Rethinking Eden What's left for those who missed out on that great little house and garden?

Some new forms of creativity will also be required from architects, planners and developers. So far they, as a group, have been slow to produce a new vision for a more crowded and more expensive Los Angeles that combines density and greenery. But a few examples have begun to emerge. One of the most striking is a design by French architect Jean Nouvel for a high-rise condo tower in Century City. Nouvel calls the building "the green blade." Tall and very thin, it would be draped from top to bottom in lush hydroponic gardens suspended from the exterior of each floor and watered by a remote, automated system.

Don't get me wrong: There is nothing middle class about the project. It would be pitched to the richest of the rich. But the renderings Nouvel produced for the building, which could break ground as early as next year, are a reminder that we live in a place where even high-rise living can be garden living, where the climate means that you can surround yourself with nature even if you live high above the ground. That combination is possible in affordable housing too.

As a political reality, the disappearance of the L.A. dream also means that the city increasingly is divided into two camps: the housing haves and the housing have-nots. The haves are those who moved here long enough ago that they are now the proud owners of handsome single-family houses with low mortgage payments. The have-nots include those who came after the real estate market went crazy and all those yet to arrive.

The ways in which these two groups of Angelenos see the city and its future could not be more starkly different, and, indeed, their competing visions will probably set the agenda for nasty political debates on a number of hot-button issues. The haves are worried about density, growth and development; they have something to protect. They want to conserve the low-rise, essentially suburban quality of the city that has been so good to them but now is changing in ways they find unsettling, if not downright frightening.

The have-nots, on the other hand, will push for the emergence of a much different city: one where density and growth are givens, where transit and walkability and the creation of open space are a priority. Because they live mostly in apartments and condos, they don't have access to the spacious private realms that the haves do. They will demand that the city pay more attention to shared spaces. They will push for new parks and attractive sidewalks in ways their predecessors never needed to; at the same time, they won't be nearly as concerned as the haves if single-family neighborhoods are rezoned for higher density.

The struggle between those two visions of the city will dominate politics here for the foreseeable future. It is shaping up to be quite a battle.