An Unbiased Look at L.A.’s Heart Finds It Does Have a Healthy Beat

Regarding Charles Lockwood’s July 29 article “L.A.’s Heart’s Failure: Where Are All the People”:

Lockwood’s three-step method for making downtown the happiest place in L.A. betrays a half-spoken bias that suggests an explanation for downtown Los Angeles’ failure to become a “people-pleasing” kind of place.

Specifically, those people currently taking pleasure in downtown seem to be considered at best a demographic group in need of dilution, at worst a blight requiring the social equivalent of the Bunker Hill “renaissance” of the last few years.

While few would take issue with Lockwood’s initial step, making downtown safer, cleaner and more inviting, the question must be asked: more inviting to whom? The answer becomes clear in steps two and three, simultaneously revealing the not-so-hidden agenda of much recent downtown development.

Lockwood correctly acknowledges the success of Broadway as a commercial mecca, yet goes on to state that Broadway’s low-priced merchandise gives the street limited appeal. Obviously, Broadway’s appeal is not so limited as to preclude mobs of shoppers packed belly to backside every weekend, so this lack of appeal must be not a quantitative, but a qualitative shortcoming.

This assumption is confirmed in Lockwood’s next paragraph, where he bemoans a dearth of comparatively well-heeled office workers shopping in the area, and the intent is driven home later in the article when Lockwood lauds Citicorp’s Seventh Street Marketplace as a success.

The message is apparent: A heavily utilized shopping street offering inexpensive merchandise to a bustling, low-income community demonstrates limited appeal, better to emulate a planned mall selling premium-priced merchandise to moderately sized groups of young white-collar professionals.

These biases become all too clear in Lockwood’s discussion of downtown area housing. He rightly suggests that the establishment of a full-time resident population is a prerequisite to a thriving downtown, but goes on to define this population as young professionals and office workers with no children who “enjoy downtown’s ethnic diversity.”

It is unfortunate that these hypothetical residents would not be afforded the opportunity to enjoy that diversity for long since, in the process of moving into newly constructed moderate-price rental housing on the edges of downtown, they will be replacing the existing “ethnic” communities of non-office working families already living on downtown’s edges.

One suspects the ulterior goal is to entice “affluent Angelenos” into trading “Brentwood for Bunker Hill.” Discussions of reinforcing the communities currently on downtown’s edges, wholly responsible for Broadway’s recent success, are conspicuously absent from Lockwood’s strategy, as are considerations of recycling 7th Street and Broadway’s office vacancies into low- to moderate-income housing servicing the needs of downtown’s ill housed, or even the legions of unhoused whom Lockwood recognizes as an obstacle to making the area more pedestrian-friendly.

Faced with the term pioneer, we are inclined to picture the myth of the hardy settler wresting life from virgin soil, while we forget that this soil was acquired at the expense of other peoples already doing quite well for themselves on the same land.

The new myth of the “urban pioneer” is no less insidious, as it falls prey to a similar fallacy. In both cases, a more appropriate definition of pioneer would be that of the military, a group of foot soldiers detailed to dig entrenchments in advance of an invasionary force’s main body.

The real issue of downtown L.A. is not Lockwood’s smoke-and-mirrors debate for turning an alleged dead zone into a delightful expression of Angeleno civitas.

The issue is one of turning a profit by replacing an existing population with a new one better able to provide a maximal short-term return on the considerable expense of acquiring and developing downtown property. L.A.’s heart has not failed. Rather, it is being failed by planners, developers and architects, many of whom seem to have no heart whatsoever.

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