By: Svetlana Babaeva

We’re thrilled to once again showcase the impressive work of a GIS student from Santa Monica College! This time, we spotlight the exceptional talents of Svetlana Babaeva, whose dedication and analytical skill shine through in her latest project. Svetlana has taken on one of the most urgent and complex issues facing Californians today: the dramatic and ongoing rise in rent across Los Angeles County. With a sharp geographic lens and a commitment to uncovering meaningful insights, she’s mapped and analyzed this crisis with clarity and purpose. In her own words …

Los Angeles, often seen as a land of opportunity and the embodiment of the “California Dream,” drew me in 2019 with its vibrant cultural energy. However, I soon encountered the city’s harsh reality: a crushing housing crisis that personally affected me and nearly a third of my neighbors who spend over half their income on rent.

Understanding the Housing Crisis Through GIS

After five years of observing this crisis and studying geography at Santa Monica College, I realized my personal struggle was part of a larger issue impacting over 60% of Los Angeles County residents. This led me to create Rent Pressure in Los Angeles, a story map using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) to pinpoint areas most affected by severe rent burdens. My spatial analysis highlighted central and downtown Los Angeles County as particularly vulnerable, prompting questions about the sustainability of living here. This project has significantly deepened my understanding of how geographic thinking and GIS can illuminate and address critical real-world issues beyond just housing. These patterns clearly warrant continued investigation within this area of study.

Acknowledgements

I am incredibly grateful to the Santa Monica College Geography Program for their exceptional guidance. Special thanks to Professor Jing Liu, whose five GIS courses and unwavering support were instrumental in developing this project and my forthcoming Geospatial Technology certificate. I also extend my sincere appreciation to Professor Robert O’Keefe for introducing me to critical geographic thinking, Professor Pete Morris for his insightful, multidisciplinary approach to California geography, and Professor William A. Selby for his inspiring presentations. Their combined contributions have provided an invaluable foundation and continue to inspire my geographic explorations.

Showcase Your Geographic Work on Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography

Are you passionate about California’s landscapes, communities, or pressing challenges? Have you created maps, visualizations, research projects, or multimedia presentations that explore the geography of the Golden State? If so, we invite you to contribute to Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography — an online platform dedicated to telling California’s story through a geographic lens.

We’re looking for student and faculty contributions that connect clearly to California — whether you’re examining climate change impacts, housing and rent patterns, water resources, wildfire dynamics, transportation systems, cultural diversity, immigration, or any number of issues shaped by place and space. Submissions can be analytical or creative, visual or written, but they must offer geographic insight into the state’s dynamic human or physical landscapes.

By sharing your work, you not only gain professional exposure but also help inform and inspire others to better understand California — its regions, its people, and the challenges it faces.

If you’re interested in being featured, or have a student whose work deserves a wider audience, we’d love to hear from you! Let’s rediscover the Golden State together, one geographic story at a time.

The post Rent Pressure in L.A first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Here is a deeper story that explains how this happened, but more importantly, why it’s happening now. I will guide you through the play-by-play, always emphasizing the science behind the scenes, so you can see that this catastrophe is not past tense, no matter how much later you are reading about it. To set the stage, make sure you wander through our previous website story about precipitation extremes to understand how we got here.

Two years of heavy rains + a record nine months of drought + epic windstorms + low humidity all along the wildland-urban interface = …

It started with two years of record rainfall (competing for the most rain ever recorded in the Los Angeles area during two consecutive years), which finally broke our more than two-decades-old megadrought. Rehydrated plant communities flourished. Ecosystems added tons of biomass. Grasslands, coastal sage scrub, chaparral, oak woodlands, riparian woodlands, and every other plant community joined the party. As usual, the rain stopped last spring to make way for summer’s drought, starving our Mediterranean ecosystems of water. Through the autumn months, as water content in our plants dwindled each day, the annual race was on to see which would come first: Santa Ana winds or the first rains. Substantial early rains typically douse the fire season until next year. But, as I mentioned in the previous story on this website, the storms didn’t even show up for this year’s competition. SoCal’s widespread rainfall totals since spring remained near or below ¼ inch by mid-January, the middle of our rainy season. (As example, LA Airport had recorded only 0.04 inches and Santa Monica was at 0.09 inches for the water year well into mid-January, making this compete for the driest stretch on record for the region.)

Next, add autumn’s dry winds. By mid-November, previous gentle offshore breezes occasionally turned to classic Santa Ana winds and red flag warnings, finally sweeping shallow marine layers out to sea. Relative humidity tanked. The Mountain Fire in Camarillo scorched more than 20,000 acres, 200 structures (including homes), and destroyed millions of dollars of agricultural products in early November. By December 9, it still hadn’t rained, encouraging the Franklin Fire to terrorize Malibu all the way to PCH during another gusty Santa Ana wind event. Sadly, these were just dress rehearsals for the big shows.

As January progressed, offshore wind episodes became more threatening as the great drying trend expanded across the entire state. By early January, the National Weather Service was warning of dangerous, life-threatening (and possibly historic) Santa Ana winds that would barrel into Southern California on Tuesday, the 7^th. Unfortunately, the forecasters nailed it. By Tuesday afternoon, the winds were howling until it seemed as if helicopters were hovering above our homes all night. I’ve written about these devil winds before on this website and in my book and I’ve experienced and researched scores of them over decades, but this was different.

We were caught in a wide, massive atmospheric wind tunnel midway between a low-pressure system dropping to our southeast and a strong high-pressure system trying to assert itself to our west. Upper- and lower-level support grew into an historic pressure gradient that forced cool, stable air masses toward the coast, where they would be warmed by compression. But there was another problem: the mountains were in the way. As the heavy air parcels were pushed up the opposite sides of the mountains, they eventually made it to the top, where they were free to cascade down the coastal slopes toward the ocean to become leeward waves. Widespread gusts were clocked at over 70 mph; a few made it over 90 mph. Meandering mountain waves, chaotic eddies, and violent rotary currents formed downwind of the mountains, spreading over developments, infrastructure, and millions of residents on the coastal plain. Though the powerful winds blew from the continent, wind directions would temporarily jerk one way and then the other without warning as the powerful eddies circulated by. Giant trees and power poles were toppled as power outages swept across Southern California. The big show began to resemble a terrifying scene in a science fiction movie, except you couldn’t write a script that could better prime a landscape for the ignitions that would follow.

My chronological photo essay below illustrates how a wildfire can quickly explode into a deadly monster, consuming everything in its path until it meets the ocean. This was the case as our beloved Pacific Palisades natural and human landscapes were destroyed within a few hours this week. Given the conditions I’ve just described, it should also be no surprise that another conflagration would race out of the foothills below the San Gabriel Mountains on the same day. The death and destruction barged into Altadena and Pasadena neighborhoods that seemed far removed from the dangers of what we might consider a wildland-urban interface. (The extend of such imaginary boundaries is being reevaluated.) The greatest surprise may be how heroic firefighters were finally able to stop such an out-of-control train inferno before it did even more damage.  

I’ve experienced and written about too many of these disasters over the years. The ominous red sky, the choking smoke, curious ashes fluttering down to resemble delicate snowflakes, butterfly wings, and rose petals: you may have read about them here or in my book. But I’m one of the lucky ones—so far—as these heartbreaking catastrophes become more common. Admit it or not, we all know what’s going on here. Our relationship with nature has gone seriously awry. We’re testing her and she’s winning and she always will. We’ve got to find better ways to increase our natural history and science literacy and reconnect to the real world or we’re all toast. Without such a paradigm shift, we will continue to feel the potential of the California Dream, and all that we love about our Golden State, slip away. And if you think you can simply escape to other states or countries with greener pastures, take a closer look at the chaos and dysfunction beyond our borders. Maybe if you stick around, you can play your role in righting our ship.

UCLA’s Park Williams and other researchers have teamed up to learn how much of these severe events might be connected to the bigger climate change puzzle. Click here for their most recent article.

Here’s another perspective (slightly compressed) from renowned climatologist Bill Patzert:
“…decades of ‘criminal’ zoning, totally irresponsible building codes, inadequate water storage to deal with fire apocalypses and not dealing with a power delivery system that ignites fires year after year, are the major culprits.” 
Patzert also emphasizes that “global warming is the greatest existential threat to the environment and our civilization, but what we are living through now is human carelessness and ignoring the natural climate forces of Southern California.” But his interview with the LA Times sums up this year: “During my career, I’ve never seen punishing Santa Ana events so overwhelm the normal winter rainy season.”

Regardless, here is where my sign-offs are getting a bit repetitive: keep your seatbelts fastened.

And now follow me as we watch the peculiar behavior of the horrific wildfire that terrorized the Pacific Palisades and changed our world.

If you want to experience the drama of escaping the Palisades firestorm and rushing to evacuate, check out Tracy’s series of photos and videos arranged in chronological order as escapees eventually make it down to PCH. The last images show an heroic officer using their hose to douse spot fires started by embers landing in their yard. Note how such a fire can advance with its burning embers through the sky faster than on the ground. (Please appreciate that these images are personal, raw, and unedited.)

Here is a time-lapse video showing the start of the Palisades Fire from another angle from 10:45am – 2:48pm. Thanks to NPS Ranger Susan Teele for sharing.

This time-lapse video shows a Mt. Wilson view of the Eaton Fire from January 7-8. Another thanks to NPS Ranger Susan Teele for sharing.

Notice how above-average precipitation quickly dwindles to far below average for this season as we move from Northern California to Southern California weather stations: https://ggweather.com/seasonal_rain.htm

This NY Times article supports Bill Patzert’s earlier comments.

Check out this NY Times Article: Researchers show how Santa Ana wind speed is the main variable that makes SoCal fires more destructive.

This research is from the International Journal of Wildland Fire: Climate and weather drivers in southern California Santa Ana Wind and non-Santa Wind fires

Santa Ana wind history and trends.

THE END??? All the stories on this website and in my California Sky Watcher book confirm what we’ve learned from experience: nature’s cycles never “end” and we’re just a part of them. Should it finally start raining in SoCal, the next chapters will likely feature catastrophic mud and debris flows that always follow these fires after they have stripped the covers off our hillsides. Stay tuned!

The Unimaginable Epilogue

Dominant upper-level high-pressure systems settled over the entire West Coast and generated exceptionally dry on-and-off offshore wind events across California for more than two weeks after the worst wildfires started. In Southern California, powerful Santa Ana winds howled through January 23, fanning numerous new fires just as crews tried to mop up some of the most destructive wildfires in California history. Relative humidity dropped into single digits throughout SoCal. But finally, for the first time since spring, weather forecasters were tracking a low-pressure system capable of delivering precipitation that promised to be the final blow to the fires by January 26. This little system wouldn’t direct any atmospheric rivers over the fire scars. We will have to wait to see if those will arrive during our other normally wet months of February and March. To learn more about the science and power of atmospheric rivers, you might check out my story about ARs on this website or read my feature article in the current edition of Weatherwise Magazine.          

Here are three videos shared by Karin from the Topanga Canyon Docents:

Topanga resident Elena Roche made a number of videos during the fire. You can see more on her YouTube site. Here, active fires were blocked just before they could burn through the community of Topanga and parts of Trippet Ranch. By this time, the fire fronts were spreading several miles around after ravaging the Pacific Palisades.

This video takes you up from PCH through Topanga Canyon in the aftermath to see what burned and what escaped the flames, and why any substantial rain will produce destructive mud and debris flows. It was filmed on January 17th.

Here are personal stories from the Topanga New Times published just before the first rain finally came.

The documentary Dry Times, made by Anurag Kumar and Alex Gregory, has, unfortunately, become more relevant as it captured California’s recurring predicaments during the megadrought that spanned more than two decades: Given recent events, this has become a haunting trailer. The Movie

The post Making Sense of our Apocalyptic Firestorms first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

We start our weekend at the 50^th annual Summer Solstice Celebration and Parade in Santa Barbara. We end this only-in-California weekend by making extraordinary discoveries on our bikes when CicLAvia cut through South L.A. along Western Avenue. 

El Capitan State Beach provided a beautiful staging ground to plan our attendance at one of Santa Barbara’s most festive events of the year. Like most other Southern California coastal campgrounds, staying overnight at El Capitan usually requires reservations months ahead of time. Camp sites are just a short walk to their relatively secluded beach, which is about 20 miles (and minutes) to the little city that has been coined our “American Riviera”. And like much of the Santa Barbara coastline nowadays, you will find most of the beach submerged if you visit during high tide. Assorted rolled and rounded rocks have been deposited in piles and stranded along with wave-sculpted driftwood at the base of the bluffs and just above tideline. Low tide offers opportunities for long walks and/or runs along the strips of temporarily-exposed sand, which are occasionally interrupted by rock outcrops and a few tide pools.

