Los angeles-city of quartz


Class war and repression are said to have driven the Los Angeles Socialists into the desert. (Pg. 9) Why would anyone want to live in the desert? The once militarized desert, created a place for people to have homes. With the population growing in such large numbers and the land growing scarce they had to begin developing the vacant land. The population needed a place to live. (Pg. 4) Dirt and dollar signs, and advertising homes with lush names appealed to the middle and upper classes. The fact that they could live in the fastest growing metropolis in the advanced industrial world made them excited. The city of Los Angeles was new and still developing. In the meantime, the economic state was changing. The rich got richer, the poor were even more poor and the middle class was cut in half. Everything about the growing city seemed perfect, and I suppose for some it was. However, along with growth and change there comes crime. Several incidents took place in Los Angeles against people of color involving the police. Anglos became a minority in the city and county of Los Angeles during the 1980's. (Pg. 7) The city of Los Angeles was created for the white, urbanized, higher middle and upper classes.

I think Davis' primary thesis or point in the book is just that. Los Angeles was being developed into a city for the wealthy by the wealthy. He describes all the hardships that the poor and middle classes go through to survive in the city. The middle and lower classes are completely separated from the wealthy society as Los Angeles is built and after it exists. It is amazing how the wealthy can create such a perfect utopia for themselves, especially being the minority and with all the people fighting against them. I guess things worked out for them because they fought so hard for all of the changes and ways they wanted things laid out.

The biggest fight for the wealthy was the development of Los Angeles. The Home Owners Association made up of the wealthy also played a huge role in the development of the Los Angeles area. The fact that the Home Owners did not want to be classified with the less expensive part of Los Angeles or the wrong side of town caused an uproar. This began what is known as the "slow growth movement." (Pg. 156) The first major ground breaking event for the Home Owners Association was in 1985 when they won in court to stop the building of high-rise development. Then the Home Owners Association had Proposition U, which reduced the development of commercial property. Along with those fights, the Home Owners Association also fought for street signs designating that the wealthy lived there. Without spelling it out certain street signs would suggest the class and how much the houses were worth. The reason for all of this commotion, the "Los Angeles home owners love their children, but they love their property values more." (Pg. 154) The home owners did not want to loose any value in their homes. They figured that if mass production of tract homes were built, there goes the value of their home. With cheaper homes in the same neighborhood that would cause lower classes to afford homes in their territory, and they would not let that happen. So, the fight continues. Thus, creating several more propositions and then the Lakewood Plan. The Lakewood Plan gave the suburban communities cut-rate prices on all of the vital services. (Pg. 165) Along with the cheapest rate of sales tax, if the property was to be used for their own use. There were twenty six-new cities formed along the Lakewood lines. This allowed the residents to zone out low-income or renting along with insulating their properties from the burden of the rest of Los Angeles. There was actually a reason for gating themselves in on the "nice" part of town. The Home Owners Association created this plan to keep the homeless, lower class, and criminals out of their neighborhoods. These neighborhoods also had private police that patrolled the area for anything out of the ordinary. The Lakewood Plan was ideal for some of the residents in Los Angeles. The Plan kept the poor in the inner city. The poor could not escape the inner city. The Lakewood Plan populations now exceed one and a half million in L.A. County. (Pg. 168) The black population of the Lakewood Plan has been kept to a minimal. Only 1 percent of the population in the Lakewood Plan is black compared to Los Angeles County at 10 percent. I guess this proves how the people that fought so hard to be kept away from the minorities won. They have very few that live in their neighborhoods, and very few that can even get to where they live. In a way I see this as segregation. Why not be with people of color. I gather that it is not just blacks and Hispanics' they don't want living in their territory, but Asians and probably anyone that is not an Anglo. This form of racism is very sad. We have enough racism everywhere else, without saying who can live where and fighting to keep certain ethnic groups out of your neighborhood, when they are such a large part of the city's survival.

Downtown in a word simply became too big for local interests to continue to dominate, and recentering came effectively to mean internationalization. I take this to mean that other cultures were running the downtown and inner city of Los Angeles. Over half of the downtown's major properties were foreign-owned. The Anglo population was having to be serviced by the foreign business owners. The nottori-ya seems to be the one's that had all of the power Downtown or in Los Angeles for that matter. The Japanese would donate money to schools, to the Presidential Library, and to the Mayor 's campaign. This shows that ...