What L.A.’s Suburbs Can Teach Us

I’ve been thinking a lot about history this year. In April, the city of Lakewood (where I live and work) commemorated one of those milestones whose passing begs for shared memories (even as the number of those who actually remember grows distressingly smaller).

Lakewood is 50, having been whipped up from former lima bean fields north of Long Beach in just 33 months, bought up by World War II and Korean War vets just as fast, and incorporated in 1954. One day, nothing. The next, 17,500 houses and a storefront for a city hall. The day after, and half a century has already passed.

Like it or not, 50-year-old places such as Lakewood (and Panorama City, Norwalk and Lawndale, among others) define a large part of the Los Angeles experience -- the “not quite middle class” blend of comfort and anxiety that comes with precarious ownership of a small house on a small lot on a street of nearly identical houses that still manages to answer to a longing for community.

The L.A. grid, when you look down from a jet approaching LAX or even from a freeway overpass, generally blurs into incoherence. But there are 88 cities and hundreds more distinct neighborhoods beneath the LAX glide path, each with its own tragedies and joys as real as those of Jerusalem or Troy; we see only a pattern of green and gray and hardly ever wonder why the prospect doesn’t move us.

A lot of Los Angeles County should be seen as a spectacle of democracy: an ordinary landscape where millions of working people express their flawed and hopeful idea of home. Flawed in 1954, certainly, because it had little room for people of color, and flawed today because the suburban landscape isn’t adequate to every thing we require of it. But hopeful then as now because dignified lives are lived there as a result of (not in spite of) the kind of suburban place Los Angeles still is.

Too often, however, the response to suburbanization is becoming fearfully polarized. When 20 homes under construction near Washington, D.C., recently burned, authorities quickly assumed that arson in protest of a new suburbia was the motive. Now, it seems, the reason may be animosity toward the new suburbanites, who are mainly middle-class African Americans.

In Sacramento, state Senate leaders are willing to pit environmentalists against low-income homeowners by weakening California regulations to speed new residential construction. Proposed legislation also would preempt local land-use authority and mandate greater density in existing suburban neighborhoods. Burning the suburbs or legislating away their charm in the name of some other land-use ideal is a failure of the imagination. So is labeling everything built since 1950 as “dumb growth.”

What Lakewood’s history shows, of course, is that Lakewood is neither heaven nor hell, despite the city’s appearance as a bit player in the long-running melodrama known as Suburbia -- “the place,” in social critic James Howard Kunstler’s words, “where evil dwells.” You can find plenty of toxic, gated enclaves and McMansion wastelands in the suburbs, but you’ll find communities there where a small house on a small lot is still a place of pilgrimage.

The newest owners in the older suburbs are overwhelmingly immigrant people of color. Despite the gulfs of language and ethnicity, their hopes for the suburb where they live, from my experience in Lakewood, are no different from those of my parents 50 years ago. With the possible exception of hip pioneers settling the region’s suddenly residential downtowns, we all live in suburbia in Los Angeles. We’re all the rueful beneficiaries of half a century of sprawl.

We often find it difficult to talk coherently about our suburban experience. I think we lack a workable “rhetoric of place” for our situation. The story of our suburbanization needs to be better told and broadened and deepened. We need to know everything that places such as Lakewood can teach us if we’re to make a better place for all the immigrants, commuters, landlords, homeless, working poor, homeowners and business owners headed our way in the next 20 years.

When I walk out the door of my home and see the familiar pattern of house, lot, street, neighborhood, parks, schools and stores, I see the human-scale, porous, flexible landscape that working people longed for when Lakewood was among the first of the mass-produced suburbs. It’s not for nothing that so many still seek to live in places that recreate Lakewood’s sense of place whenever they have the chance.