I’ve had Los Angeles on my mind lately. In November, I published a novel set there (you should buy Love Economy if you haven’t yet!). In March, I took a trip there. My youngest child goes to college in LA, my oldest went to college nearby, and my wife and I went to school just east of Los Angeles in Claremont. Perhaps you could say I have been educated on LA’s good points. The fact that I grew up in Seattle somehow only increases this fondness. Seattleites love to hate Los Angeles, which gives my liking for the place a pleasant touch of the transgressive.
Los Angeles is so large and so complicated and so widely represented in film and television and literature as to be kaleidoscopic, even hallucinatory by nature. So, maybe it’s appropriate that what I have to post here are four short, only loosely connected ideas.
That the Old Would Again be New – Models for Better Suburban Architecture
On our LA trip we stayed at the edge of Angelino Heights, an ancient proto suburb located on the vertiginous hillsides south of Sunset and above Echo Park Lake. I picked the place somewhat at random, but it turned out to be a treasure box for domestic architecture. We saw many of the early twentieth century craftsman-style dwellings and bungalow courts that are typical to older Los Angeles neighborhoods, and it turns out that Angelino Heights also harbors a rare-for-Southern-California collection of older Victorian homes.
The Victorians and Craftsman-style homes are cool, though I’m not sure they are a model for anything new except retro-looking upscale single family houses. But I’ve long dreamed of seeing LA- style bungalow courts replicated at scale, together with the gorgeous stucco fourplexes common to areas of the city close to Angelino Heights like Silver Lake and Los Feliz. I’ve even thought about establishing a housing development business to realize this dream. Lacking the skills and capital to establish myself as a real estate developer; however, for now I’ll content myself to write about this kind of housing.
I also appreciate the way that Los Angeles neighborhoods like Echo Park and Angelino Heights sometimes make clever use of steep Northeast LA hillsides with terraced or “stair step” designs.
The Late Eve Babitz May be Having a Cultural Moment
On my Los Angeles trip I finished the second book I’ve read recently by Joan Didion’s party girl contemporary Eve Babitz. The book, Babitz’ first and probably best known, is a memoir style collection of essays and fragments called Eve’s Hollywood. The loose, funny, sometimes melancholic, always pointed writing in this book is perfect for the messy metropolis Babitz once so loved. Previously, I read the provocatively titled essay collection Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. I picked up both volumes in bookshops far from LA, one at Point Reyes Books in Point Reyes Station and the other at Elliott Bay Books in Seattle. Both carried little white love tag reviews written in pen by store employees. I had never heard of Babitz before encountering these volumes, but the writer and self-described professional adventuress is having a bit of a cultural moment, I think. It’s too bad she’s no longer around to enjoy it.
I wish I could say that “Beth Kamińska,” a central character in Love Economy, was modeled on Babitz’ public persona. Her name even sounds a bit like Babitz’. But I dreamed up Beth well before I encountered Eve. Also, while my character is pretty wild, perhaps in certain ways like to how Babitz was in reality, the fictional Beth is also a super-serious economics professor confronting the limits and contradictions of her attempts to maximize utility in her personal life. Babitz the actual person, meanwhile, scorned academia and took herself off the college track early. Here’s what she has to say on this score in her fabulous essay “Sins of the Green Death” (“‘But what will you do,” the counselor’s eyes leave my test scores and focus on my face, ‘if you don’t go to UCLA? ’/ ‘I was thinking of becoming an adventuress,’ I mumble. / ‘What?’ / ‘Maybe I’ll …’ I chicken out, only 17 and not Brando enough yet, ‘go … to L.A.C.C.’ / ‘Oh.’”).
Babitz also reminds me a bit of another female character in a recent book set in Los Angeles, one that has just perhaps sold a few more copies than my own. This character is the narrator in Miranda July’s All Fours. But July’s character is more obsessive than the mercurial-seeming Babitz. I liked the speaker in All Fours, but Babitz comes off as someone who would have been more fun to encounter in the lounge at the Chateau Marmont.
LA is tops for food
“De gustibus non disputandum est” (“in matters of taste there can be no dispute”) is a favorite saying of my brother-in-law’s. Well, maybe. But you’re going to have a hard time convincing me out of my opinion that LA has the best food scene in the country. There are just so many casually delicious, funky, fun options.
A couple of recommendations that are only a long walk (or short Uber ride) from where we stayed in Angelino Heights include a homey natural wine bar and small plates spot called Henrietta, adjacent to the always delicious Clark Street Bakery on Glendale Boulevard. Also wonderful is the upscale Mexican joint A Tí, where we took our son and his girlfriend. I recommend the ceviche and the duck mole and the tacos, which come in thick homemade blue corn tortillas. We didn’t try the desserts there, saving ourselves for El Moro down the block, part of a small Mexico City-based chain focused on deep fried snack foods. You know just the tasty, ridged, cinnamon sugar-dusted cylinders I’m talking about …
And Yet … People are Leaving
While I’m very pro-LA lately, the same can’t necessarily be said for many actual LA County residents. Take, for example, the results of this year’s UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs’ quality of life survey, which places Los Angeles residents’ satisfaction with their own quality of life at an all time low. Among the negatives are high costs for everything but housing especially, the climate of fear connected to immigration raids in a city very much defined by immigration, and the effects of catastrophic wildfires. According to this LA Times article one in five residents surveyed reported continuing loss of income related to the wildfire disaster.
Many LA residents are expressing their dissatisfaction by leaving. As a point of cultural reference, and to connect to an earlier section of this post, the Los Angeles Eve Babitz wrote about was a place of very rapid population growth. Most of Eve’s Hollywood, after all, is a memoir of Babitz’ youthful experiences in the 1950s and 1960s. In the ’50s LA County gained nearly two million new residents. Another million showed up in the ’60s.
The louche, loose, creative early 1970s Los Angeles Babitz chronicles in Slow Days, Fast Company tracked with a brief period of population decline (see Ron Brownstein’s important book Rock Me on the Water for more on this culturally important moment). But this short breather was followed by continued breakneck population growth from the late 1970s until around 1990, after which time Los Angeles County grew more slowly to a peak of just over ten million people in 2017.
Since then, however, the county has lost some 400,000 residents. Just between July 2024 and July 2025, according to this LA Times article, Los Angeles County lost 54,000 inhabitants. This was the largest numeric population loss for any county in the nation, although as the article also points out Los Angeles County is by far the nation’s largest, which means that losses in percentage terms are perhaps less dramatic than they appear. Also, this is hardly a place witnessing rust belt style housing abandonment. Los Angeles remains a great place to live if you can afford it, and in fact, evidence exists that might lead us to expect to see an increase in the concentration of comparatively wealthy older Californians.
But even if for a GenX homeowner like myself LA sometimes looks like a pretty attractive place to live, the key question for the Los Angeles region is not how many fifty- and sixty-somethings move in or out. Instead, as USC demography and urban planning professor Dowell Myers points out in the aforementioned LA Times article, it is especially critical for the region to keep people the age of my children—people in their twenties.
Connected to this demographic challenge is the issue of immigration flows, since immigrants tend to be younger. Also, of course, there is the critical issue of housing costs. This issue isn’t much of a problem for baby boom homeowners sitting on decades of unearned housing wealth and shielded by California’s stupidly inviolable Proposition 13. But for younger people, housing costs are a huge issue and a huge problem. Across California, how can we create environments that make it easier for the young to buy and rent homes, start businesses, and form families? And how can we make sure these environments are also beautiful and durable, perhaps even on the model of the older Los Angeles neighborhoods discussed at the beginning of this piece?