Crowded? I've definitely changed how I live in Los Angeles over time, as the city has changed.
1.) Decades ago I drove 18,000 miles a year. My grandmother thought nothing of driving the 45 minutes from Hancock Park to her beach house on Balboa Island near Newport Beach. Today that would be 1 hour 45 minutes . . . . . if you're lucky. People actually drove to a job downtown - I didn't, but many did.
Now, for many years I've driven 4,200 miles per year. I work at home, I drive to the gym, to dinner, to our ceramic studio, and drive to San Francisco once a year with local trips to Palm Springs, Santa Barbara, San Diego.
Most people now live closer to their job, which means more good paying jobs are located through out the city such as West Hollywood, Beverly Hills etc. People ideally want to be less than 20 minutes from work and even more work at home most of the time as I have for years.
I tried out the Metro subway for Jury Service downtown and it was about 20 minutes door to door. It was like living in Berlin or any other normal city.
2.) Trader Joe's (Aldi Grocery) is a 3 minute walk from my front door, Ralph's grocery a 5 minute walk, along with many other stores and restaurants. I grew up in a "bedroom community" out in the redwoods and pear orchards of the East Bay of San Francisco - where you had to drive to everything - and that lifestyle holds no appeal for me at all. Even as kids we couldn't wait to leave, as our parents told us "how lucky we were to be living there". They still think it's terrific and still neither my sister nor I understand. What's so terrific about not being able to walk to anything other than other people's houses? Yuck.
My parents grew up in Los Angeles not far from where I live now. Admittedly, when they moved away to San Francisco, Los Angeles had a horrific air quality problem. But it's perfect now, and where I grew up is now effectively part of Silicon Valley so everything (restaurants, hotels, etc) are priced like Switzerland. Living in San Francisco was fun when I was younger, but it's cold. There's millions more people in the Bay Area, but they've accommodated them well and bought added amenities - and their presence will hopefully provide an eye-watering sales price when we sell my parent's commercial property. Offers a year ago from developers when we were considering an exchange were very gratifying.
3.) I wish I could take fast public transport to LAX airport, but this doesn't exit so I drive or take a shuttle or Lyft. Even if I flew less I'd pay for the Global Entry Pass to bypass the TSA and Customs lines - it works well. The gimmicky "Clear" facial ID program is pointless. The BART subway station inside the San Francisco airport is very convenient and this should be standard. For that matter I could use a German style high speed train to Palm Springs, San Francisco and San Diego - but I won't be seeing those in this lifetime.
4.) We have a private mailbox place one block from home, in lieu of something like Amazon-Ring. I remember "shopping", I hated it, and I still do and it was difficult to find what I wanted. I suppose like everyone there is so much stuff that now comes to me from Amazon, and other online vendors, with occasional deliveries from Walmart or Target who are doing a good job of keeping Amazon very competitive. |
