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Opinion: Love the Views, Hate the ‘Tude

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Well, there goes the neighborhood.

Thanks to the New York Times.

The paper profiled my part of L.A. last weekend as a hot, up-and-coming neighborhood with comparatively cheap housing, geographic convenience and views that ‘could be mistaken for Tuscany.’

As even downtown and Hollywood became gentrified, Northeast L.A.—Eagle Rock, Mt. Washington, Highland Park—had to know that its turn would be coming.

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Already, we were seeing the hipsters move in. More and better restaurants followed them. That part was great. Alas, sometimes, so did the attitude.

In the venerable hillside neighborhoods of NELA, the roads are old and narrow and sometimes, happily, still unpaved. There are no sidewalks in my neighborhood, where I’ve lived for 18 years, nor in many others around me; people walk their dogs and push their strollers in the street. These are real neighborhoods of old people and little kids, artists and office managers, nurses and writers. There’s an amiability, a pleasant knowledge that this isn’t the struggling, striving Westside, but a lucky, placid little Eastside Eden.

Even before people read the New York Times article and began emailing their real estate agents about this NELA place, stratospheric housing prices were squeezing buyers east, from the Westside and Hollywood Hills, across the Los Angeles River and into NELA. Most of them I’ve met really want to be part of the neighborhood they’ve chosen, and are probably delighted to be homeowners just about anywhere in L.A.

But a few of them seem angry at being here, and indifferent, even hostile to the local way of doing things. They ignore a passing ‘’hello’’ on the street. They roar heedlessly up and down the narrow, 75-year-old streets in glittering Range Rovers and such wheeled fauna which they sometimes park, astonishingly, in the red zones that are there so ambulances and fire trucks can squeeze and wiggle up and down the fire-prone hills to save our lives and our houses. Where’s the ‘gentry’ in this gentrification?

There’s such a thing as being in a neighborhood but not of it. I’m inclined to think their corporate clocks are ticking away angrily, ‘I’m 30 years old, 31 years old, and still not a studio chief? AND I have to live on the Eastside?’ In a city where folks in the 310 area code can think of the Eastside as beginning at La Brea, life in NELA must be an affront to some people—a waystation on the way up to a bigger title and a more acceptable address. For the rest of us, living here is a destination.

I’m sure that the New York Times piece added $20,000 to the value of my house. But what it did to the worth of the neighborhood—well, that’s another calculation altogether.

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