During this summer solstice weekend, the monotonous June Gloom had finally been squashed to near the sea surface by air descending out of a strong high-pressure system, producing Southern California’s first widespread heat wave of the year. But as is often the case when water temperatures hover near 60°F (15.5°C), a shallow layer of chilling fog frequently drifted off the ocean and backed up against the coastal cliffs. Wisps of fog occasionally rolled up and danced on to the marine terraces only to burn off or retreat back down to the beach. Just inland, the Santa Inez Mountains are being lifted as the crust is compressed in this region where the Pacific Plate is jammed against the North American Plate along the big bend in the larger San Andreas Fault system. As this Pacific Plate side attempts to slide to the northwest at about the rate that your fingernails grow, folds and faults bend and break the crust, thrusting the Santa Inez Mountains above the sea so that they loom over this thin strip of coastal plain. The great barrier is part of the Transverse Ranges that cut across this widest transect of the state with ridges and long valleys trending west-east. On this day, the mountains abruptly emerged up and above the shallow fog, exposing their coastal sage scrub and oak woodland slopes to bake in the dry summer solstice heat wave.

Such typical June weather conditions kept the streets of Santa Barbara basking in that sweet sea breeze soft spot between the cool beach and hot inland slopes during most of the day: a degree too warm in the sun, a degree too cool the shade. How could anyone possibly survive such discomfort?   

Such a perfect setting and weather stage was set for the crowds of more than 50,000 people. They gathered along Santa Barbara Street on Saturday, June 22, to watch the parade that would end at the lush tree-studded Alameda Park, where the three-day festival featured colorful artists, dancers, and an eclectic mix of musicians and local bands. The bizarre parade and the entire weekend evolved into something resembling a crowded amalgamation of the Doo Dah, a miniature Burning Man, and the Rose Parade gone awry. Participants ranged from older established residents who found the best of the California Dream long ago, to younger free spirits attempting to revive older hippie and beach cultures, to folks somewhere in between. On the surface, the whole sun worshiping and summer near the beach stereotypical Golden State cultures came alive on this weekend. Even the mix of those who had wandered out of the security of their multi-million-dollar homes with those who were living by the day and didn’t care was classic Californica. Scenes of people celebrating their California Dreams, surrounded by Spanish-style architecture, framed by coastal Mediterranean environments, complete with nonnative palms poking up from perfectly manicured green landscapes, could have come right out of a Hollywood movie.

Closer investigation reveals another, more complicated side of Santa Barbara that counters most stereotypes. Thousands of residents (more than 13%) live below the poverty line. Blue-collar locals with their roots in this coastal town mix with recent immigrants working in service and construction industries. They squeeze into limited affordable housing, while thousands more workers cope with the local housing crisis by commuting from more affordable distant communities to earn a paycheck in paradise.   

To further demonstrate the great divide between the two Californias, we jump 100 miles east and a bit south into the just-as-renowned working-class cultures and densely-populated landscapes of South Los Angeles, about 10 miles from the beach. We can thank Metro’s cicLAvia celebrations for occasionally introducing thousands of visitors to these neighborhoods, which seem worlds away from the Santa Barbara where we reveled just one day earlier. At first, the only thing these iconic California locations might seem to share is the mild Mediterranean climate and a noon sun that climbs to nearly 80 degrees above the southern horizon during these longest summer solstice days. (The highest noon sun of the season is measured at about 71.5 degrees from the southern horizon along California’s northern border, to about 81 degrees along our southern border.) Community, environmental justice, access to open space, food deserts, poverty, urban heat islands, struggles for survival, economic opportunity, urban renewal, and gentrification enter our common vocabulary here. As with Santa Barbara (but for very different reasons), South LA has inspired researchers, writers, musicians, artists, moviemakers, activists, politicians, and entrepreneurs who have been sharing their perspectives about this place, while much of the world has been listening. The darkest narratives focus on crime, gang violence, drugs, and arguments about whether we should refer to historic violent eruptions as riots, rebellions, uprisings, or civil unrest. But look a little closer beyond the media’s oversimplified and exaggerated stereotypes and the stories become far more complicated — and interesting.      

Wander through the neighborhoods and business districts surrounding this gritty leg of Western Avenue that stretches from south of the I-10 Freeway to the I-105 Freeway. You will likely find people and landscapes that conform to whatever stereotype you choose. For instance, you will notice thousands of recent immigrants who are crowding in and filling spaces left by those who fled this crowded urban flatland to search for new opportunities in distant places. But you will also find people and landscapes that offer hope and new opportunities for success and renewal right here. The contradictions are complex. People from other parts of the country are often astounded to find the average cost of a modest single-family South LA home at around $700,000. Though this is less than the median $2 million+ in Santa Barbara, it is far higher than the U.S. average. And you will find plenty of folks who are rooted here and are staying and investing to improve the quality of these living and working environments. You will also find vegan restaurants, parks, churches, schools, and community meeting places where the focus is on physical and mental health and planning for a better future. I wrote about some of them in a few of our website stories we posted over the years, including A Cultural Tour of LA. (You can surf back through a few of our website pages to find them.) And when you venture along some of the tree-lined streets, where families work together to create a sense of community, you might not realize you are in one of LA’s more renowned lower-income working-class neighborhoods. It’s amazing how landscapes with trees can make such a positive difference by changing microclimates and cultural climates.

Enter entrepreneurs turned local heroes Joe and Celia Ward-Wallace. I met Joe while admiring some of the artwork in his now famous South LA Café. He might be considered a celebrity businessman, but I’d like to consider him the local positive influencer and geographer. He has proven how investing time, energy, and hard work into a struggling neighborhood can result in big payoffs for everyone. I could feel how his interminable positive energy is transforming landscapes and bringing new opportunities to South LA. Joe and Celia’s work has grown far beyond their coffee shop and cultural center theme: Coffee. Community. Connection. They champion a nonprofit community foundation and have worked as coaches and consultants for a string of budding local businesses.

Joe also understands the importance of trees that can add more than aesthetics as they soften the harsh urban heat island. When approaching South LA Cafe, you might first notice the trees he planted in spite of bureaucratic hurdles and costs that could have caused most folks to give up. And when you talk with him, you understand that he is one of those rare never-give-up souls with good ideas and dreams that are improving the quality of our living and working environments. It is obvious how a little greenery and shade in front of his thriving business has changed everything on this South LA corner, especially on an afternoon near the summer solstice. South LA Café has not only demonstrated how to cool the micro deserts created by urban heat islands, but how to bring healthy nourishment to a food desert.

South LA may never be a Santa Barbara (and vice versa), but comparing and contrasting the two places and their people during the summer solstice reminds us that we have plenty to learn from one another since we and our countless microclimates and cultural climates are all connected in profound ways. And the most impactful influencers are proving that Californians (like all of humanity) and our neighborhoods and landscapes really do have “more in common than the differences that separate us.”  

There’s a lot more to this Santa Barbara and South LA summer solstice story, so continue with the photo essay that follows and check out these websites:

South LA Café

LA Natural History Museum

TreePeople

Benefits of Urban Trees from the USDA/Forest Service

More Urban Tree Research

The post Celebrating the Summer Solstice California Style first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Just more than a century ago, the typical California commute or road trip around our growing cities and outposts was by foot, streetcar, or cable car, except for those who could afford a horse and buggy or carriage. Longer cross-country trips required wagons, stages, or trains. Bicycles were also pedaled into early urban scenes, with thousands of bicyclists organizing into bicycle clubs and demanding better roads for smoother bike rides. Our fledgling California settlements and wannabe cities grew into the 20^th century without widely-paved roads and parking lots to accommodate cars.

Revolutionary “horseless motor carriages” began rolling across the Golden State in the early 1900s. By 1905, there were already more than 6,000 vehicles (including motorcycles and trucks) bumbling through city streets and breaking down and getting lost and stuck on treacherous dirt roads to nowhere across the state. By 1906, the Auto Club was erecting directional road signs along crushed rock surfaces covered with oil and less-navigable dirt roads to serve those who were wealthy enough to afford their own vehicles. Auto Club members were issued ever-changing and improving road maps.

After Ford rolled out the Model T in 1908, cars became more affordable for average families (and much less expensive than the shorter-range electric cars that were already navigating city streets) and the California car culture was off to the races. By the time the $18 million State Highway Act was passed in 1910, funding was far too paltry to build the roads and other car infrastructures that the public demanded in nearly every town, city, and county. Still, the bonds funded groundbreaking and paving designed to start a continuous system of roads built to connect cities and other key points from north to south (including the birth of what we now call Hwy 101).

As the number of vehicles multiplied, there were plenty of critics. They noted the clouds of smoke belched out from unsafe vehicles that were running over defenseless pedestrians and crashing into one another, resulting in appalling rates of injury and death. But an unstoppable wave of car culture momentum took control and our relationships with cars eventually became as complicated as the people who have driven and interacted with them and the astounding varieties of automobile makes and models that have come and gone over the years.

Into the early 20^th Century, advancing streetcar tracks and technologies led to more efficient electric railways in our cities, often championed by real estate speculators who profited from increasingly dependable public transportation systems connecting to their new developments. Families with the financial resources were encouraged to move farther away from city centers to find their California Dreams on bigger lots within sprawling suburbs. Volumes have been written about how these early public transportation systems, ironically, set the geographic stage and paved the way for the freeways that would replace them.

The Arroyo Seco Parkway (later renamed the Pasadena Freeway) was completed in 1940 as the state’s (and arguably the nation’s) first freeway, connecting downtown LA to Pasadena suburbs. This was just a prelude to the pavement that was increasingly spreading and thoroughly covering and sealing the ground throughout cityscapes and suburbs and then extending in long and wide paths that radiated out to more remote coastal, mountain, and desert terrains. Following WWII, mass migrations into the state and out of our inner cities (commonly referred to as “white flight”) plopped millions of mostly middle-class families into outlying suburbs. These more distant developments were financed by bread winners encouraged by the accessibility and reliability of new free-flowing highways and freeways that quickly and conveniently linked commuters to urban centers.        

Those with the resources evacuated the inner cities and took their wealth with them, leaving behind those without the means. Exacerbating the segregation and inequalities, freeways and other car-culture connections to the suburbs were often built through older neighborhoods with the least political and economic power to stop them. Bifurcated working-class communities from the Bay Area to Southern California looked on as people drove through and passed by their neighborhoods to their jobs in the city in the morning and then carried their earnings out to spend in the suburbs every evening and throughout most weekends. By the mid-1900s, LA’s Bunker Hill (which once served as home to the wealthy business class) became another symbol for the new urban California. The old Victorian homes were abandoned and then razed and replaced by sleek steel and glass skyscrapers to serve as office spaces for the growing number of commuters from the suburbs. The car-culture wave impacted every California city, but LA became the poster child. Automobile worship was first tempered and then ridiculed by some as a series of seemingly insurmountable and disturbing problems developed. Stand-out San Francisco fared better and even thrived at times by offering a denser, more cosmopolitan urban experience with all the exciting, cutting-edge cultural attractions and innovations (and convenient public transportation systems) that go with it. Most other California urban centers weren’t so lucky.      

Little Selby (your author) was born into this California that was growing and changing faster than anyone could grasp. Our working-class outpost on the western edge of Santa Ana was quickly surrounded by a population and economy that seemed to take off with unimaginable changes in some places while other communities suffered from abandonment. Open fields that once supported orchards and truck crops grew cookie-cutter housing tracks attracting middle-class newcomer commuters. We watched new highways and freeways blaze their way through what remained of partially-open thoroughfares or reach farther by using eminent domain to scrape away older properties and neighborhoods that got in the way, new routes erected to support millions of neophyte commuters in their single-occupancy vehicles. We didn’t realize it then, but the growth and change was wild and unprecedented.

The times were exhilarating and exciting to some winners and participants, but troubling and destructive to some perceived losers who loathed a landscape and car culture with no sense of place or permanence. And these changes required wider roads, parking, and other paved spaces that dominated an infrastructure where cars were king. You know the old Joni Mitchell line about paving paradise and putting up a parking lot? Or how about Tom Petty’s editorial regarding life in Reseda, which more correctly referred to nearby parts of the San Fernando Valley: “There’s a freeway runnin’ through the yard.”    

Relatively sprawling and expansive, Southern California’s coastal plains served as perfect foundations for the pavement that was stretching from the beach to the base of the mountains. As LA’s urban heat island developed into a massive urban heat basin, local and then regional microclimates warmed by at least a few degrees. Place your hand near a paved surface on any sunny afternoon or try walking barefoot across the pavement on a summer day: you will quickly sense the additional heat that now radiates through every California urban landscape. Now follow the trails into nearby undeveloped hills covered with the natural plant communities that existed before our pavement: Evapotranspiration from Mediterranean grasslands, coastal sage, chaparral, and oak and riparian woodlands keep afternoon temperatures noticeably cooler. You can also compare the hot paved surfaces to the relatively cooler afternoons common to our city parks or beneath the street trees that decorate our precious urban forests. Further proof of how pavement transforms microclimates is found in research showing how urban heat islands have become particularly extreme even across car-dominated desert cities such as Phoenix and Las Vegas, after the natural soils, cacti, and other desert scrub communities are covered by expanding suburbs. I examine these changes in more detail in my California Sky Watcher book, which will appear in a few months, published by Heyday.

