Please Come to Reseda
You’ve just bought a fully restored 1905 Arts & Crafts bungalow: four bedrooms, two baths, 3,000 square feet. In New York, this would have cost forget-about-it. But you, recently transplanted in L.A., paid in the $150s. How’d you find out about West Adams?
You didn’t read about it in “Community Choice,” a 186-page book profiling neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties that the L.A. Chamber of Commerce distributes within the $23 package of literature it sells to prospective new residents who call the chamber for information. Nor did you find a profile of Boyle Heights or Compton or Pacoima or Watts. But Yorba Linda and Walnut and Rancho Santa Margarita? You could recite their schools’ average SAT scores by studying the book. And while nobody expects the chamber to include “The Day of the Locust” or videos of a certain Rodney King arrest in Lakeview Terrace, Lakeview Terrace isn’t profiled, either.
“We try to include all of what we call ‘residential communities,’ ” explains “Community Choice” editor Ned Hawley, who writes the book annually with three contributors, using statistics and firsthand observations. “We exclude cities that are primarily industrial or commercial.” Does East L.A. fall into either category? “I don’t remember specifically why it wasn’t included,” Hawley says. “Maybe we couldn’t get demographic information. We want to give people a feel for the community,” he adds.
Like the “feel” for West Hollywood, which is “home to a large number of seniors” but apparently no discernible gay population, since its overwhelming presence there is not mentioned at all. No less benign and baffling: Reseda, situated in the smoggy San Fernando Valley, is “blessed by the warm, pleasant climate and the clear skies Southern California is famous for.” Benedictions are also bestowed upon Van Nuys--”blessed with an ideal location”--and Signal Hill--”blessed with a number of local community colleges,” to say nothing of its disproportionate number of oil wells. The desert landscape of Lancaster is “clean and new, as yet untainted by the neighboring metropolis.” Presumably that neighbor wouldn’t be Palmdale, where “all the factors necessary to make a good city a great one come together.” Finally, there’s Northridge, which uncharacteristically is revealed to have “lost some of its original country atmosphere” and been “rocked by a major earthquake.”
Among the package’s other quasi-factual gems: Proud alums of Andover will find in Hancock Park and Pasadena a “more ‘preppy’ way of life.” Retired Iowa farmers will doubtless feel right at home in Downey, Long Beach or South Pasadena, each hailed for a “sort of Midwest ambience.” The chamber also excels in understatement: the problem-plagued Metrorail is “still partially in the building stage,” and the 4,083 square miles and 9,230,600 residents of L.A. County are summarized with one inarguable statement: “Los Angeles is big.”
By contrast, New York City’s relocation literature doesn’t mince words. Unlike the L.A. guide, which apparently finds comfort in, well, ignoring some neighborhoods--”We’re not going to say a community known to be crime infested is a great place to live,” Hawley insists--New York’s is brutally honest. “I tell people to stay below 96th Street in Manhattan,” says John Saunders, who writes the New York guide. “If anybody wants to argue with me on that, fine.”
Such unvarnished frankness may yet find its way in L.A.’s relocation oeuvre. In the meantime, new Angelenos who find themselves watching news footage of a parade down Cesar Chavez Avenue can only scratch their heads. East L.A.? Where’s that?
