2010: Los Angeles=Manhattan

This is for all those wonderful Angelinos stuck in traffic right now. Have you been to Hollywood and Highland lately? This weekend my good buddy and I thought we'd get dinner and do a little shopping in Hollywood. Gone are the days of the shady corners complete with shady characters. Today the streets of Hollywood are lined with tourists, police officers and trendy shops and restraunts that we not there two years ago. I remember cruising that star-lined street with the homies in high school, thinking about how trashy it all looked, but at least back then we could find a place to park.

Even closer to my heart is the destruction/construction of Pasadena. First, they wanted to give us a pro-football team (thank God that didn't happen), then they kick out all those cool old shops and a movie theatre that was a local landmark and replace them with sleek, brightly lit boutiques most of us can not afford and probably still wouldn't go to even if we could. Here's a SNtS challenge. Next time you're in the "Dena" count all the new super-condos that were not there the last time you drove by. All over the city, lots that used to hold one or two single-family homes have spawned huge, ridiculously-priced condos which are painted in trendy ultra-modern colors in efforts to attract all those yuppies who work downtown, but don't want to live there. (I realize that was a run-on sentance, but this is a blog not a textbook)

Generally, progress is a good thing. However, when you construct a building on a corner that used to house one or two families and invite two oor three hundred new people to live there, you have completely changed the dynamics of the area. The streets now have to accomodate a bunch of new traffic, but they don't get any wider. A new starbucks will soon follow, driving the old cafe that's been in town since the 70's out of business. The 210 used to be a passable freeway, now, one can expect traffic everyday (even Saturday and Sunday)!

So, what should we do? Leave? I don't want to, but I fear that one day I may be blogging from San Luis Obispo or somewhere simularly charming.

That's it for my first post! Most likely no one is going to read this, but it's good to get these frustrations off my chest. And with that, I'm out.