By contrast, you can also sense how the San Francisco Bay Area has evaded some negative effects of our car culture. Constricted on its bumpy little 49-square-mile peninsula, San Francisco was built and cast in the 1800s without cars; and its steep, narrow streets show it. The famed cable cars, streetcars, and hostility to automobiles stand out to this day as if The City were showcasing its antithesis to LA. Beyond The City, the Bay Area’s physical geography helped drive growing differences and perceived divisions between Northern and Southern California. Enormous water bodies separated spreading megalopolises and obstructed potential freeway routes that would have otherwise connected them. Limited car lanes were directed and merged toward the few exorbitantly-expensive bridges that acted like hourglasses; the flowing traffic had to be squeezed into narrow funnels that opened toward urban landscapes on each end of a bridge. The Bay Area’s combined hilly terrain, giant bays, and other assorted and dramatic natural landscapes concentrated populations, restricted where freeways could be built, and forced other ways of imagining transportation and daily commutes.     

From the 1960’s and 70’s and beyond, car troubles were emerging from the paved horizon and they impacted more than our urban landscapes. Exhaust that belched out of millions of vehicles without pollution controls began literally choking Californians to death, emboldening air quality management districts to exert their growing powers. Folks who didn’t develop lethal respiratory illnesses still felt the pain of ozone and other air pollutants originating from dirty vehicles. The problems were realized by kids like us who struggled to get a breath while participating in competitive sports and other recreational activities. We didn’t know that we would damage our health when exercising in smoggy air that was twice as polluted compared to today.

Like most adventurous California teens at the time, road trips for me meant escaping to the freedom of new places and open spaces. And the list of magical places to visit and experience grew as my mental maps expanded. I started driving when I was 16 so that I could get to my part-time blue-collar jobs and save some money that would lead to more independence and the great outdoors. I bought my first junk car with that money before graduating from high school. “Get your motor runnin’, head out on the highway” became a theme song for this new-found freedom as long as I could keep my car from breaking down. I tuned in my car stereo and turned up the volume to overcome the roar of wind whooshing into my open windows and past my ears as landscapes raced by and more distant and exotic places called out. What a rush! At last, I was free to break away and both figuratively and literally blaze my own trails. Fantastical vistas and the most remote trailheads were finally within my reach.

Back then, new freeway and road traffic flowed relatively freely compared to today. Global warming and anthropogenic climate change and crushing traffic gridlock had not yet entered into the public discourse. The expanding freeways and additional lanes to everywhere began resembling massive arteries and veins that gradually narrowed into capillaries to feed commuter traffic into more distant communities. When my unreliable clunker was working properly, I could smoothly zip between my jobs and college classes. I occasionally slapped my class notes on my steering wheel to cram study time into my drive time. Once, suffering from sleep deprivation and carbon monoxide poisoning from all the car exhaust, I dosed off while driving on the freeway. I woke up at what seemed to be nearly a mile later, still in my lane, stunned to realize how my steady foot on the accelerator kept my car pacing the steadily-flowing traffic. This was, literally, a car culture wake-up call that I wouldn’t forget. I realized how fortunate I was to be alive and free to make it to my job and classes that day among all the car-commuter madness. You would certainly not survive such an experience in today’s traffic that is constantly stopping and reaccelerating within much narrower lanes.         

And then the traffic monster raised its ugly head. During car culture growth years, if a freeway or road got too crowded, we widened it or built another one. But the throngs of new arrivals and commuters would quickly pack the new lanes until we had to build another and then another until we began running out of places to build them and neighborhoods that would allow them. “Rush hour” commutes expanded to two or three hours for some. And so we developed dysfunctional love-hate relationships with our cars and I shared those feelings even though my commutes were never that long. As we worked our way into the final years of the last century, many commuters found themselves trapped by the very car cultures and suburban lifestyles that were supposed to liberate them. Those who couldn’t afford to move closer to their school and work were stuck in gridlock, wasting away both physically and mentally in their nearly stationary cars, poisoned by the high concentrations of air pollutants surrounding them.

For too many Californians, today’s car culture represents an inefficient loss of precious time and a deteriorating quality of life and health. Bay Area commuters have settled as far away as Stockton and other relatively inexpensive Central Valley locales. Thousands of daily commuters into the LA Basin come from more affordable lnland Empire and high desert communities. Many of them drive up to two hours to their jobs in the mornings and then another two hours back home in the evenings. Living around relatively affordable Bakersfield and working in LA County job centers has become a lifestyle for some. Residents around other growing conurbations (such as the state’s second-largest city, San Diego, and in Sacramento) have watched with trepidation over the years and revolted with movements earning names such as “Not Yet LA.” Yet, apparently irresistible car culture momentum has also overwhelmed many of those communities to commit what critics consider the same old mistakes while expecting different outcomes. Look at the gridlock that builds each weekday afternoon as commuters check out of their jobs near the coast and then cram onto freeways, jamming all lanes that point inland, toward more affordable eastern San Diego County suburbs. Listen to the sometimes-daunting daily traffic reports reverberating from Sacramento and every other major California metropolis when serious injury and fatal accidents block lanes here and shut down freeways there. The lucky ones just get stuck in traffic gridlock behind each incident. For the least fortunate, their beloved (or hated) cars turned on them to become violent high-speed killing machines when seat belts, air bags, and other safety features weren’t enough to stop the carnage.  

The car-culture momentum balloon started deflating decades ago in some of our major cities, partly because it became too expensive and destructive to rip up neighborhoods and make way for more cars. You could argue that the revolt began way back in the 1970s when the San Francisco Bay Area committed to building and supporting efficient public transportation systems such as BART. I was a beneficiary of those attempts to get people out of their cars. When I moved to densely-packed San Francisco, it was like landing on another planet or in the Land of Oz. I quickly learned that trying to maneuver my manual transmission (AKA a clutch) while frantically bobbing my car up and down the steep, narrow streets was asking for stress and trouble. And it wasn’t necessary. So, I would leave my junky car behind for days and effortlessly ride safe and efficient buses, streetcars, and BART, with no worries about parking or traffic. And I got frequent free entertainment from the circus-like cast of characters that would unexpectedly appear on all the different public transit options. My car came in handy when leaving The City for one-day adventures over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands, Mt. Tam, Muir Woods, Pt. Reyes, Stinson Beach, or to points south such as Santa Cruz Mountains haunts like Big Basin Redwoods, or the scenic beaches around Pescadero, Año Nuevo, Davenport, and Santa Cruz. The car was discarded and convenient public transportation embraced during weekdays to get to graduate school and work, but the car was cherished during weekends. I’ve been the fortunate one to live, work, and play in the best of both transportation worlds.

The Bay Area’s anti-automobile movement was bolstered by the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake that badly damaged or destroyed elevated two-level portions of the Embarcadero and Central Freeways. Instead of replacing them, City residents successfully fought to reclaim their views and neighborhoods. The results are seen as today’s unobstructed spectacular views of the Bay from the Embarcadero and in the parks and other public spaces along Octavia Boulevard, landscapes that were previously sliced, blocked, and dominated by massive freeway structures. During this revolutionary period, San Francisco’s late poet laureate, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, famously expressed the growing popular frustrations: “What destroys poetry of a city? Automobiles destroy it, and they destroy more than the poetry. All over America, all over Europe in fact, cities and towns are under assault by the automobile, are being literally destroyed by car culture.”

In contrast to stereotypes, Los Angeles and other parts of Southern California have also recently rejected some new freeways. It may be no surprise that the once-proposed Beverly Hills Freeway (which would have cut through some of the wealthiest communities in the state) was scrapped decades ago. And the last freeway to slice through densely-populated LA Metro neighborhoods was the 105 (Century Freeway), completed in 1993, costing more than $2 billion. Today, giant billboards advertising personal injury law firms soar over this freeway and its working-class neighborhoods that didn’t have the power to stop such a divider. But more recently, South Pasadena and surrounding communities finally blocked the long-planned extension of the 710 Freeway that would have bifurcated their neighborhoods.

And just a few years ago, after long and bitter battles, activists managed to save beloved Trestles surfing beach and San Onofre State Beach (near the border between San Diego and Orange Counties) from a massive toll road. New highways and freeways are still being proposed and debated farther out in Inland Empire and high desert exurbs, complete with the familiar clashing pro and con players fighting to gain momentum and win the hearts of residents, business leaders, and policymakers. Similar battles over what to do about cars continue in inland exurbs beyond the Bay Area that extend well into and through Central Valley cities. They pit car-friendly traditionalists, motivated by growing traffic and commuter crises, against those who see what has happened to larger conurbations closer to the coast and want to preserve what remains of the places and environments they cherish.     

We must pause to pay homage here to some of the most offensive monuments demonstrating how we, in our desperation, torture ourselves when we are forced to crowd together with our cars: parking structures. Yes, multi-level parking structures save precious urban space for other activities and they decrease the extent of paved surfaces compared to sprawling parking lots. But once inside a monotonous parking structure, have you noticed that you could be anywhere at any time? It is difficult to imagine how we could build more generic and dull environments. Not only do the different sections and levels all look the same in one structure, but they look and feel no different in cities and suburbs hundreds of miles away. There is just no “there” there. As soon as we enter the gates, we lose our sense of time and place and become disconnected from the unexpected surprises waiting for us in the outside world. Day or night, rain or shine, who cares? We are suddenly surrounding by bland concrete surfaces in every dimension, as if stuck in a Twilight Zone existence. But we are forced to tolerate this loss of precious quality time and sense of place so that we can reach our desired destination, which could be government or business offices, or a clinic, college class, sporting event, amusement park, concert, store, theater, or some other mall-like experience. You can’t be blamed for suffering from a case of claustrophobia while hunting for a space to squeeze your car in to and then walking through these hardscape labyrinths. And don’t even dare start wondering what might happen during an earthquake or fire. The insults to the senses multiply when impatient drivers honk their horns and compete for the closest space and when cheap car alarms are activated to echo among the other commotions … parking structures quickly devolving into unnerving peace stealers. “It’s not a walk in the park” is the understatement for such experiences, which makes one wonder why we don’t demand better from the people who design, build, and maintain these scars on our landscapes and psyches. How about adding, at the least, a few more colorful murals or other displays of art and humanity?

As we progress through this century, you will notice valiant efforts in nearly every city to get people out of their cars. They include innovations in telecommuting, building more affordable housing near schools and jobs, and funding and encouraging the use of public transportation and safer pedestrian and bicycle right-of-ways. As example, several California cities are fishing for more resources to fund light rail and that includes new lines that are stretching across the LA area. Meanwhile, according to Public Road Data from the State of California, we now have more than 175,000 miles of maintained roads in the Golden State, with about 400,000 lane miles. The more than 14 million registered automobiles and 31 million total registered vehicles travel more than 330 billion miles each year on California roads. And according to the California Office of Traffic Safety and CHP in 2022, around 4,000 people (and 1,100 pedestrians) are killed in hundreds of thousands of accidents that result in hundreds of thousands of injuries on our state’s roads every year. We see every day how cars, and the infrastructures and landscapes we have built to accommodate them, are suddenly or in the long-run impacting all of us whether we like it or not. Even in many remote locations, the very same vehicles that give us access to the great outdoors are interrupting the peace and wild landscapes we cherish. Our bipolar love-hate relationship with cars intensifies.           

And isn’t it fitting that debates about cars have become just as polarizing as most political debates these days? Listen to the advocates (often on the political right), who mostly celebrate traditional car cultures, life in the suburbs and exurbs, and the perceived libertarian independence that accompanies such lifestyles. You’d think that cars were sent to us from heaven above. And for those living in the most rural and remote regions of the state, cars and trucks continue to represent necessary tools for survival. By contrast, listen to the pundits on the opposite side (often from the political left and clustered in our urban centers) echo the criticisms and sentiments of the late revolutionary writer Lawrence Ferlinghetti. You’d think cars were instruments of the devil.

