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.