequent. He has always struck me as a modest fellow — polite, constantly working, cleaning up after others.

    The man had his daughter with him, and the two of them were unsure whether they had the right bus stop. He called to me and asked if I could help. The young lady had to get to the Westside. I directed her to the correct stop across the street.

    The man thanked me, and told me that his daughter had to get to UCLA, where she is currently studying. He said he has another daughter enrolled at UCLA, too.

    It occurred to me that the modesty I had long attributed to this man is actually resolve. Oh, he may be a modest sort, but his accomplishments are not. His high-reaching daughters attest to the resolve in his character.

    It also occurred to me that this man is an immigrant who pulled up stakes somewhere far away to come here and pursue a better future. Think about the uncertainty of such a move — and then consider how often you encounter individuals who have done the same thing. Ponder how many others have faced similar uncertainty upon arriving here from another state — or even moving from one neighborhood to another in search of better circumstances.

    I spent some time thinking about this after I saw my acquaintance at the bus stop. I became lost in thought for a moment, and then a rumble of hunger brought me back. I had a cold and didn’t want to go out to eat, so I called a regular lunch spot for a delivery. It’s a small restaurant, and the owners are among the many to travel a long way to cast their lot in Los Angeles. They’re feeling the economic slump, their faces creased with concern lately.

    A familiar voice came on the line and took my order. She noticed that I sounded a bit off. She inquired about my health, and I told her about my cold.

    My lunch arrived 20 minutes later with something extra in the bag—a bowl of soup with a get-well note.

    It dawned on me that, yes, it will be a tough Thanksgiving for a lot of folks — but this is still the City of Angels.

    Look for them — they walk among us.

    Give thanks for them — they will not fail us.

    Jerry Sullivan is the Editor & Publisher of the Los Angeles Garment & Citizen, a weekly community newspaper that covers Downtown Los Angeles and surrounding districts (www.garmentandcitizen.com)

  • In Ethnic Enclaves, The U.S. Economy Thrives

    Dr. Alethea Hsu has a strange-seeming prescription for terrible times: She is opening a new shopping center on Saturday. In addition, more amazingly, the 114,000 square foot Irvine, Calif., retail complex, the third for the Taiwan native’s Diamond Development Group, is just about fully leased.

    How can this be in the midst of a consumer crack-up, with credit card defaults and big players like General Growth struggling for their existence? The answer is simple: Hsu’s mostly Asian customers – Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese, Japanese – still have cash. “These are people who have savings and money to spend,” she explains. “Asians in Orange County are mostly professionals and don’t have the subprime business.”

    To Hsu, culture explains the growing divergence between ethnic markets and that of the general population. Asians, she notes, whether in their native lands or here in California, tend to be big savers. In tough times, they still have the cash to buy goods, while others stay home or go way down-market.

    Nor is the Diamond Development Group’s experience an isolated case. Throughout the country, ethnic-based businesses continue to expand, even as mainstream centers suffer or go out of business. The key difference, notes Houston real estate investor Andrew Segal, lies in the immigrants’ greater reliance on cash. “When cash is king,” observers Segal, president of Boxer Properties, “immigrants rule.”

    This is true not just of well-heeled Asians or Middle Easterners, but also for Hispanics, who generally have lower incomes, notes Segal’s partner, Latino retail specialist Jose de Jesus Legaspi. For example, the recession has barely taken hold at La Gran Plaza, the recently opened 1.1 million square foot retail center in Ft. Worth, Texas, where Legaspi serves as part owner and operating partner.

    The center, reconstructed from a failing old mainstream mall purchased in 2005, is now roughly 90% occupied. “We are doing so well that we are expanding the mercado,” Legaspi says, referring to the thriving centers dominated by very small businesses run from attached stalls that are a popular feature of many Latino-themed centers. “It’s all cash economy. They pay their bills with cash. The banks and credit card companies are not involved. It’s true capitalism, and it works.”

    Latino shoppers, he suggests, also have been less impacted by the stock market collapse than other consumers. After all, relatively few, particularly immigrants, have large investments on Wall Street. In addition, even if they have lost their jobs, particularly in construction, Legaspi adds, they tend to pick up other employment, even at lower wages, often in the underground economy. “They get paid in cash, and they pay in cash.”

    Another key advantage lies in close connections many ethnic merchants have to economies such as Korea, China, Taiwan and India, where enormous amounts of cash have accumulated in recent years. “Many of these merchants have family and other ties to the international economy,” observes Thomas Tseng, a principal at New American Dimensions, a multicultural marketing group in Los Angeles.

    The media focuses on huge surpluses spent by major corporations or sovereign wealth funds, but a substantial amount of the money being made in places like China or India also accumulates into family networks. They often funnel this cash to relatives’ enterprises in North America, where many also retain second homes and often educate their children.

    This combination of cash-spending customers and well-endowed investors explains why in many places, the immigrant market remains one of the few still aggressively expanding. Even in thriving Houston, notes architect Tim Cisneros, the credit crunch has stopped many projects by clients from the mainstream real estate development community. In contrast, Cisneros’ Chinese, Indian and other Asian clients continue to build and expand.

    “I am doing an Asian-Mexican sushi chain that isn’t hurt by the credit crunch since they are doing this out of the checkbook,” Cisneros told me. “And the Indian reception hall I am building is doing well. The action is from these developing companies much more than the old Anglo groups.”