What are your experiences with and views about cars? Do you think they represent freedom and independence or are they killing us and destroying California lives and landscapes? A little of both? I’ve chased the California Dream across our state on foot, on my bike, in my car, and on all types of public transportation; and I’ve been fortunate to have lived and learned from all of these experiences, celebrating in and sometimes suffering from very different transportation worlds. But I’m also now fortunate to live in a city (Santa Monica) where I have transportation options that include hopping on my bike and pedaling in almost any direction along our many relatively safe bike routes. Our ability to build bridges and pathways toward a brighter and more efficient transportation future depends on a better understanding of the important rolls all of these options (and that includes our traditional cars and newer EVs) have played and will play as we attempt to steer toward better living and working environments.     

View this animation illustrating how roads were paved across much of celebrated car-culture poster child LA County until there was no more room for them. The authors suggested that demand on those roads has been growing for nearly 40 years as more cars were crammed into limited transportation infrastructures. Check out their other maps showing historical growth in LA County.

Here are some traditional maps showing major California highways.
And: https://www.tripinfo.com/maps/ca

This impressive interactive GIS site classifies our highways and roads. You can click to choose a wide range of valuable information related to this story.

Finally, as a bonus for navigating through this story, you are invited to breeze through the following colorful photo essays that showcase classic California cars and transportation landscapes. The first set (click to page 2) skips around California’s landscapes made for cars and some that have rejected cars. The second set (click to page 3) celebrates various classic cars that I have recently photographed to illustrate some of California’s car art and culture history.

The post Cars: Driving and Dividing California first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

We know that millions of people moved here from other states and countries to escape oppression, harsh weather, and economic hardships. We explore these great migrations in our publication. They were attracted by their perceptions of the California Dream that included new freedoms and opportunities. They came to this place where they could reevaluate their priorities and redefine what it meant to live a fulfilling life of purpose. These push and pull factors made California a magnet especially for working and middle class people looking for something better. The great migrations accelerated after WWII and peaked in subsequent decades. They brought a wealth of diverse people and cultures that settled here and quickly established their own ways of living and looking at life. And like the cultures we see today, these tumultuous movements were informed part by myth, part by reality. Now, as the state has grown, evolved, and matured, the great migrations have ceased. Except for wealthier residents mainly concentrated along the coast, the California Dream has become more elusive. Descendants of working and middle class people who built the state are being squeezed into more affordable inland regions or even out of state.

Here, we focus on people who were jumping off their factory assembly lines and other perceived treadmills and settling here during the booming 1960s and 1970s. These are people who revolted against the status quo and followed their dreams, sometimes to happiness and sometimes to ruin. Theirs are stories that helped shape California folklore and mold us into what we are today. We have established a reputation of sharing peer-reviewed scientific research on our web site that helps us understand California people and landscapes. Here is a reminder of how real-life human interest stories from the real world can be just as informative and even more interesting.

Take your time to read about how very different people viewed the Golden State as their escape plan and how they were encouraged to build their lives here. We first link you to an investigative reporter’s story featured in a fashion and style magazine. If you’re curious about what happened to that 1960s counterculture revolution with its epicenter in California, this article is for you (link below). After you’ve completed that read, we offer you another Golden State treat. Writer Gerry Morrow looks back to share life experiences and views of his world as he planned his escape from Cleveland to California. Both stories link us to the good and bad ghosts of our past, both from the same general time frame. But these diverse people settled in very different places and eventually lived very different lives that would seem to be worlds apart: the state’s cool, wet northwestern forests, versus southeastern California’s hot, dry Coachella Valley. We hope these stories begin to answer the questions we first presented about how we got here: Who were these people, what were they escaping, what were they looking for, and why did they think they could find it in the Golden State?

First, link to this story about what happened to California’s Historic Counterculture: https://www.gq.com/story/californias-vanishing-hippie-utopias?utm_source=pocket-newtab

Next, writer Gerry Morrow shares his experiences when he parts with a long family and personal history working in Cleveland’s steel mills. He escapes what would become the rust belt, blazing a new path that would lead to a new life in California. For Gerry and so many others like him, landing in the Golden State was analogous to landing in a different country. He later moved to Oakland, trying to break through Bay Area barriers as a singer/songwriter, paying the rent with blue collar jobs that included roofing. He was eventually pulled back to southern California by some other transplanted friends from Cleveland, where he worked as a roofer in the mountain town of Idyllwild. After part of a building collapsed underneath him, shattering his ankle and injuring his back, he returned to school at the age of 52. He earned his AA degree in Composition, BA in Literature, MA in Composition and Rhetoric, and started teaching. Today, Gerry still resides in Palm Desert with his partner, Judy, just a few miles from where he got off that plane five decades ago. We can see how rivers catching fire led to much more than the Clean Water Act: they became symbols of the multitude of events and factors that pushed people into California. Gerry Morrow’s story becomes one of millions of dramas that combine to make our state golden. His award-winning story was published in the spring of 2009 in California State University San Bernardino’s Pacific Review.

The Inspiration of Kitridge Taps the Zombie Man, by Gerry Morrow

Kitridge Taps. I remember him like I remember statues––he was always just there. But then, some statues do leave bigger impressions than others. Thirty-eight years have passed and I can still see him as if he were standing right in front of me. A permanent fixture in the warehouse, Taps earned the knick-name “Zombie Man.” Walking with a shuffle and his eyes wide open, never blinking, whatever he saw in his thousand-yard stare was anybody’s guess. Taps was never really there except in the physical sense, but he was always there.

No one ever saw him clock in or out, and whenever the rest of us showed up for work, he’d be standing like a pillar in the center of the big bay closest to the banding line. He always had his back to the warehouse and his eyes fixed firmly on the dust clouds raised by the heavy equipment running around in the coil yard. And he never moved until he heard the steam blast of the shift whistle.

He only ever spoke more than one word when ordering food at the canteen, other than that, he kept to himself. We loved to speculate about Taps, but nobody knew for sure how long he’d been at the mills, how old he was, or where he’d come from. But, even though we couldn’t pin any of it down, after a considerable amount of communal cogitation, we figured that at the very least his beard pre–dated World War Two. We also figured him to be from the Appalachians––basing that assumption on his lanky frame, odd facial features, and the way he dragged out the opening consonants in his favorite two words, “yep” and “nope.” In the end, we surmised that he’d most likely ridden in on the rails, standing straight up on a flatcar in the middle of a train pulled by a steam locomotive. There was even the supposition that after stepping down from the train, he stood on the banks of the Cuyahoga River and waited patiently until they built the steel mills around him.

Kitridge Taps and I were part of a nine-man team on the banding line in the warehouse at Jones & Laughlin’s 80 inch Hot Strip Mill in Cleveland, Ohio. Every day coiled steel, straight from the mill and still glowing red, slid up to us on a huge steel conveyor belt, the links recessed into deep channels cast in the concrete floor and the top running a few inches above. When we stepped onto the conveyor, we were moving down the line with the coils as we did our job––and it was a job so hot that one man from each team of three, would be “off the line” for a full hour at the end of every two hours he worked. The two men “on the line” would toss the steel “belly bands” and “eye bands” like lassoes around or through the coils, and there was a real trick to that part. Once they were cinched up, the bands were tightened and clamped with a large pneumatic apparatus appropriately called The Bander. This tool dangled weightlessly at about chest height on a thick spring suspension system mounted on an overhead rack. It was a simple but ingenious design that allowed us to position The Bander at any angle necessary to cinch up a band.

To protect our bodies from the heat of the coils we were issued silver asbestos overcoats that hung to our shins, and to protect our hands, they gave us silver asbestos mitts that were twice as thick as potholders. There were also the heavy plastic face shields that fit over a hard hat turned backward, and they kept our faces from getting baked. We had to work close to those coils, and they were big, sometimes over six feet high and six feet wide. On a cold winter night, the center hole of a big coil that had cooled down to just the right temperature out in the coil yard was a pretty good place to sleep away your hour off. In the heat of the summer, when you were off the line, you took your break as far away from those coils as you could.

The outside temperature didn’t much matter when we were on the line. Winter or summer, when we were on the line, we were slow cooking in our own sweat. Due to that, and the constant chafing of work clothes under the heavy protective gear, we all tried to psyche ourselves into oblivion as the shift dragged on, and no one knew more about psyching himself into oblivion than Zombie Man. But, there was a problem in that. You see, the statuesque Taps would always end up becoming so oblivious, he never remembered to shove his beard under his coat before getting on the conveyor. This was not a good thing, because his beard hung down to his belly and his face shield stopped just below his chin.

So, down the line would come a 15 ton coil of hot steel, spitting small chunks of slag like little shooting stars, and there would be Taps, waiting to band it with his beard sticking out. Whenever he stepped on the line like that, every man in the vicinity would wave his hands and try to yell above the din of the mill, but it was always to no avail. The time finally came when we all gave up trying to get Kit’s attention because sooner or later, we all had to admit that it can wear you out––yelling at a post.

Why he didn’t care, I just don’t know, but Taps had a whole lot of deep black burn holes in his beard, and a whole lot of deep black burn holes in the long stringy gray hair that stuck out sideways from under his hard hat. When he removed that hat and his face shield at the lunch table in the shanty, his forehead and cheeks appeared a deep steam-baked red, and coupled with the natural expression that went along with his catatonic condition, he always reminded me of a sweaty pirate shocked into a state of total confusion because the cannon he was manning just blew up in his face.

But, that wasn’t the worst of it. When he was on the line, every time an airborne chunk of red-hot slag skipped past The Bander and hit him anywhere below or to the side of the face shield, you could easily get a whiff of burning hair from 20 yards away. Now, there were a lot of wicked smells in the mills, but the smell of grease burning in Kit’s whiskers was unique. Not only did that smell lead to a lot of talk about Zombie Man trying to unconsciously commit suicide by fire, but it also led to a lot of talk about getting the hell out of that place.

I’d already tried to leave the mills twice. However, the rendezvous I chased all the way down to St. Petersburg, Florida turned out to be an ill-fated move because when I got there, she was nowhere to be found. And my dreams of making it with my guitar in New York City ended when I got in a wreck and totaled my van on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. So now, every time the beard on the Zombie Man started to smolder, all I could hear in my head was the tune California Here I Come. About a week or two after that began to happen I made the conscious decision that all I would require was airfare and a few hundred bucks in traveler’s checks and my buddies on the banding line, and the great city of Cleveland, could color me gone forever.

It didn’t take long to sock away the bucks, and I clearly recall my last walk from the warehouse to the clock-house. I was working swing shift (3-11), and the boys on the line gave me the last hour off. The locker room was empty when I showered, and just as the first of the night shift began drifting in, I left through a side door that led straight outside. It was snowing, and with my hands stuffed in the pockets of my pea coat, I was in no particular hurry. Lost in thought, I found myself stepping in cadence to the slow, rhythmic puffing of an idling locomotive somewhere far behind me. My feet crunched in the snow, and the tinny clang of distant crossing bells enhanced the mood as I walked for one last time alongside a stalled train on the tracks that led out of J&L Steel Mill.

One last time I gazed up at the giant, red-hot ingots standing like stoic monoliths on the flatcars of the B&O. One last time I listened to the snapping sound of scale as it popped from the sides of those ingots and into the rippling night air. One last time I breathed in the smell of hot steel––the stuff my father made. And even though it was a clear crisp winter night, and even though the smoke stacks of the 80-inch glowed brightly with a clean new shine put there by the full moon, I couldn’t help but think just how little charm there was, in reality, left for me down at the mills, or in Cleveland.

The year I left my hometown, it had an ugly reputation. Pollution was taken for granted in Cuyahoga County, and some of the local DJ’s had begun referring to Cleveland as the “mistake on the lake.” Others, a little bolder, called it the “armpit of the nation.” Those were the days when beaches all up and down the coast of Northern Ohio were littered with dead fish and closed, or posted with “swim at you own risk” signs due to the toxic waste spewing from the mills into the Cuyahoga River. Out on Lake Erie, the main intake for Cleveland’s water supply, known as The Three Mile Crib, had to be moved twice. First, it became The Four Mile Crib, and then The Five Mile Crib.

Finally, Canada started breathing down our necks for polluting their side of the lake, and with that––the eyes of the entire United States, and the world it seemed, were upon us. True to form, we put on a spectacular show for all interested parties when we allowed the “Big River” to catch fire. The authorities could only guess at the ignition source, but in the end, most figured that a steel worker taking a break on a trestle must have tossed a burning butt down into the swirling grease and oil floating on the surface of the water. Whatever the cause, that trestle burned up when the whole river, from one bank to the other, burst into flames. Randy Newman wrote a song about it, and the hook went like this –– Burn on big river, burn on/ burn on big river, burn on/ you know the Lord can make you tumble/ the Lord can make you turn/ the Lord can make you overfloooow/ but the Lord can’t make you burn.

