Los Angeles Plays Itself

Yes, Skid Row and the surrounding area still has the largest concentration of homeless people in the US. Just a block east of Skid Row is The Arts District, which is in terms of real estate prices, the hottest neighborhood in Los Angeles right now. It's where all the trendy cafes (Blue Bottle, Stumptown, Urth Cafe, etc.) have decided to open up shop in Los Angeles. Traditionally the area had attracted artists because of the large, cheap commercial and loft style spaces available, but in the last 3-4 years it's become unrecognizable. Back in the 90's it was an extension of Skid Row. Today, it's filled with yuppies who can afford to pay $3,000 a month for a 1,000 square foot studio. It's the only neighborhood on the Eastside where rental prices are comparable to Venice/Santa Monica. The homeless population continues to hang on to control of an ever-rapidly gentrifying neighborhood. It's an eerie feeling watching a hopeless residents of Skid Row slowly push a shopping cart down a busy intersection like a living dead man, as Teslas and Benzes swerve to avoid him.

Just one block west of Stumptown coffee, there are boarded up commercial buildings on 7th street. It's the southern border of the Arts District, and even though most of the foot traffic is homeless people, the landlords are asking $12,000 a month for a storefront of under 2,000 square feet.

In Los Angeles, Hollywood is the cultural capital, downtown is financial capital, and the SM/Venice is the tech capital. But East LA is the soul of the city IMO. Not just the city of East LA, but everything east of downtown all the way to Rowland Heights. Of course Boyle Heights and the neighboring cities are the Mexican cultural centers. Remnants what LA used to be before the mass migration west and before the US government deported millions of US citizens of Mexican heritage [1]. I live here now and I love it, even though living here means that you're more car dependent than most other places in Los Angeles. A few miles east and you're in Monterrey Park, the city with the highest concentration of Chinese residents of any city in the US. Walk into a popular restaurant around here and the sights, sounds, and smells will be almost identical to Hong Kong. And then there's everything South of the 10, which the author didn't really get in to either. The point being, Los Angeles is much more than Santa Monica east to Los Feliz, and people who are considering moving here ought to look beyond those boundaries if they want to get a better understanding of the city.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Repatriation

The transformation of the Arts District has been truly incredible. Virtually unrecognizable from what it was 5 years ago. It's interesting how the original anchor location for that transformation, The Brewery, has been more or less ignored as development focused on the area just east of 2nd and Alameda. As restaurants like Wurstkuche, Zip, R23, and Church & State became popular, the housing developments around the area sprang up virtually overnight. It would be interesting to do a visualization of that based on liquor permit applications and construction permits, since I can't say for certain which happened first. Certainly the currently under construction aircraft carrier sized white condo complex on the edge of the river is in response to the restaurant/bar scene that has developed.