Rethinking Eden What's left for those who missed out on that great little house and garden?
For much of the 20th century, Los Angeles was one of the few major cities in the United States--maybe the only one--that offered so much promise to new arrivals when it came to residential architecture. In New York and other large cities on the East Coast, showing up as a new resident without a trust fund has always meant scratching out a living and moving slowly up the housing totem pole, from undersized apartment to slightly-less-undersized apartment. But Los Angeles long glittered as a city where you could arrive as a middle-class family and afford your own slice of Eden: a single-family house with a sizable garden on a nice block.
Nobody moved to London or Tokyo expecting to land in a house like that. But in Los Angeles it was possible, even easy. This was our own version of the American dream, more potent in some ways than the original; it's how L.A. was marketed to potential residents from its earliest days as a big city. Even if the house itself was small, you could, with a bit of ingenuity, turn it and your garden into a showpiece, a lush oasis in the city.
Indeed, there was something almost colonial about the way so many less-than-rich homeowners were able to live here, taking breakfast on a shaded terrace every morning (while reading, don't forget, their plump and ambitious local newspaper), driving a gigantic, plush-seated automobile to work on wide and free-flowing roads and generally living as large as an American diplomat in Calcutta or São Paolo, Brazil.
Those days are becoming a fading memory: For anybody now moving into the city, or trying to go from being a renter to a homeowner, that kind of life can seem locked up tighter than Dodger Stadium in January. The run-up in prices that began in the mid-1990s, combined with rising density, has made the goal of luxurious middle-class living largely unattainable. And it may be that way for good: A decline in the housing market like the one we're seeing now simply isn't going to be enough to bring back the days when a nice three-bedroom on an 8,000-square-foot lot was affordable for the majority of new arrivals.
So what does that mean as far as making a life for yourself in L.A.?
It means first of all learning something from New Yorkers--specifically that making your house or apartment enviable takes work. The potential for creating a kind of residential oasis in L.A. is still quite possible, but it won't happen by itself. Earlier arrivals discovered nature outside their front doors and simply had to cultivate or tame it; new ones will have to strive to produce or reproduce it. That might mean planting a garden on your apartment patio or returning a cement backyard in Highland Park to its original green state.
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