To top things off, just when the average Clevelander thought our reputation couldn’t possibly get worse, Mayor Ralph Perk caught his hair on fire at the opening ceremony of a new sheet metal factory. He was leaning forward trying to cut a thin steel ribbon when he ran the business end of a blowtorch upward and into the top of his head. The whole fiasco was dutifully reported in The Cleveland Plain Dealer, which also ran a front-page picture of Perk looking like a roman candle while an assistant, coming up from behind, tried to throw a suit jacket over his head. In one fell swoop, Cleveland grabbed the singular distinction of having both a mighty river and a Mayor catch fire in the same year.

But nothing changed. Without so much as a moment’s pause, the mills continued belching out flames, noxious fumes, and a rolling black smoke that rose high enough into the sky to redden the sun at noon. And that was on a good day. When the skies were overcast, or there was an atmospheric inversion, those plumes of smoke would end up in a horizontal squat over the city, and stagnate because they could no longer rise. That was a bad day––when the pollution hovered above our heads like shifting fog, deepened to the color of cast iron, and then just got too heavy to be contained by the choking sky. On days like that, it was only a matter of time before a fine soot that looked and felt like powdered graphite drifted down into the neighborhoods surrounding the steel mills, and that greasy, coal black soot clung to and coated everything, even vertical surfaces like windshields and stop signs.

I flew out of Cleveland in mid-winter and the town was buried in snow. It was a rocky take-off because the plane was flying out of the tail end of a blizzard, and there were still some pretty high winds. When I boarded, I heard the temperature, counting the wind chill factor, was twenty below due to an artic front that extended all the way from Chicago to Buffalo. When I landed in Palm Springs, the temperature was eighty degrees and the sun was shining like I’d never seen it shine before. California was exactly one hundred degrees different in temperature, and one hundred percent different from where I’d come from.

That day, when my steel-toed work boots hit the tarmac and I saw sprawled before me the beauty of the Mojave Desert and the majesty of the San Jacinto Mountains, it was difficult to hold back my emotions. Even though I hadn’t flown in from a foreign country, I saw myself as the luckiest immigrant to ever inhale new air, on a new day, in a new land. But, I managed to remain collected, and with mid–western common sense, I refrained from letting out a yell in front of strangers. Instead, with a purpose born from the knowledge that my self-control was tenuous, I shouldered my sack, picked up my guitar, and started out for town.

As I walked away from the airport I hardly got a glance from my fellow passengers, and they all disappeared when I hiked through the gates and down the exit road. I turned off the pavement and onto a dirt path that wound through the middle of a flat desert landscape broken only by short, tough looking bushes, and round dried out tumbleweeds. I could clearly make out the sun glinting on windshields and hear cars honking on the big boulevard off ahead in the distance. The whole world, it seemed, was in front of me, and it looked and felt better than I could have imagined. It was then that the wave of gratitude I’d been holding back swept through my body with such force that it caused me to drop to one knee and clutch at a handful of desert sand. I became momentarily lost as that sand sifted through my fingers, lost in a silent prayer of gratitude to Kitridge Taps the Zombie Man for providing the inspiration that got me out of the mills in Cleveland Ohio…for the third and last time.

The post Did the Road to Freedom End in California? first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

California has nurtured its share of oversimplified stereotypes about its diverse people and places and you are probably recalling some of them as you read this. The world-famous beach town and tourist attraction known as Santa Monica may be just one example. With today’s home prices averaging more than $1.5 million, it is often considered just another poster child symbolizing overpriced beach communities that have pushed most working and even middle-class families far inland to more affordable locations within or beyond the Golden State. But, as in so many other communities, it hasn’t always been this way. It was once home to thriving working-class neighborhoods, where people without wealth could enjoy open spaces, iconic beaches, and refreshing breezes off the ocean…a piece of the California Dream without the riches. You might visit today’s Virginia Avenue Park to see how City officials and community leaders have struggled to support vestiges of these historic neighborhoods that have earned a closer look.    

The following one-hour video is a masterfully-produced blending of art, history, and geography that helps us understand the stories behind these landscapes. Though the setting is in the Pico Neighborhood of Santa Monica, it could be about your family or neighborhood or the multitude of other California communities and ethnic groups that combine to define the most diverse state in the history of the world. After viewing the video, you might want to tour through the series of current images that follow here. They illustrate how a traditional working-class neighborhood has evolved after being bifurcated by a major freeway more than 50 years ago and, more recently, threatened with gentrification pressures familiar to countless other California communities. If you wish to learn more about L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods beyond Santa Monica, you will want to visit our earlier story on this web site, Eat Your Way through L.A.: A Cultural Tour of Los Angeles. For now, enjoy the video:            

Learn about the project and view the video:

The Trailer:

Once you have seen the one-hour video, you are invited to follow the following images that wander through parts of today’s Pico Neighborhood, July, 2021.

One last reminder: If you wish to learn more about L.A.’s working-class neighborhoods beyond Santa Monica, you will want to visit our earlier story on this web site, Eat Your Way through L.A.: A Cultural Tour of Los Angeles.

The post Excavating History in our Hoods first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

As of July 26, the state was reporting more than 7,000 new cases per day, six times higher than a month before, with a 161% increase in just 14 days. The 3,200 patients hospitalized had doubled in just two weeks. What fueled this spike? About 97% of those hospitalized were not vaccinated. Though coronavirus vaccinations have proven exceptionally effective by any measure, about ¼ of all eligible Californians had still chosen not to take the shots. When including those not yet eligible, only 61% had received one dose and only 53% were fully vaccinated, leaving the state vulnerable to this new variant. The results were predictable; COVID illnesses and deaths surged in regions where vaccination rates were lowest.

By mid-September, many Central Valley hospitals (particularly in Fresno County and the San Joaquin Valley) were in crisis, running over 100% standard capacity, forcing COVID patients to wait days for limited ICU surge beds. Overwhelmed hospitals brought in National Guard medical team reinforcements. Human interest stories about the unvaccinated crowding local hospitals and sometimes dying were tragically repeated in local media, such as the 40-year-old San Joaquin County woman who publicly fought against masking and vaccines until she was also infected and then left four children behind.

Meanwhile, as if to accentuate the division between the two Californias, infection rates plummeted in the cities with highest vaccination rates. By September 20, 2021, the CDC reported that California’s 95 COVID cases/100,000 people (seven-day case rate) was the lowest in the country and 66% of the state’s population had received at least one shot. Average statewide rates were more than two times lower than bordering states and more than three times lower than Texas and Florida; still, rates in those few local Golden State hot spots, tragically, resembled the sickest states. Geography (location) had become one of the most important factors determining who might become seriously ill and die.

And so this disease continues to ravage all of us and slow our recovery, but now with avoidable and self-inflicted wounds. As we look back at the positive language in our story below, showing trends from early this summer, we are haunted by the quick recovery that could have been, if only vaccinations were taken more seriously. Instead, by September, consumer confidence was dropping again and hopes for robust economic growth were dampened, especially in the hard-hid services sectors that included leisure and hospitality industries, while total hospitalizations and deaths of the unvaccinated continued to accumulate. Now that we have updated you with this mix of bad and good news about short-term trends, note how the long-term effects remain the focus of our original story.        

From mid-June, 2021…

The Golden State, along with the nation, seems to be nearing the end of an historic war. As of the middle of June 2021, the Coronavirus enemy had killed nearly 63,000 Californians and about 600,000 Americans, and it had permanently injured many times more. Nearly 3.8 million California cases and at least 33 million U.S. COVID-19 cases have been confirmed, though there have been many more undiagnosed illnesses. Casualties range far beyond the lives and parts of families that have perished. Thousands of businesses have been destroyed, along with the life savings, investments, and dreams of their owners. Thousands more have been crippled. Millions of households have suffered from lost jobs and incomes and some may never recover. The pandemic crept into every household in different ways and then spread staggering collateral damage to nearly every sector of our economy. We will never be the same.

Indelible Scars
Finally, after 15 months of trying to understand the invisible enemy and debating how to fight it, we have gained the upper hand and are reopening California. We are haunted by our mistakes and informed by our lessons learned as we ask if we won or lost this war. As is often the case with war, the answer depends on who you are and how you were impacted, especially for those who lost loved ones or spent weeks recovering. As with so many other crises, the most vulnerable and low-income residents have been hit the hardest, while those with the resources have largely weathered the storm with less damage, further exacerbating that gap between the wealthy and working classes.

Documenting the War
We have documented many of these battles on this web site with two substantial stories that covered parts of the state from north to south. Our first story asked a lot of questions as we hunkered down in our communities during a bewildering period last spring, just after the attack began. Our second story covered a frustrating period into the summer of 2020, when we knew more about the enemy, but engaged in fierce debates about how to respond to the pandemic. We illustrated the astounding range of reactions and the impacts on our people and landscapes that reflect our diversity; you are encouraged to scan back to these lengthy stories, chronicles that appeared months earlier on our web site.

War with an invisible enemy presents unique challenges and it is unfortunate that some Californians, as with many Americans, spent more time and energy arguing over how to wage the war, rather than joining together to fight it. While some favored draconian restrictions with crippling lockdowns and stringent shelter-in-place, others completely ignored the enemy as if it didn’t exist, allowing the virus to spread, kill, and maim unchecked, prioritizing economic concerns over health consequences. And as with much of the nation, California’s official response was somewhere in between. We all struggled and fought to find the most rational and effective middle ground that could save lives AND the economy.

Our results have also been mixed. But with per capita infection and death rates below the national average, our state is now leading the nation out of the crisis with some of the lowest numbers throughout spring, 2021. As of our reopening on June 15, 2021, California boasts some of the lowest case rates and highest vaccination rates in the nation. Our positivity rates consistently remain below 1% and more than 70% of eligible Californians have received at least one vaccination. (You can see updated data in the links near the end of this story.) Beyond all the suffering and business failures, one of the biggest economic surprises came at the end of the pandemic with an astounding bounty of money in the form of another historic state budget surplus (several tens of billions of dollars), partially thanks to a flood of tax revenue from wealthier and healthier residents. Now, rather than pointing fingers, it is a time to examine what remains and what we learned from this war, for there will certainly be others, and we hope our worst enemies won’t be us.

Here, we celebrate putting COVID-19 in our rearview mirrors as we finally and officially reopen the Golden State. Now that the virus seems to be under control, we offer what we hope will be this last pandemic story from California on our web site. For those of you not from the Golden State, the three stories combined now provide an historic account summarizing how Californians weathered the pandemic, from its start and hopefully, to its finish. This last story examines a few enduring lessons and some imprints the Coronavirus pandemic stamped on our state’s people and landscapes. Since it would be impossible to cover all the remarkable and lasting changes, we will pick out several notables from a geographical perspective. We encourage you to use your experiences and lessons to make your own list, always imagining how we could have worked better together to find the sweet middle ground that would have saved more lives and lessened the personal tragedies and economic suffering in the long run.

A Very Different War in the Two Californias
First, we note that infection and illness rates remain particularly high among those who are not vaccinated and have refused to take precautions. The pandemic lingers on within those groups. In contrast, data show infection rates dropping dramatically in groups with a larger percentage of people who are vaccinated. It is clear that the war is being fought and won by the vaccinated. These trends have become evident on the maps comparing vaccination and infection distributions. And though the state has recently made great strides toward distributing vaccines to the least healthy, low-income communities, these populations remain most resistant with the lowest vaccination rates… and far more vulnerable. Surveys showed the poorest 25% of zip codes with only about 43% of their populations fully vaccinated, while 68% of the people within healthiest and wealthiest zip codes were fully vaccinated going into June, 2021. Put in other words, zip codes where folks already struggle with lower life expectancies and levels of education and less access to reliable housing, transportation, and medical care continue to suffer with lowest vaccination rates and highest number of infections and hospitalizations, in spite of the state’s aggressive attempts to reach out and in to such communities: https://covid19.ca.gov/vaccination-progress-data/

We can see how Californians have reacted to these Coronavirus threats and historic changes to their surrounding environments in a variety of ways that will have lasting impacts on all of us. We’ll start an abbreviated list here, making just a few notable observations, so that you can continue your own list and conversations.

Reconnecting to Science for Survival
We have reconfirmed how viruses spread and how to stop them. Those who applied lessons learned from previous pandemics (such as the 1918 influenza that infected about 1/3 of the world’s population) implemented common sense methods of social distancing and masking in crowded public settings. Their infection, illness, and death rates were dramatically lower, slowing the spread. In contrast, those who ignored these long-established medical precautions, or were forced to work in dangerous environments requiring closer public contact (such as health care workers and service workers), suffered the highest infection rates, illnesses, and deaths. These life and death survival lessons have forced us to become more aware of our relationships to our surrounding environments. The pandemic encouraged us to hone our observation skills and use the scientific method to reassess our lives and our places in this world. We are now using this knowledge to repel the mutating variances that threaten to interrupt our recovery. The science is further confirmed when we recognize how our cautionary pandemic behavior changes also suffocated the annual cold and flu season before it could get started.

