Ok but LA sucks for reasons that have nothing to do with what I want from a city and everything to do with what everyone wants from a city: walkability, affordability, good roads/traffic and infrastructure, good vibes, authenticity, public transit, and people who don’t suck.
Even people who are from LA and say “we have all that and I love LA” only mean “I love my neighborhood in LA, which is a 90 minute drive from the 7 other malignancies of highway sprawl that also call themselves LA.”
I had to temporarily live in LA for three months during which time I came to understand that LA is really a terribly place for humans to live. Yes LA “has everything” but it is all a 40 minute drive from wherever you are one-way. People in LA think driving 90 minutes round trip to go out for dinner is normal behavior because the city has so twisted their concept of “normal”
LA has very few places that are “pretty” surrounded by a hundred miles of sunbaked 1980’s low-rise stucco squalor sandwiched between freeways. It’s ugly, inconvenient and fully self-absorbed
But our food though, amirite?
And poor air quality.
My inlaws live near LA, and they wanted us to move there. I looked at everything you mentioned and just said nope.
My area is better in almost every way except weather, and honestly, I don’t mind the weather. LA sucks, I really don’t know why so many talk it up…
So if someone says “I Love LA” you want them to mean that they love every single neighborhood in LA? That seems like too high a bar for any city. Agreed about walkability and traffic, though.
I mean more that it’s crazy to call them “neighborhoods” when any two have nothing in common and are completely inaccessible to each other unless you have your own car and get on the highway for an hour.
And when that’s the case, how does one even say they like “LA” (as in the whole city) when you’re more likely to travel out of state from Long Beach than to Westwood.
This is every city.
Jesus, take a pill and cope harder.
Haha nope. You can cross the entirety of Paris from rural outskirts to rural outskirts by public transport in as much time as it takes to get to the next neighborhood over in LA by car.
No it really isn’t. I’ve lived in two cities in my life and neither was like that. To put into context the drives LA contains approach calling Cleveland and Columbus Ohio neighborhoods of the same city.
Sure once you hit megapolis you get huge transits caused by density, but NYC isn’t nearly that bad. Chicago can be rough but it doesn’t come close. DC is delightful.
LA is uniquely “what if we built the most America megacity ever”
Transplants suck everywhere, but that doesn’t mean LA isn’t a complete dumpster fire.
