* Santa Monica’s housing stock was pretty unimpressive when I lived there in 1981-82. No airconditioning in my dumpy apartment, but I only needed it about 10 days per year, and barely needed any heat.
Before antibiotics, rich people didn’t like to live near the ocean because they thought they’d get TB. So they lived inland in places like Pasadena. My grandfather, for example, moved from Oak Park, IL to Altadena above Pasadena in 1929.
But then smog and antibiotics came along, so people with money started to moving to Santa Monica, which had surprisingly crummy houses.
Now the smog is gone, so Pasadena is nice again.
* My brother-in-law and family lived in a rental in Santa Monica in the mid to late 1980s as they began their university careers. I recall their saying that several of their older neighbors bought homes there in the late 1940s and early 1950s for about $10-15,000 or so. Not very fancy homes going by external appearances—definitely lower middle to middle income homes.
But even by then, the market value had gone up by 20 or 30 times in nominal dollars and these had become upper-middle class properties for those who sought to buy.
* A friend of mine bought a 900 square foot house in Santa Monica around 1986. That was pretty typical of the housing stock except in the extreme north where there were big houses. Santa Monica shows up a lot in Raymond Chandler detective novels from around 1940 as “Bay City” — a kind of sleazy, low rent place. Philip Marlowe’s best girl lives in a tiny house on…
The new construction in 1981, however, was extravagant. I recall touring a new house made out of white pipes by some avant garde architect that looked, as Tom Wolfe would say, like an insecticide refinery.
It took me a long time to figure out that my parents’ worries about me catching some terrible disease from the fog in Santa Monica were actually reasonable from a pre-1945 point of view in which penicillin didn’t really exist and inland hot / dry weather was healthier than Santa Monica’s cool / moist weather.
And that’s why Santa Monica in 1981 was a fairly expensive dump. Now, it’s much more expensive but it’s less of a dump.
* the documentary dogtown and z-boys gets it title from Santa Monica and Venice being called, well, Dogtown in the 70s.
Venice was still pretty sketchy to me in the early 2000s. Now that was the place to buy for recent property increases.
it was an interesting documentary, btw. you get to see the white punk skate subculture being born because a guy was filming it at the time. White Dogtown surf punks showed up white straitlaced suburban Californians at skate competitions with their 70s stoner surfer style.
* Dogtown was specifically the Pacific Ocean Park area, where the pilings left over from the old amusement park made for some interesting surfing. The poseurs of Venice and Santa Monica appropriated the Dogtown cache after the documentary became a cult classic.
* Aside from worries about tuberculosis, it was not unusual before 1970 for parents of children with chronic asthma to be told by their doctors to move to drier climes for the benefit of their children, if they could do so. Humidity, fog and sea air significantly worsen symptoms of asthma in many patients.
* The assumption was that dampness (e.g., fog) was dangerous. Santa Monica is mostly sunny, but it does get foggy at nights. Fog used to shut down LAX frequently, but now they have extremely powerful runway lights that keep the otherwise dilapidated airport busy until the wee hours every night.
Southern California was settled after 1887 first in the inland San Gabriel Valley (e.g., Pasadena,about 30 miles inland) first. A large fraction of early residents of SoCal were Midwesterners with respiratory problems (some actually had TB, some had other problems, some had no problems — as in Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” tuberculosis was hard to prove). Pasadena’s warm dry climate was considered healthier than Santa Monica’s mild moist climate.
There’s no natural harbor to draw people to the coast. And downtown Los Angeles, about 20 miles inland, was a rare place where the Los Angeles river always flowed above ground due to a geological quirk forcing the aquifer under the river to the surface.
* Fog did not discourage the settlement of San Francisco, but if there’s gold in them thar hills, you’ll put up with a little fog.
* LA had a train that ran down to the Beach Cities to service the beachgoers and the people who lived in those little cottages. In the South Bay the tracks ran along what is essentially now the bike path. Photos from the early 20th century show beach homes scattered among rolling sand dunes.
A colleague of mine’s 100 year old Mom was still living in one of those beach cottages on a 1700 square foot lot on a walk street several blocks from the beach. When she passed away he listed it for $2.2 million and took the first offer above asking, which came in 2 hours after the property was listed. Kicked himself afterward when he had the thought, too late, that he could have ridden a bidding war. There is probably a 2500+ square foot house on the property now.