Redefining “Attendance”
We have redefined attendance expectations at many work, school, and social events. The good news is that most folks with child care and home health care responsibilities and challenging commute issues have been able to attend work and school on line. Motivated people with the technological skills and resources are finding abundant opportunities and more time to improve and progress. The bad news is that some less skilled, mostly lower-income folks haven’t gained adequate technical support to compete. Additionally, some students and employees who may have required more supervision and encouragement have been abandoned within a culture that was supposed to celebrate inclusion. Now that we have learned how certain tasks can be efficiently accomplished on line and within hybrid formats, we are challenged to bring the forgotten back into our village. Showing up still matters, whether in person or on line, and we now must reach out to this too often hidden, disenfranchised population that may have been left behind in the pandemic dust. 

There’s No Place like Home
After the crisis hit, we spent less time and fewer resources commuting. As the pandemic eased, nontraditional and confusing transportation patterns emerged that include people travelling by choice at any time. We also spent less time and resources on clothing, personal hygiene, and the styling required to leave home, as professional and social meetings moved on line. This has also allowed us to spend more quality time tending to important personal and family responsibilities. More folks have discovered that there is no place like home, adding the camaraderie of new pets and the pleasure of domestic activities such as outdoor barbecue events.

Competing to Escape
As we reopen, some of the money saved and accumulated vacation time is now being spent soothing cabin fever. As example, the startling 2021 Memorial Day rush to travel on land and by air sounded a big post-COVID alarm. As domestic travel exploded, many lodging reservations and car rentals doubled in number and costs over the last year at the same time. In some cities, Uber and Lyft rates doubled during peak times, thanks to fewer drivers and the sudden swarm of rider demands.

Help Wanted
Furloughs, lockdowns, and idle factories have interrupted global supply chains. As the pandemic wanes, temporary shortages of goods and services and workers have conspired with sudden increases in demands, resulting in market imbalances, leading to some of the highest inflation rates in more than a decade, as of June, 2021. Some employers are offering return-to-work incentives that include partial school tuition pay and one-time bonuses, necessary business decisions that drive prices even higher.

Exposing New Vulnerabilities
Temporary shortages have become especially evident in meat packing and distribution and other intensive food industries. The global shortage in microchips has stifled production and infected huge segments of the economy, from advanced technologies to car manufacturing industries. The pandemic has revealed our evolving vulnerabilities. A few decades ago, the U.S. controlled 90% of semiconductor manufacturing; it now only accounts for about 10% of global semiconductor production as demands increase. The pandemic-driven shortages exposed how we have fallen behind in our R&D investments into essential manufacturing and technology industries and how California can play a leading role in reestablishing the leadership that is crucial for our economic security.

As an example of the power of ripple effects, these supply chain shortages have also caused dramatic spikes in demand and prices for used products, such as cars. Increasing demands for rental cars have exacerbated the problem as rental companies are less likely to shed their older models into the markets as long as they can command top dollar on rental contracts. No person knows how long these imbalances will last or what changes may become permanent. But, the pandemic highlighted our vulnerabilities and that should encourage us to shore up our supply chains, partly by encouraging more manufacturing and R&D in California for Californians. Just as we have learned lessons about how we might react to the next virus threat to save lives, we have no excuses for ignoring the economic warning signs raised by the pandemic and the inevitable traumatic ripple effects that can follow.   

Housing Market Chaos as Example
California’s real estate and rental markets exhibit remarkable examples of enormous pandemic-fueled upheavals that few experts could have predicted. Here is where we can use economic geography to help us understand some of the powerful and recent changes that connect all of us. We started with a pre-pandemic state that was already reeling from skyrocketing real estate prices and rents, particularly in coastal cities. Record low interest rates encouraged more home buying, further escalating record-high prices. Working- and middle-class residents were being priced out of gentrified, unaffordable neighborhoods, such as in those crowded coastal cities. Many fled to rural and inland communities with lower housing costs and rents. Others migrated to more affordable states. For the first time, California’s population stopped growing and even experienced a slight loss as the pandemic hit. As the pandemic grew, many more residents fled the more densely populated urban neighborhoods, escaping to the safety of suburban, rural, and resort open spaces that were also more affordable.

As real estate markets initially paused to adjust, the bottom fell out of urban rental markets. At the height of the pandemic, rents dropped up to 20% within some of the densest urban neighborhoods, such as in San Francisco and Los Angeles. Many high-income cosmopolitans were finding success working and learning on line from more remote locations.  Resort towns and rentals quickly filled to capacity with semi-permanent newcomers and the flood of B&B vacationers seeking out safe open spaces. While the pandemic evolved, a series of positive feedback mechanisms created the perfect storm for skyrocketing real estate prices.                

Those who had dreamed of owning a California home took advantage of the record low interest rates that were held lower to prop up the economy during the pandemic. Cash-rich investors joined the frenzy and lines of competing potential homeowners stormed each house that hit the market. The lure of working at home surrounded by safe COVID-free open spaces threw fuel on the real estate boom. Add a critical shortage of building supplies to the shortage of housing on the market and you can see how eager homebuyers became desperate to acquire their piece of the California Dream.

By April, 2021, we could see the light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, but the real estate price explosion accelerated. Median home prices for the entire state had soared more than 30% above the previous year, to more than $800,000 for single-family homes. San Mateo became the first county to break the $2 million median housing price, while median prices in the entire Bay Area soared more than 35% in one year to more than $1.3 million. Perhaps perfectly and safely located between the L.A. and Bay Area conurbations during such a pandemic, the more secluded and relatively “affordable” Central Coast real estate market experienced the highest year-over-year price increase (about 40%) by April, 2021, where median prices hit $925,000. Though housing prices soared everywhere across the state, the Central Valley and Far North markets continued most affordable with median prices around $435,000 and $367,000, respectfully.

Urban geographers and planners are debating if the moving preferences toward single-family homes in more distant, less dense neighborhoods will be lasting trends or will fizzle out after the pandemic. Will young urban professionals return (again) to our revitalized city centers to restart the smart cities movements that concentrate populations supported by urban cultures and local, public transportation? Throughout this story, we can see how the pandemic has impacted the two Californias in ways that we could never have imagined, but seem so clear as we look back.

You can see why we used rental and real estate markets to demonstrate how the pandemic accelerated shifting demographic trends and changed our world. Folks have been forced to reexamine their personal lives and surroundings, as some have rediscovered nurturing open spaces. As at least hybrid learning and working options at home have taken root, it is unlikely that we will ever return to “normal”. Continued vacant offices and empty parking spaces are among the many signals that we have turned a new corner and may never look back, except hopefully, to the pandemic lessons learned.

Jing Liu on Mapping the Pandemic

Team geographer Jing Liu has also been researching and monitoring the pandemic. The following are some of her thoughts, occasionally edited for this story:

I think the pandemic has raised great attention to the connections between nature and human society, the importance of spatial thinking and analysis, and much more! I am amazed by the new research opportunities this pandemic has opened to us! Recently, I was talking to a group of researchers at the CyberGIS Center at UIUC and learned that they have put together this COVID-19 Gateway website https://covid-19.stcenter.net/ where we could find data, research papers, and much more. For example, check out this animation to see the spread of the virus in the US from last February. 

The Pandemic has changed every aspect of our lives, including mobility in our communities. Check out Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports (https://www.google.com/covid19/mobility/) and here is the PDF for California counties. It is also interesting to compare different communities (e.g. Los Angeles County (page 11) vs Madera County (page 12))!

Check out the data storefront of the Department of Housing and Urban Development at ESRI: https://hudgis-hud.opendata.arcgis.com/ Here, you could use the data to perform your own analysis based on California! Here is an application example: Location Awareness Speeds Pandemic Relief Funds to Renters

Thanks again Jing. We hope all of you are informed and inspired by our web site’s occasional pandemic coverage from the perspective of a California geographer. And we also hope this will be our last pandemic story. We end this one as we have the earlier two stories, with a few links where you will find a wealth of pandemic information from California and beyond. Finally, as the war ends, it’s time to officially and safely celebrate the reopening of the Golden State. Here’s to a summer of 2021 with health and freedom!   

Additional COVID-19 Pandemic Sources.
If you are interested in details, statistics, and some informative maps, here are some updated sources we have listed in previous California COVID-19 stories. Good luck!:

L.A.Times tracks the virus in California:

https://www.latimes.com/projects/california-coronavirus-cases-tracking-outbreak/

John Hopkins University national maps show confirmed cases and deaths by county. Zoom in to California counties:

https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/us-map

National Geographic:

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2020/05/graphic-tracking-coronavirus-infections-us/

Google data:

https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=covid-19+maps+California

We also encourage you to read more personal COVID stories on the California Historical Society web site at: https://californiahistoricalsociety.org/exhibitions/tell-your-story-california-during-the-time-of-covid-19/

The post Reopening California: Lessons from our Historic Coronavirus War first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

Recently, developing geospatial technologies have revolutionized how we research these issues, trends, and problems. New maps join our old maps to inform and encourage us to view our cities and neighborhoods through clearer lenses and with fresh perspectives that we could only have imagined years ago. In this story, we have selected a few recent sources shared by geographers Jing Liu, Pete Morris, and Rob O’Keefe.  

The tsunami of data and maps that are being reexamined and produced for us to peruse and interpret can be overwhelming, so we will try to narrow our sources to a handful of recent projects and organizations whose efforts can be tied together. This is an exceptional story for our web site since we are not so much interpreting or analyzing the data here. Instead, we are sharing the work of other researchers and scholars by linking you to several sites that might help all of us understand how our neighborhoods and cities are evolving with their own histories of successes and failures. Our story ends with a short photo essay.  

We will remind you to be careful about oversimplifying and accepting popular interpretations of these maps and studies. Our cities are as complicated as the people who work and live in them. We have been forced to reconsider and adjust some formerly accepted theories and assumptions about how they evolve and change. We must admit that future researchers may discredit some of today’s popular theories, assumptions, and overgeneralizations about how past landscapes, people, and policies might explain what we see today.

Ours are perplexing urban landscapes of sequent occupance, continually remodeled by countless forces that we struggle to understand. Cities and neighborhoods we see today are products of the past, but they also reflect our recent decisions and policies, requiring us to accept responsibility for them. When wearing his historical geographer cap, Pete Morris correctly warns us about the rhetorical power of maps, especially when they use color-coded jargon to support popular belief systems. We should also be careful to make what may first seem to be convenient links between past and current urban geographies when such relationships may be much more complicated. In other words, more cautious micro-scale analyses might challenge assumptions we have manufactured from overgeneralized maps that may have supported our presumptions.  

With these cautionary thoughts, we invite you to use the following links to expand your knowledge of how redlining, segregation, gentrification, migration, displacement, and affordable housing might leave their imprints on California’s urban people and landscapes. You are encouraged to construct your own informed interpretations while pondering each of the following outside sources.       

This educational video traces the historic policies that set the foundations for today’s conflicts over gentrification. Though it is intended for a nationwide audience and discussion, neighborhoods in Los Angeles and San Francisco are highlighted, especially toward the end; it was produced by the UC Berkeley Urban Displacement Project, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, and Great Communities Collaborative, an Initiative of the San Francisco Foundation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0zAvlmzDFc

Consider San Francisco’s Legacy of Redlining, produced by the UC Berkeley Center for Community Innovation at the Urban Displacement Project:
https://www.urbandisplacement.org/redlining

Here is a more detailed map from the Urban Displacement Project showing gentrification, displacement, and exclusion in the Bay Area, but with a rich choice of relevant layers to add:
https://www.urbandisplacement.org/san-francisco/sf-bay-area-gentrification-and-displacement

This more detailed map from the Urban Displacement Project covers southern California’s most populated coastal counties: Mapping Neighborhood Change in Southern California: Los Angeles, Orange, and San Diego Counties: https://www.urbandisplacement.org/los-angeles/los-angeles-gentrification-and-displacement

ESRI has published a wealth of redlining and gentrification maps that cover the Bay Area with thorough explanations and interpretations. (A few may require sign in to ArcGIS online):
https://www.arcgis.com/apps/MapJournal/index.html?appid=1832f7860d634b83877475144748908e
Don’t miss the series of seven ESRI Bay Area diversity maps (from above) that illustrate how the percentage of whites in the population has changed since 1920; watch on their page 6 as neighborhoods evolve with their redlining and gentrification imprints. 

