A decade ago, Downtown Los Angeles was going to be the next big thing. From a 2014 episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee:
“Why would anyone ever be downtown?” Jerry Seinfeld inquires.
“Because downtown is slowly turning into Brooklyn.” Patton Oswalt answers.
“I get it. Everybody needs a Brooklyn.”
Seinfeld and Oswalt are not men normally swept away by faddish enthusiasms. But the idea that Downtown Los Angeles was finally going to have its time in the sun seemed pretty reasonable five to ten years ago.
Granted, DTLA is rather oddly sited 17 miles inland from the Santa Monica Pier and 24 miles from the harbor. (It’s where it is because when the Spanish arrived in September 1781, that was, due to a geological quirk, the only part of the Los Angeles River that flowed aboveground all year round.) But back in the Good Old Days of the Stuff White People Like era, DTLA looked like the future. As I wrote in my review of Spike Jonze’s Oscar-winning 2014 movie Her:
One reason Her is so much less popular with viewers than with reviewers is because it is set in a future Los Angeles depicted as a serene, benevolent utopia stripped of everything that English majors have traditionally found tawdry about the real LA: swimming pools, movie stars, and fancy cars. Granted, those are the only things that the rest of the world likes about LA, but tasteful writers have always been irritated that Los Angeles was the Dream Destination of the Uncouth.
Thus, critic Liam Lacey explains in the Toronto Globe and Mail:
Some things about this Los Angeles of the future are much better that [sic] today: Density has replaced sprawl, so everyone lives in high-rises looking out over other high-rises (many of the exteriors were shot in Shanghai), to the thrum of a trancey aural wash of Arcade Fire music. They walk on elevated walkways and ride a subway system and work in rooms in velvety pastels. Poverty and cars seem relics of the past.
… But downtown living is the kind of thing that literate people enjoy these days. (Recall the surprise success of the 2009 romance 500 Days of Summer with Joseph Gordon-Levitt as an aspiring architect wooing Zooey Deschanel in a gentrifying downtown LA.) Hence, Her looks like it was inspired by a Matthew Yglesias e-book about how we should all live in Blade Runner-sized apartment towers and take magnetic levitation trolleys to work.
And indeed DTLA’s now full of tall new apartment buildings.
But then came the New Meth, 2016’s Proposition HHH to subsidize homelessness, and the Floyd Effect.
Now, DTLA is kind of scary-looking and upscale exurbs like Santa Clarita and Irvine are back in fashion.
It’s almost as if urban living is dependent on retrograde law and order.
Oh, well…
