Week 10: The Final Response

This week I am responding to a post made by my classmate Kei Komura. His original post can be found here: http://kkomuro1005.blogspot.com/2012/11/blogging-social-difference-in-la-week-8.html

Hi Kei. This is an interesting post because you’re right about the differences between these two beach towns. Many, but not all of the beach towns in Orange County have a kind of homely feel to them that seems less commercialized than ones up north like Santa Monica.

Your blog post explores a couple of interesting ideas and the one I want to focus on deals with these areas around Irvine being bastions of the rich and affluent. You noted Harvey’s approach in saying that there are pockets of geography in which industrial activity and poverty are located in addition to ones characterized by wealth. Calling back to the reading we were assigned earlier in the quarter by Olin, Kling, and Poster, I think a strong argument can be made that the affluence of Irvine and surrounding communities throughout Orange County can be attributed to the adoption of the automobile as a primary means of transportation.

If you think about Irvine in the sense that it was a master planned community placed deep in the periphery, you realize that in order for such a place to grow and expand money has to come in from somewhere. What job opportunities are available for people living there? While industrial parks did exist in the early stages of the city’s growth, they probably didn’t account for a large enough proportion of employment for local residents to explain its early wealth. How then did Irvine manage to thrive? It seems to me that the answer to this question is that it was developed with the affluent in mind who could afford the cars that would allow them to travel back and forth between home and their location of employment.

I think in modern times this has become a fairly common theme to the master planned community in the Los Angeles area. It’s not uncommon for people to commute 40-50 miles each way now to work. At a former job of mine, I had a supervisor who commuted from Corona to Long Beach, which is roughly a 50 mile drive each way. He did so because the homes in the area were nicer than what he could get nearby and he had access to a car to go back and forth. It is ultimately the car that enabled him to live where he did.   

Week 9 - Metro Rail and Little Tokyo

            This week for my blog post I decided to visit Little Tokyo, a section of Los Angeles that I have never had the opportunity of visiting before. To get there I decided it would be easiest to take the train since I didn’t feel like dealing with the inner city traffic and also had tickets to the UCLA game at the Rose Bowl, which is along the same rail line. It was a win/win situation as far as transportation was concerned.

My route required me to travel on four separate rail lines from Downey all the way to Little Tokyo. Each of these rail lines had their own unique characteristics in terms of scenery and ridership. The Green Line was the least crowded of the lines and perhaps the most uninteresting as well since it simply follows the 105 freeway until you get into the Hawthorne area.

The Blue Line took me through some of the poorest parts of Los Angeles as it made its way up towards downtown. The ridership on this segment of the trip was entirely made up of Latinos and Blacks and the scenery appeared largely industrial and quite old. My favorite part of this segment was actually all of the street art that was readily visible from my seat. I attempted to take some pictures but they all came out blurry and didn’t do the artists any justice. (For anyone interested on the state of street art in Los Angeles and it’s relationship with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority I strongly recommend this LA Weekly Article: http://www.laweekly.com/2012-08-30/news/los-angeles-war-on-street-artists/ )

This map shows the income levels of the downtown area. Note the region around the 110 freeway where the Blue Line runs through. The outlined yellow region is ZIP code 90023 in which much of Little Tokyo is located.

7th Street/Metro Center where the Blue and Red lines connect.

The Red Line is one of two subways in Los Angeles. As it is underground, there wasn’t any scenery to look at but I thought the demographic of the ridership was a tad interesting that day. It was largely comprised of white USC fans on their way to the Coliseum. This trend was even more interesting when I got off at Union Station and saw that many of the USC fans were coming from Metrolink trains that service Orange County.

Union Station

Downtown LA from the Gold Line platform at Union Station. The building with the pyramid looking roof is city hall.

More platforms at Union Station.

The Gold Line is the newest of the routes that I took on this trip. The segment from Union Station to Little Tokyo is very short but it takes you through an interesting part of Los Angeles across the 5 freeway and right up against the federal detention center until you hit first street. This is where we got off and explored Little Tokyo…

This Christmas tree was at the Japan Village Plaza shopping center. There were a lot of neat little Japanese shops here.

This is another shot of the Japan Village Plaza shopping center.

While I was originally going to discuss Little Tokyo this week, the different transfers I made while traveling there ended up being more interesting and in particular the Red Line which travels under downtown. In many ways, the subway felt akin to the throughways that Engels described in 19^th century Manchester despite being public transportation. With the other three lines you are able to look out at the urban environments and watch the different interactions between people and space occur. On the Red Line you are underground and shielded from seeing anything going on outside.

