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.
