When Google Buys Your Hometown Mall
Rethinking civic identity in rapidly changing Los Angeles
I’m at a party in Silverlake when I meet her. She’s a model-turned-filmmaker from a place where the way people greet each other isn’t “Hello” or “How are you,” but “Do you have a cigarette?” She lives in the Hollywood Hills. I am told her friends make up most of the CW casting pool.
We are congregated around the firepit outside. It is a sea of raw denim, leather jackets, beanies, and beards: a Netflix-perfect amalgamation of LA style, whatever that might be.
As she puffs, adjusting her Penny Lane jacket around her shoulders, the conversation turns to the Olympics and then to Los Angeles’ housing crisis. We don’t want the Olympics to come to Los Angeles. Nobody wants the Olympics to come to Los Angeles, except perhaps our oft-absent mayor, Eric Garcetti. It will make things worse, we reason, but we are afraid to expound upon how, lest the “worse” become real and take up residence in a $3000/month studio downtown that used to be a textile factory.
“It’s a crisis,” we say, and the beanies all nod in unison. “If we aren’t careful, we’ll end up like the Bay Area.” The Bay Area is our gentrification boogeyman. If we don’t triple-check the locks and say our prayers, predatory developers and tech giants will wait until…
