Los Angeles Is Paradise Lost

Let me paint you a picture of a certain city.

Imagine a community situated between the ocean and mountains, both of which provide recreational opportunities for residents and visitors alike. This geography significantly moderates the climate so that it’s warm, but generally not dangerously hot, all year round. For a plurality of the global population, this is considered the ideal climate.

Imagine that this community is highly multicultural. Settlers from Europe, and later immigrants from various parts of Asia and the Global South, have elected to make their homes here. Consequently, the city is home to restaurants featuring many cuisines from all over the world. If you ate out one meal a day and never patronized the same establishment twice, it would take you about 18 years to run out of restaurants.

Imagine that this city’s activities do not stop at dining, either. The city is home to many institutions related to the arts, as one of the “creative capitals” of the world. It’s also among the most high-profile cities in the global film industry, and many celebrities from all over the country (and some from other countries) live there on either a temporary or permanent basis.

If you are moderately informed about geography, you’ll probably have guessed that the city I’m referring to is Los Angeles, California. If so, you are correct. 

Everything I’ve said above is true of Los Angeles. It’s got ideal geography and what many people consider “perfect” weather (droughts and wildfires notwithstanding - we’ll get to that later). People from all over the world have lived there, and the culinary offers are wildly diverse. And of course, it’s home to numerous film studios and other cultural institutions that mean you’ll seemingly never run out of things to do.

Now, if I ended this post there, and the reader had no access to outside information, you’d probably come away with the impression that Los Angeles is the best city in the world. Doesn’t all that sound like paradise?

A beautiful picture of Los Angeles with the San Gabriel Mountains in the background.

Unfortunately, thanks to poor urban planning, it’s more like “paradise lost.”

A very smoggy view of the same city. Image taken from the Los Angeles Times.

Los Angeles is infamous for its car traffic. As my beloved YouTuber Not Just Bikes always reminds us, there is no solution to car traffic other than viable alternatives to driving. He’s argued that car dependency is bad even if you do enjoy driving - this video explains many of the reasons why.

Speaking of American cultural institutions, one such institution is the late musician Tom Petty (1950-2017). One of his most famous songs is “Free Fallin’”, which contains lyrical references to locations in Los Angeles such as Reseda and Ventura Boulevard. At one point, the song states that “there’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”

Think about that for a moment. Obviously, this is an exaggeration to some extent - highways normally aren’t built right through backyards. Except sometimes they are.

You see, there’s a little something called “eminent domain” that allows the government to seize homes in order to use land for infrastructure projects. This Amnesty International article talks about how homes destroyed to make room for these highways have historically been in neighborhoods with large percentages of people of color. Even with all the fresh produce that grows abundantly in California’s Mediterranean climate, these disruptions can create “food deserts” for people in their neighborhoods.

We can have a conversation any time about how these highways reinforce racial injustice and how inequity is built into every aspect of this country’s infrastructure. But that’s a topic for another essay.

Traffic in Los Angeles is a nightmare specifically because public transit in the city is so lacking. People lose time in their commutes, but that’s not the only thing people lose as a result of car dependency.

Another casualty of Los Angeles’ less-than-ideal urban planning is its air quality. A few days ago, the Los Angeles-Long Beach area was once again ranked as the smoggiest city in the United States. Apparently, it has been that way for many years running. This is, in large part, thanks to the numerous cars on the road. And smog isn’t just unpleasant to look at - it can exacerbate asthma for those living with that condition, cause babies to have low birth weight, and even contribute to lung diseases like cancer and COPD in the long run. 

One band from California, Red Hot Chili Peppers, has been fairly active in the environmental movement. They’ve got a song called “Black Summer” about the 2020 Australian bushfires and climate change more broadly. It’s a beautiful song, as disturbing as it may be, and bassist Michael “Flea” Balzary has stated that after it rains, Los Angeles is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. And he might be right about that, except that rain is increasingly hard to come by as the region’s water security takes a nosedive. 

And of course, with the lack of rain, the risk of wildfires increases exponentially. As we saw earlier this year with the fire that destroyed much of the Pacific Palisades neighborhood, cities are not immune to the devastation that such disasters can bring. 

Now, I’m not going to say that climate change is exclusively Los Angeles’ fault. It is true that a significant percentage of greenhouse gas emissions are from the transportation sector, and planes and cars generate far more of these emissions than trains and bicycles. That’s no secret. Furthermore, even cities with far better public transit networks, such as those in the Nordic nations, are going to have to deal with the ramifications of the climate crisis. Indeed, they already are.

But the United States is far and away the world’s most massive climate villain. You can argue that many other countries aren’t doing enough to switch to renewable energy (or as Bernie Sanders says, transform our energy system away from fossil fuels). But at least they accept that climate change is real and caused by human activity.

For instance, at time of writing, tomorrow is the Canadian general election. The Liberals, led by Prime Minister Mark Carney, are broadly seen as favored, having pulled off a 30-point comeback that few people besides myself thought plausible. But even if the Conservatives, led by Pierre Poilievre, were to win a plurality of seats and make Poilievre Prime Minister, Canada isn’t going to pull out of the Paris Climate Accords. 

Anyway, look at cities in the Nordic countries. Not only are they far more sustainable, but their climates are far colder. I’m sure that if anyone from Finland, Iceland, Norway, or Sweden is reading this, they’ll contend that there’s no such thing as bad weather, only inappropriate clothing. But lots of people I know would dislike the long, dark winters, even if those countries have very broad social welfare programs.

Ultimately, if there’s nothing else you take away from this column, I want to reinforce that Los Angeles is one of the greatest tragedies in the history of urban planning. It had the potential to be a paradise on Earth, but instead it’s paradise lost. Like Joni Mitchell once said, they paved paradise to put up a parking lot - it shows.