You will find redlining maps and detailed neighborhood descriptions and data from the 1930s for Sacramento, Stockton, Oakland, San Francisco, San Jose, Fresno, Los Angeles, and San Diego at Mapping Inequality: Redlining in New Deal in America. Simply click on one of the California cities at
https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=6/36.43/-121.553
However, you might want to read through the introduction that describes the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation (HOLC), their grading criteria, and the time frame: https://dsl.richmond.edu/panorama/redlining/#loc=6/36.752/-119.861&text=intro

Here is a KQED article about attempts to recover from redlining, focusing on Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood:
https://www.kqed.org/news/11648307/has-oaklands-fruitvale-neighborhood-recovered-from-redlining

Gentrification and displacement were impacting California’s people and cities long before researchers were using scholarly terms to describe these trends. This remarkable video about Bunker Hill in 1956 examines the struggles of another vulnerable and relatively powerless (mainly elderly) population in a thoroughly segregated Los Angeles. Interestingly, it was filmed just after the nearby working-class Mexican American neighborhood in Chavez Ravine had been acquired by the city through eminent domain. Dodger Stadium would soon rise to replace that ravine and its neighborhood in a saga that would be remembered as one of the most controversial and debated displacements of an entire community in the city’s history. Back on that languishing old Bunker Hill in the 1950s, you don’t have to imagine local residents (many retired) watering their lawns, visiting neighborhood bars, and shopping at Angel’s Flight Pharmacy on yesterday’s relatively sleepy hill; in this film, they are threatened with displacement just more than 60 years ago. If today’s collection of steel and glass skyscrapers representing the center of a world-class super city was the developers’ intention…mission accomplished: https://vimeo.com/332916635

You can find many stories about how the growth of L.A. Airport encouraged or forced displacements in surrounding neighborhoods during past decades, as flight patterns rendered them unlivable. Here is a more recent video highlighting such transitions and displacements, this time in Manchester Square, at the hands of L.A. World Airports: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhNLQKHYjXk

Exploring some California Examples

The following photos will take us into the field to apply some of the concepts and observe some of the trends we have explored in this story.    

We end our story with just one more image from just one more San Francisco district that evolved from despair to stardom in recent decades.    

A Portion of South of Market becomes The East Cut
By the late 1800s, this once up-scale San Francisco neighborhood had declined and “lost its cachet”, becoming a “gritty swath of industry and commerce.”  Following the 1906 earthquake, it was described as “warehouses and large business operations catering to seafaring and other industries”. Such descriptions carried through the decades until signs of change began to sprout in the late 1900s. Boosters eventually broke traditional links to its South of Market past and some of its working-class neighbors. By the 21^st Century, it was being remade into a high priced mixed-use neighborhood in high demand. It is now (rebranded as “the East Cut”) home to The City’s tallest skyscraper, just a short walk from this intersection. Note how the language used by today’s developers and boosters sounds similar to movements that have been gentrifying neighborhoods in cities across California:

“The East Cut is San Francisco’s fastest-growing and most exciting new neighborhood. For years prior to its rebirth, our area was lumped in with SOMA, South Park, South Beach, the Financial District, or the Embarcadero. But as our neighborhood has redeveloped and come into its own, residents, businesses, and community organizations are embracing a new identity to distinguish our home from the rest of the City.”

“This unique part of San Francisco has experienced significant change and growth in the past few decades, including the removal of the Embarcadero Freeway, the most dense concentration of new home construction in the Bay Area, and the creation of thousands of new jobs. The East Cut is a local effort to unite the Rincon Hill, Folsom Street, and Transbay areas under a new banner and identity befitting our neighborhood. While building a sense of place and pride today, the East Cut also harkens back to a time when our community was an indelible part of San Francisco.”
https://www.theeastcut.org/about-us/

The post Connecting Yesterday’s Redlining to Today’s Gentrification and Displacement first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

More recently, our state’s political leaders have begun to reflect its evolving, diverse demographics. It might seem safer to avoid what some consider contentious or uncomfortable topics within this project that embraces objectivity and attempts to educate a wider range of people. But, within such a tumultuous political atmosphere, these trends, maps, and people have earned our attention and we responsibly garner the courage to explore them here.   

Every Election is Different and Significant
Though the 2020 presidential election demanded our attention, we recognize how every recent statewide election has changed our state in profound ways. Partly because California’s four-year-term elections for governor remain perfectly out of sync with Presidential elections, we conduct consequential elections (that also include the House of Representatives, critical statewide initiatives, and local elections) every two years. Still, voter turnouts are much more impressive during higher-profile presidential elections that include many of those other down-ballot choices. In contrast, voter participation can plummet by between 11-30% during gubernatorial election years. This is one reason why savvy political experts and advocates are careful to time their preferred candidates and ballot measures to coincide with the election cycles most likely to attract likeminded, sympathetic cohorts.  

Clear Trends from the 2020 Presidential Election
Eligible Californians showed up in record numbers to vote in the November, 2020 presidential election. Voter turnout soared to 80.7% in 2020 compared to 75% in what was already considered a dramatic 2016 election. And though the energy and emotions topped any memorable election, the statewide outcomes settled into familiar, ongoing patterns in 2020. These results reflect a state’s total population that leans toward Democratic and progressive candidates, but trends more moderate on the many statewide initiatives, or propositions. And there continues a clear divide between the two Californias. This is most evident when comparing more progressive and Democratic coastal cities to the more conservative and Republican communities father inland, especially in rural northern and eastern California. We’ve analyzed this chasm in previous research and stories within this project and web site, but here is the latest evidence. 

The 2020 Presidential election was a statewide landslide by any measure, as Democrat Joseph Biden gained 63.5% of the vote compared to Republican Donald Trump’s 34.3%. But, Biden’s dominance in the usually progressive coastal cities faded as we work our way mostly inland and to the north. Trump voters dominated in the more extensive rural regions of the state. More than 11 million Californians voted for Biden and only about 6 million voted for Trump. The Secretary of State’s map shows a more even visual split since more conservative, Republican-dominated counties tend to be larger in area, but lower in population.          

Your Perceived Political Incompatible May be Closer than You Think
Some of the most astounding political differences are recognized in surprisingly close proximity. For instance, some Bay Area counties where Biden dominated over Trump, such as Marin (82% for Biden to 16% for Trump), San Francisco (85% to 13%), and Alameda (80% to 18%), are only about 100 miles, or less than a two-hour drive west of counties where Trump dominated over Biden. These include Amador and Calaveras Counties; Trump won them both by 61% to 37% and he also won in the counties to their north and south. Perhaps the most extreme example of how these rural/inland regions differ with the urban/coastal regions was in more distant and extensive Lassen County, where Trump beat Biden by 75% to 23%, but less than 12,000 people voted.        

Now we can examine another map (below), built by Dr. Jing Liu. She also uses the California Secretary of State’s presidential election data, but displays much more detail. Watch the ratio of blues and reds change in the pie charts as you sweep from west to east and back again. Her map suggests more gradual political geography trends, rather than rigid boundaries.

Issues and Initiatives Make More Complicated Maps

Results from 2020 statewide initiatives suggest a more moderate to conservative electorate as they rejected some progressive causes. As example, Proposition 15 would have made some changes to the landmark and historic Proposition 13 of 1978, which limited annual tax increases on California properties. The old Prop 13 eventually forced statewide budget-cutting that included schools and educational programs until our state, ranked near the top before it passed, plunged much lower on the list of states in per-student spending during the following years. So, the new Proposition 15 was written to continue those property tax controls for homeowners and zoned commercial agriculture, but to adjust higher-valued commercial and industrial property taxes to reflect their market values rather than their purchase prices. It became a classic battle between big property owners that included giant corporations with massive real estate holdings in California, versus citizens and labor unions and teachers, who believed the largest landowners were reaping the greatest rewards from an old initiative designed to benefit the average homeowner.        

Tax Policies Versus Education and Services
Opponents of the new Prop 15 saw a giant tax increase for large businesses that threatened to run them and their industries and jobs out of the state; supporters saw it as closing a big loophole to make an outdated and flawed initiative more fair. Put more simply, some big businesses would be the losers and schools and local governments the winners. Combining both sides, more than $120 million was spent in campaigns to convince voters on this one initiative in a state where politics was already a big, expensive business of its own. This may help explain why Prop 15 lost, but it was close. Initiative voting results show a state still divided, but with a slight majority of voters leaning toward the more conservative and pro-business arguments presented by opponents. 

Deceiving Maps Tell Compelling Stories
The Secretary of State’s map showing these results is even more fascinating. It first appears that Proposition 15 was rejected by a resounding landslide, rather than the thin 52% “no” vote to 48% “yes” vote. But again, the counties most enthusiastically rejecting the initiative were mainly larger and more sparsely populated. These relatively conservative counties cover a much larger percent of our state’s land surface, but they usually do not include the densest populations where the numbers add up fast over very small areas. So, the final vote tallies were a lot closer than this map might suggest. It’s yet another illustration of how California, like the nation, shows its divisions that can ebb and flow, sweeping to and fro across the state in various forms, depending on the candidate, issue, or initiative.

Now we can examine Dr. Jing Liu’s map (below) that uses similar data made available from the state. Notice how much more detail she placed into this one attractive map without making it appear cluttered. You can now see the percentages of votes for each county. A map like this one suggests that there are many more important stories to tell about the electorate. We can also see from this map that winning and losing percentages are wildly different in each county.

California’s Diversity Erupts on to the National Stage

Millions of Californians have compelling personal stories that demonstrate the diversity of our state and contribute to our political geography. Here are a few leaders that you have either heard of, or that have shaped your state and your world without your knowledge.  

A History of Political Diversity
The Golden State has elevated its share of political philosophies and candidates that have changed the nation and the world; we mentioned a few in our publication. It has been a wild political roller coaster ride since statehood. We sent conservative Republicans Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan (a former Hollywood star who served two terms as governor) on to become presidents. We elected a range of powerful and sometimes controversial governors, personalities who often grew on to the world stage and others who sometimes grew away from steadfast partisanship and toward more pragmatic leadership during their terms. Some would argue that these might include Democrat Jerry Brown, who served two terms twice (1975-1983 and 2010-2018), becoming our longest-serving governor in history, as he gained a reputation for fiscal prudence; and there’s the Austrian-born celebrity body-builder-turned-movie-star Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger, who jumped into a bitter political recall atmosphere as a staunch conservative, but exited in 2011 as a champion of many environmental causes.  Since politics should encourage healthy debate, we welcome and respect your well-informed opinions about which personalities and policies could be highlighted here. But we can all agree that the state’s political landscapes and leaders are changing to match today’s demographics and cultures.

What Pio Pico and Kamala Harris have in Common
Pio Pico was an established leader and the last Mexican Governor of an already very diverse California. He finalized the secularization of the missions and later became a U.S. citizen after the American conquest. He was a native Californian, a “Californio” with a mixture of Native American, Spanish, and African ancestry, who reflected the diversity and mixed racial backgrounds typical of many Californios in the 1800s. Fast forward to the 21^st Century and the most diverse state with no ethnic majority; enter Kamala Harris. Her mother migrated from India and her father from Jamaica, but they quickly established solid reputations in California as successful leaders in their professions.

Harris was born in Oakland and raised in Berkeley. She earned her law degree from the UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco. She served as District Attorney of San Francisco and would eventually be elected and reelected to serve as California’s Attorney General (as the first female and African American in this office) from 2011-2017. Kamala Harris was elected U.S. Senator in 2017 to replace retiring Barbara Boxer and to continue the two-decades-plus long dominance of women Democrats from the Bay Area (including Diane Feinstein) representing California in the U.S. Senate. In 2021, this modern-day mixed racial native Californian became the first woman, African American, or Asian to serve as Vice President of the United States.

The Door Opens for a New Kind of Senator
When Kamala Harris moved up and on to Washington D.C in 2021, Governor Gavin Newsom fulfilled his duties to temporarily fill the U.S. Senate seat vacancy by selecting Secretary of State Alejandro Padilla, another Democrat. He was born in Los Angeles. Senator Padilla’s parents emigrated from Mexico and raised their kids in a working class part of the San Fernando Valley. He was eventually educated at MIT and trained as an engineer, but he was elected to the L.A. City council in 1999 as their youngest member. He served three times as L.A.’s first Latino Council President and was later elected to the California State Senate until he was elected Secretary of State in 2015. Packing such a resume by 2021, Alex Padilla became the first Mexican American or Hispanic to represent California in the U.S. Senate.                      

California’s AG Goes to Washington
Xavier Becerra was elected as California’s first Latino Attorney General and served as the state’s top law enforcement officer starting in 2017, following Kamala Harris. He was born in Sacramento and was the first in his working-class family to earn a college degree, which eventually included a Bachelor of Arts from Stanford and Juris Doctorate from Stanford Law School. He served in the State Assembly and was later elected to 12 terms in the U.S. House of Representatives before his tenure as California’s Attorney General. President Biden tapped him to head the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2021, leaving another vacancy in this state where a fresh crop of leaders were gaining valuable experiences and graduating on. 