    If the immigrant markets helping Cisneros through the credit crush represent one of the few bright spots in the present, they also will likely become even more important in the future – even if immigration slows down dramatically. By 2000, one in five American children already were the progeny of immigrants, mostly Asian or Latino; by 2015, they will make up as much as one-third of American kids.

    Given these underlying trends, look for developers like Dr. Hsu to keep prescribing more of what she calls “multicultural shopping centers,” focused both on immigrants and their children. As long as these newcomers, both affluent and working class, continue to save, covet cash and work hard, they are likely to continue thriving through the recession and beyond.

    “We are leased up, and we think the supply [of shopping] is not enough,” Hsu says. “We are ready to go Saturday and feel great trust in the future.” At a time when most mainstream American retailers are hiding under their desks, such sentiments are not only welcome; they may also indicate who might be leading the retail recovery when it finally comes.

    This article originally appeared at Forbes.com.

    Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com and is a presidential fellow in urban futures at Chapman University. He is author of The City: A Global History and is finishing a book on the American future.

  • Mexicanizing oneself in Los Angeles

    Working on a construction crew back in college with a few workers each from Mexico and Guatemala, I was amazed at the animosity between the two groups. They would joke, not good-naturedly, about how much cheaper the prostitutes were in the neighboring country or how stupid the other’s politicians were. I traveled in Central America a few years later and found the same thing.

    This great article from earlier in this week’s LA Times shows the economic and cultural effects of these nationalist tensions in the U.S. It chronicles how immigrants from El Salvador have to assimilate to the existing Mexican power structure in Los Angeles for jobs. Since the dominant Latin culture in LA is Mexican, and there is a strong nationalistic bias in some communities, El Salvadorians are changing their accents and even adopting their cuisine and mores to fit in.

    The reverse is true in other cities. When one of the Mexican construction workers I knew flew out to D.C., he entered a taqueria in the Adams-Morgan area. Upon hearing his accent, the cashier from another Central American country promptly said, “The Mexicans eat over there.” Looks like you better choose your adopted city carefully if you’re a Central American immigrant.

  • Spanish, Obama, and Cambio in St. Louis

    There are two definitive differences between St. Louis and Los Angeles: Autumn is better in St. Louis, and more people speak Spanish in Los Angeles. And, yeah, there’s the Mississippi River and the humidity and the beach and the film industry and the palm trees, but in terms of my own private geography and topophilia, autumn and Spanish are the differences that matter. I long for LA in every season but fall, and a part of my longing is, inevitably, a longing for Spanish.

    Let me be clear: my Spanish is not as good as it once was, as it should be, or as I would like it to be. At my best, I could read a newspaper, and now I struggle with verb conjugation as I try to teach my son a limited number of phrases. I had to correct my pronunciation of Sepulveda when I arrived in LA, and I had to constantly remind myself that Californians do not place the accent in Cordova on the first syllable as they do in my hometown of Santa Fe, New Mexico. But during my time in California, the straining to understand when I rudely eavesdropped, the sorting of accents (Guatemalan, Mexican, Honduran), the delight in piecing together the history behind the names of the streets and the neighborhoods and the mountains – from Pico to Los Feliz to the San Gabriels – wrapped me in Spanish, and somehow made me feel comfortable with the constant struggle to comprehend a landscape written in a different language.

    I knew I moved through the city with a cloak of privilege. White Angelinos stereotypically treat Latinos, especially recent immigrants, as invisible workers. I tried to buck the stereotype, but my stumbling Spanish was usually no more than comic relief to native speakers. No one ever questioned (as they have some of my Latino friends) whether English was my first language. And when I was tired or distracted or just disinclined, I never had to speak Spanish to navigate the metro or read the paper or, even, to order at a restaurant. I’m willing to entertain the thought that my relationship to Spanish was no more than a condescending quest for local color, but I like to think it was more than that. I like to think that the city loved me in Spanish.

    It was in a spirit of perversity that, just as the leaves began to turn, the mosquitoes began to die, and the outdoors became bearable, I decided to accompany my husband to Cherokee Street in St. Louis for Mexican food. Cherokee Street has a burgeoning Latino community, boosting St. Louis’s Hispanic population to a whopping 2%. Nonetheless, undocumented residents perhaps double that number, and co-workers tell me they’ve watched St. Louis’s Latino population grow, especially within the Catholic community. For what it’s worth, I can’t stand on more than one street corner at a time, and from the corner of Cherokee and California it could almost have been LA. It was a hot, dry day. Dust actually blew past the furniture rental stores. Squint, and I could almost smell the Santa Anas. Our restaurant had a Spanish soap opera on the television, the waitress served the coke in a tall glass bottle. For a few minutes, it felt like the city loved me.

    Head west on Cherokee, and you will see a huge Obama poster with the word, Cambio – Change – written across the bottom, and an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe in the corner. In these final days of the campaign, images of Obama seem more and more to reflect what their creators want to see. The poster is, arguably, a picture of St. Louis’s potential future: a majority black city with a growing Latino, especially Mexican, population. I look at the poster, up against St. Louis’s characteristic red brick, and hope that Latinos here will be visible in a new way. I remember a bumper sticker, “Rednecks for Obama,” that I saw recently in my neighborhood. I remember that St. Louis is no blank slate when it comes to race relations. I chastise myself for being naive. I note that the poster says cambio, not esperanza; change, not hope. I think about how to tell my son, in Spanish, where I’ve been that day.

    Flannery Burke is an assistant professor in the Department of History at St. Louis University. Originally from Santa Fe, New Mexico, she writes about the American West, the environment, Los Angeles, and St. Louis.