* I recall reading that the original Spanish settlement of Los Angeles was built inland due to some Spanish regulation about avoiding maritime attacks
* SM didn’t strike me as sunny. And definitely the fog was still there in the mornings at Samohi (close enough to the ocean to just barely have a view–standing at the right place in no fog).
I still don’t see how you think the Bay area has better weather. The Pacific ocean is cold. So the coast from San Diego to SB has the best weather in the world. SF is too far north.
Your take only makes sense if you’re comparing the valley to going to Berkeley/SF/Palo alto. but why skip Malibu? It’s just better.
* But only 12,500 people are allowed to live along the 26 miles of ocean in Malibu. And Rob Reiner and Barbra Streisand are going to keep it that way. You might say that Malibuites are privileged xenophobes who hate and fear the huddled masses of the San Fernando Valley yearning to breathe free in non-existent high rises overlooking their beachfront homes in Malibu, but then you aren’t holding the Microphone are you?
* I took a vacation to Santa Monica last year, and while it’s overall architecture is prosperous/pedestrian, I thought it the most enticing place to live that I have ever been to. The mellow vibe, close to the cool parts of LA, an hour’s drive from the beautiful coastal interior of So. Cal, the warmth, with the cool natural airconditioning from the sea. Who wouldn’t want to live there? I’ll never have the money, though, so it’s just a dream.
* Palisades High School, aka Pali Hi, has been around for decades. I lived a few blocks from there after college and knew many who went to school there. The local community thrived based on the semi-remote location, accessible mainly via Sunset Boulevard and Pacific Coast Highway (PCH). That kept it somewhat removed from the homeless scene in Santa Monica and kept the crime rate down.
Pali remains a wonderful close-in very expensive suburb, fairly accessible to Century City meaning not a really horrible commute like having to drive to downtown LA or the Valley. Modest bungalows cost millions and those on larger lots get torn down to construct bigger homes. The old housing stock was not very well built, as Steve noted as well about Santa Monica. When the wind blew, you could see the curtains move, and there was no insulation as none was really needed.
If you are feeling patriotic, and are in the LA area on July 4th, watch the Palisades Parade. They usually have some celebrities along with bands and such. One of my memories from past parades was seeing dozens of people flipping off then-politician Tom Hayden.
* I had never heard that one before, the rationale I did hear was that the LA river in what is now the downtown area is the only place in Southern California where you had a reliable year round supply of potable water in the open. This allowed enough farming and livestock to support a community of about 10000 people. The only other significant open water at that time was the marshlands at what is now Marina Del Rey where the LA River flowed to the Pacific prior to the early 1800′s. That would not have been a healthy area to live and because there was no natural port there, there was no other incentive to settle in the area. The only other water was the seasonal winter floods, and Lake Elsinore on the other side of the Santa Ana Mountains which is the only natural lake in SoCal, but even Lake Elsinore disappeared during droughts.
* My wife and I took our very young children to Santa Monica about four times. The last time, in Fall 2014, we were harassed, intimidated, and followed for a prolonged period by an aggressive, large, young black man. Nobody did anything, even merely calling the police, and we had to leave lest I get into it with him and get arrested.
Santa Monica people are hateful leftist bullies when it comes to people like us, and self-hating cowardly pussies when it comes to guys like the “African-American gentleman” (as they would say) who menaced us.
* One element of “the Plan” may be municipal minimum wages that are elevated above the national minimum. Washington, D.C.’s minimum hourly wage rises to $11.50 this week and goes up annually until it reaches $15 in 2020, and will be adjusted for inflation each year after that.
Is this a canny strategy to make such cities out of reach for people whose labor isn’t worth $15 an hour? (My 17-, 19-, and 20-year-old sons are working this summer for $12, $11, and $15/hour.) And not only will there be no low-paying work available, but there won’t be any cheap, low-margin businesses around; there will only be pricey places, and poorer people, even the ones without jobs, will have to move somewhere else if they want to shop in a Dollar General or eat a Big Mac. As with the housing, immigrant businesses will play into this somehow, the places that don’t really pay official wages to their self-employed owners and relatives. Also, immigrant laborers will be as exempt from a $15 an hour wage floor as they are from any other legal restriction on their ability to work.
* They did this [high minimum wage] in Santa Monica a number of years ago. It’s probably pretty effective at clearing out lower working class people. It has no effect on the nonworking homeless, so they become more noticeable amidst all the pretty people.