The Most Powerful Woman in a Divided House
These recent leaders we have sent to the Senate and the President’s Cabinet continue a long tradition of powerful influencers lifted to the national stage from California, and that is especially true in the House of Representatives. As a recent example, Nancy Pelosi has represented San Francisco’s 12^th District for more than 30 years. In 2007, she was the first woman to be elected Speaker of the House and she has been leading Democrats in the House of Representatives ever since. She has often been considered the most powerful woman in America, gaining praise from supporters, but scorn from her mainly Republican detractors who label her as a liberal progressive. She beat her opponent (another Democrat) by more than 55 percentage points in her 2020 reelection and resumed her tenure as House Speaker in 2021. In that election, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, her campaign committee raised more than $27 million compared to her opponent’s approximately $1.7 million. Here is where we recognize that it would be difficult to imagine American leaders with more wildly conflicting politics and philosophies than California’s representatives in the House. And you can blame much of it on the geography we examine here.  

Digging in Their Heals in the San Joaquin Valley
Consider the conservative Republican districts that are evident in the southern San Joaquin Valley. Kevin McCarthy has represented California’s redrawn 23^rd District in the House of Representatives since 2007. He was born in Bakersfield and earned his BS and MBA at California State University, Bakersfield. As a 4^th generation resident of Kern County, he was reported to be the first Republican in his immediate family and has a long history as a staunch conservative in the Republican Party.

He served as minority leader in the California State Assembly before his election to Congress. He eventually served as House of Representatives Majority Leader for five years until 2019 and has been House Minority Leader since then. His district that is mainly in Kern and Tulare Counties is considered one of the most conservative Republican strongholds in the nation. He has gained a reputation as a prodigious fundraiser, thanks to backing from powerful business interests. Encouraged by his constituents, he also earned a reputation as one of President Donald Trump’s most enthusiastic and loyal supporters through some of the most tumultuous and controversial political struggles in U.S. history. This included his support to challenge the 2020 Electoral College votes and Trump’s attempts to reverse those election results. Kevin McCarthy won reelection to the House in 2020 by beating his Democratic opponent by more than 24 percentage points.  The Center for Responsive Politics reported that his campaign committee raised nearly $28 million just for his 2020 campaign, while his opponent raised less than $2 million.  

From the Farm to Washington
Right next door is redrawn Congressional District 22, where Congressman Devin Nunes has represented the traditionally more conservative Tulare and somewhat less conservative Fresno counties since 2003. He was born in Tulare into a family with Portuguese ancestry. He grew up on his family’s dairy farm there and earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in agriculture from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He has served as Chair of the House Intelligence Committee.

Most folks from any political persuasion would consider Nunes one of the most conservative members of the House, and like McCarthy, he has earned his reputation as a controversial firebrand. Some of his views and most famous quotes have included dismissing scientists and the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic; he was also considered one of President Trump’s most ardent supporters. The media and even some of his Republican colleagues panned him for attempts to interfere with ongoing legal investigations and for his loyal support of President Trump’s conspiracy theories. He also voted to toss out voting results from the 2020 election. But Devin Nunes won reelection in 2020 over his Democratic rival by more than 8 percentage points. According to the Center for Responsive Politics, his campaign committee fundraising totaled about $27 million for his 2020 reelection, compared to roughly $5 million raised by his opponent. You can see that he and Kevin McCarthy proudly represent the political antithesis of Speaker Pelosi and some of the more recent California political stars we have highlighted here, but all these most powerful influencers have access to people, organizations, and companies with deep pockets.   

Diversity as a Dividing Wedge or a Common Thread
And so, just as our nation continues divided, so does this most powerful state – with 40 million people and the 5^th largest economy on the planet – remain divided in many ways. But the political landscape is changing and so are the people who do the landscaping. The optimist might imagine how a California cleaved between urban coastal and rural inland might set an example for the nation. Can we agree to use reliable facts and educate the public to find common ground and compromise so that we can accomplish the difficult work required to lift us out of multiple crises and back in to the light? The pessimist might predict our recoiling and entrenchment into our tribes and bubbles with our labels and slogans that will cause further damage and send us spiraling into decay. It’s a pivotal time and the Golden State has never had such a golden opportunity to demonstrate how we can work and learn and prosper together or wither and stagnate in our ignorance and obstinance. The direction people choose will help guide our leaders and vice-versa, and California is better positioned than any other state to demonstrate how we can blaze a better path into the future.

Some might think that the political dust settled in January, 2021. But those who are paying attention know that the political winds continue blowing as strong as ever and we have the power to steer them. We might have learned how to love or hate our elected officials; but, ultimately, those leaders only reflect the knowledge, ignorance, philosophies, and will of the people who voted for them. Regardless of our differences and historic diversity, everyone knows that maintaining democracy requires a lot of work from a well-educated and thoroughly-informed electorate. In other words, unless we find some common ground based on our knowledge of verifiable facts, the ground we stand on will soon turn to quicksand. So, stay informed with reliable sources. Get involved. Be the change. They’re not just slogans.         

You can find more details about voting results from the California Secretary of State:
https://www.sos.ca.gov/elections/prior-elections/statewide-election-results

The post Evolving Diversity Redraws our Political Maps first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

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Melting Pots and Salad Bowls of L.A.: A Culinary and Cultural Study

It’s finally time! You’ve been anticipating it. Imagine your favorite food. Really, close your eyes for a second and imagine it. Its aroma fills the air and brings back happy memories or feelings of home. It’s right there, on its way to your mouth. That first bite. It sends you back. Back to your childhood. Back to your family and friends. Back Home. In that moment you’re connected. We’re all connected. For it’s food that binds us; it’s food that nurtures us; and it’s food that unites us all.

Food is an integral part of culture, so much so, that one of the first things people do when immigrating into a new home is establish communities and restaurants to feed them. The US has long been called the Great American Melting Pot, and no other city on Earth can match the cultural diversity that Los Angeles has to offer.

Whether you’re a newly minted Angeleno, a long time resident, or just someone looking to maximize their experience when visiting this wonderful city, you don’t want to miss all the greatness LA has to offer. Large cities like this offer a world of cultural and culinary experiences; and, if you haven’t explored a city’s hot spots, it’s like you’ve never been there at all.

Ever get an invite to join friends at an Ethiopian restaurant only to realize you’ve never even had Ethiopian food before? Maybe not, but there’s certainly some great foods out there still waiting for you to try. You can learn a lot about the cultural makeup of a city by eating your way through those communities formed around food. You can become a more learned and improved traveler without even needing a passport.

“Culinary Communities” aren’t always labeled on a map in obvious ways like LA’s Koreatown might be, but with some geospatial analysis, you can get a good idea of where they are. Below, we’ll explore what came up for Los Angeles. And, for those geospatial buffs out there, you’ll find more about how these maps were generated towards the end.

Major Culinary Hot Spots Maps
The intuitive way to read the maps below is to see redder spots as having a statistically significant and higher than expected concentration of a given restaurant type than if these restaurants were evenly distributed throughout LA County – These are “Hot Spots.” The areas which are more blue are, similarly, “Cold Spots.” Dark, uncolored areas, don’t necessarily lack restaurants, they’re just areas where the concentration isn’t significantly high or low.

As you peruse these maps, you will notice that they unveil some interesting trends, but they may also encourage even more questions, especially from seasoned locals who are familiar with these places. There are multiple variables to question here, until they can become overwhelming. How does one decide how to categorize each type of ethnic food and its origins? How do we even define the boundaries of a region of the globe, such as what is considered to be in the Middle East? How do we count restaurants that may enthusiastically identify with one particular ethnic group’s cuisine, though they may offer that famous L.A. fusion mix, until it becomes a less genuine version that is Americanized, or California-ized? How might have these restaurants been forced to change as their neighborhoods evolved demographically? Some of these restaurants may have been stranded, now representing cultural enclaves of the past. We will try to address a few of these questions that may arise for each map.

Digging Deeper – Asian Restaurants
You may be thinking: “isn’t it an oversimplification to lump entire continents of people together?” You may have even seen the work of our friends at The Radical Dot Map and noticed intuitive spatial correlations between ethnicity and the culinary maps above, but also noticed these maps don’t get very granular. ‘Asian’ is pretty broad. There are a lot of distinct cultures lumped into that label. Why do cartographers keep doing that? Well, in part, it’s because even the 2010 census lumped people into 6 groups this way.

High level aggregations like this are easy to understand, but don’t paint the picture with as full a pallet as they could. Below we’ll add some detail to just one of those categories and map out hot spots of different types of Asian Restaurants in LA.

Map Wrap Up Notes from Javier

Those of you not from LA may not know of the late, beloved culinary critic Johnathan Gold.  Gold was loved and welcome at any table in any neighborhood as if he were an old friend or family. He brought cultures together by introducing them to each other’s food and won a Pulitzer Prize doing it.  He had a profound appreciation for the culture and history of LA.  

Think of all the divisiveness you see these days. Now, imagine instead, if we were all a little more like Gold.  All you have to do is grow your comfort zone a little and explore your city.  Post-COVID, if you’re fortunate enough to be near Los Angeles, you could take a food tour and Eat Your Way Through LA!  You could plan to visit a handful of places in a given area each month and by this time next year you’ll find yourself much more appreciative of the food and culture of your great city. There are plenty of apps that will help you do this.  Use an app like Swarm to make it easy to Remember Everywhere you’ve been and want to go.  Or create a blog. It’s amazing how many foodie-followers you can get.  Get out there and expand your horizons.  The more we’re all a bit more like Gold, the more our diversity multiplies our strength as a community.

Appendix

You can see how this evolved into a project that demonstrates the power and limitations of maps as much as it illustrates the distributions of ethnic restaurants and cultures in L.A. County. We are reminded that maps are only as reliable and trustworthy as the data used and the people who make them and that these technologies are improving by the day. If you are interested in more details about how the data, science, and technology were molded into these cartographic works of art, continue reading through the next sections.         

About the Data
The restaurant’s data used was pulled from Foursquare’s Places Database – a comprehensive dataset spanning 190+ countries and 50 territories.  The data set is updated daily as our world is constantly evolving. This analysis was done in December 2020.    

The Foursquare Places Database has a rich set of attributes you could use to understand the world around you.  This analysis only needed a few of them:  the restaurant’s location, the restaurant’s categorization, and information telling us if the restaurants were part of a national chain.  

Independent, locally owned and operated locations are more representative of a community than national chains like McDonald’s or Subway; so, all chain locations were removed. Certain other categories like Dessert Shops, Bakeries, and Coffee Shops were removed as they weren’t unique enough to any particular culture. The remaining thousands of locations tell a very detailed story and could fall into one of 350 different categories related to food. These locations were aggregated up using personal judgement into the major categories seen above in the first set of maps.  For example Indian, Bangladeshi, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan Restaurants were combined into a single “Indian Subcontinent” Grouping.  For the second set of maps diving deeper into Asian restaurants, most of the detailed categories were left as is, with little aggregation. Details on these recategorizations can be found in this gist. Once recategorized, this data can easily be fed into your favorite geoanalysis tool.

About the Geospatial Hot Spot Analysis
All of the above maps were built using ArcGIS Pro’s Optimized Hot Spot Analysis readily available in its Spatial Statistics toolbox. This tool aggregates point data, the location of restaurants of a given culinary category in this case, into the cells of a fishnet grid or hexagon polygon layer. These generated polygons are then compared to their neighbors and cells are categorized as being either statistically not significant or as being significant “hot spots,” or “cold spots.”    

The categorization algorithm running underneath is the Getis-Ord Gi* statistic. In our analysis, the default fishnet cell size was chosen to be 500m by 500m and a bounding polygon capturing commercially feasible areas for restaurants was supplied. The algorithm evaluates whether a given fishnet cell can be considered as a statistically significant hotspot or cold spot by comparing restaurant distributions to theoretical random distributions generated within the supplied bounding polygon and calculating a z-score and a p-value for each cell. For statistically significant (evaluated by p-value) positive z-scores, the larger the z-score is, the more concentrated restaurants are in that area (hot spot). For statistically significant (evaluated by p-value) negative z-scores, the smaller the z-score is, the more intense the clustering of low values (cold spot).  

It should be noted that not all categories had enough locations to produce reliable results. ArcGIS Pro’s Optimized Hot Spot Analysis tool requires certain threshold numbers of input locations. This is why there are far more categories of restaurant available than maps shown above.  

About The Authors

Javier Soliz does data engineering and analysis in service of revenue generation as a Sales Engineer for Foursquare Labs Inc.. 

William (Bill) Selby is a Geographer and lover of the rich culture of California. He is the author of Rediscovering the Golden State. More here.

Jing Liu is a professor of Geography and GIS (Geographic Information Science) at Santa Monica College. She is also on the team of Rediscovering the Golden State. More here.

The post Mapping L.A.’s Melting Pot Restaurants first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.