Week 8: Yet Another Response

This week I have decided to comment on a blog post by my classmate Peter Do who took a bus trip through Orange County starting at the intersection of Euclid and Edinger in Fountain Valley. His post can be found here: http://petertdo.blogspot.com/2012/11/bus-adventures.html

Hi Peter. I find your thoughts on public transportation to be particularly interesting because your trip took place in Orange County, a region within the LA metropolitan area that is particularly scattered in terms of spatial arrangement. This idea was touched upon by Olin Kling and Poster in The Emergence of Postsuburbia.        

On your trip you noted that the ridership was comprised primarily of minorities and the elderly. I imagine this is a common theme across public transportation systems throughout metropolitan areas that exhibit a polycentric spatial arrangement as Orange County does. Orange County offers an interesting way to look at institutionalized discrimination as it is expressed through public transportation because of the way that everyday life there is dependent upon the automobile. I think you’re correct that there is a stigma attached to the usage of public transportation in Southern California, and as a result those who are either too poor to afford their own vehicles and those unable to operate them are unfairly judged and looked down upon.

As I read your commentary on this experience I started thinking about how these issues might be different in regions that formed during the third urban revolution. Decentralization in the LA metropolitan area can largely be attributed to the huge change in transportation that came about through expanded ownership of automobiles in the post-war era. Without the automobile, decentralization probably wouldn’t have occurred. What do you think the makeup of public transportation looks like in say Chicago or New York City? Do you think it reflects what we see here in Southern California where these systems are primarily used by minorities and other vulnerable populations, or is it more mixed?

Having never lived in a city that started off as a major industrial center before the advent of the automobile I can’t really comment on how similar or different they are to our system. I imagine that any differences would depend upon the demographics of individuals you see within the cities and the suburbs. I have however lived in two cities (Houston and Colorado Springs) that have public transportation systems that are much worse than those found in Los Angeles and I can tell you that in those areas it is again minorities and vulnerable populations that are affected the most. It is quite tragic as public transportation is one of those issues that often gets mixed into arguments over the proper role and scope of government with many on the right wanting to cut funding to these essential services.

Week 7: Brightwater and Bolsa Chica

            This week I visited the Brightwater development off of Pacific Coast Highway and Warner in Huntington Beach. These houses are rather new and those on the edge of the mesa have amazing views of the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve and Bolsa Chica State Beach. Despite being new development, plans to build houses in this area go back to the late seventies when developers wanted to convert what was left of the wetlands after oil extraction into a marina with several hundred houses. Members of the local community (in particular, several members of the League of Women Voters), fought against this massive development, stopped it, and eventually spearheaded a restoration project whose first stage was completed a few years ago.

            As for the mesa where these houses are located, the California Coastal Commission ultimately ruled that there were no legal grounds under the Coastal Act to completely deny all development and as a result these houses were built. Despite the ruling, the building of these houses was and still remains highly controversial due to concerns over urban runoff into the nearby ESHA’s (Environmentally Sensitive Habitat Areas) and the presence of Native American artifacts and remains in the construction area that go back thousands of years.

These glass walls provide beautiful ocean views from the backyards of houses that are to be built here. 

These houses are very close to, if not directly upon a known archaeological site that is several thousand years old.

            The thought to do something on this area came to me as I was reading The Environment of Justice by David Hardy. I wasn’t originally going to do anything on this area since I volunteer here and talk about issues related to the wetlands all the time, but I felt that there were a couple of really interesting ways to think about what has happened here in terms of what Hardy talks about in his paper.

            First, Hardy discussed the way that the poor (and therefore by extension, minorities and other members of the underclass) tend to get pushed into areas that have poor environmental and ecological conditions. There is an inference here that those who have the resources and wealth to do so will live in the areas that have the best environments. At the Brightwater development there are two ways to look at the environmental quality of the site that both agree and disagree with Hardy. The first is that this area is quite scenic with views of the ocean and the reserve, and therefore it is an area of high environmental quality. This idea most certainly played a role in the presence of the Native American settlements found all throughout this area. The second would be to consider that before restoration efforts this place was quite dirty and to this day has several nearby oil wells that continue to pump oil out from under the reserve and off the coast. This second idea actually fits quite well with most of the coastal neighborhoods in Huntington Beach as up until the 1970s or so the region was a giant oil field.

In the background if you look closely you can see a couple oil derricks that are still in operation. I believe that the current lease holder is Occidental Petroleum, but I may be wrong. 

I grabbed this image from the Washington Post (see: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/gallery/2008/07/25/GA2008072502547.html). This is Huntington Beach in 1928. 

          Second, Hardy while commenting on the ecological modernization thesis talks about the refusal by some “to see the supposed trade‐off between environmental concerns and economic growth in zero‐sum terms.” As this fight over the houses on the mesa went on for literally decades, the developers were eventually allowed to build the neighborhood so long as they installed a restoration area/buffer zone between the reserve and the neighborhood itself. This was presented as a kind of win/win for both economic progress and the wetlands as the houses were to be built and some marginal restoration was to occur. 

This is part of the restoration area that has been put in place by the developers.