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.

There are at least five main themes threading through these images and videos. First, the steep slopes, loose materials, and stripped ground cover leave landscapes vulnerable to any significant precipitation, especially heavy downpours. Such mud and debris flow threats will continue with every rain event until sometime in April, when our normal annual wet season usually ends. Then, there’s always next year. Second, note the haphazard and unpredictable burn patterns that determined which homes, neighborhoods, and businesses were destroyed and which survived the firestorms as they swept through. Third, many of you may have to strain to recognize what is left of some iconic SoCal landscapes and neighborhoods seen and celebrated in countless films, TV series, commercials, and videos over the decades. Fourth, note how the wildfires didn’t discriminate, ravaging diverse neighborhoods from rich to middle- and working-class. Finally, we will end with a few articles that summarizes how we built ourselves into this disaster-prone corner.

I am also sharing the following images to confirm that there is no reason to visit the devastation, since you are not likely to discover anything new that hasn’t already been displayed multiple times in the media. And there are at least five reasons (yes, another list!) to NOT go wandering into the Palisades or any other recently burned areas. First, PCH and other roads along that entire coastline and into the Santa Monica Mountains will be subject to closures at least through what remains of our rainy season. Second, even if you find an open road, the one-lane traffic gridlock is a frustrating waste of time. Third, you can’t turn off or even briefly stop without getting cited (at best) or arrested by an army of law enforcement officers. Fourth, these are toxic landscapes that pose a host of health hazards and dangers to visitors. Finally, cleanup and construction crews are working hard to rebuild essential infrastructures throughout Pacific Palisades and Altadena. The last obstacles they need are selfie crowds getting in their way and impeding their progress. So, as you view immediate post-fire images here and in the media, know that there is nothing more to see as the cleanup progresses.

The Mountain and Franklin Fires as Warnings

Two months before the mass destruction in LA County, the Mountain Fire erupted in nearby Ventura County. Strong Santa Ana winds (as predicted) also fanned this blaze that consumed nearly 20,000 acres and 243 homes and commercial structures. Just about one month later, the Franklin Fire ignited on Dec 9 and quickly grew to 4,000 acres as powerful Santa Ana winds (again, as predicted) funneled through the Malibu Canyon wind tunnel and toward the beach. In contrast to the Palisades and Eaton fires, it only destroyed or damaged 48 structures, including a few homes. For instance, Pepperdine students and staff were forced to shelter in place as the flames raced around them, but the campus survived. Heroic efforts by savvy firefighters helped to contain the damage, but it also helped that Malibu Canyon had burned just several years earlier. Researchers use the historical record to estimate that this area has burned in wildfires on an average of two times/decade (the entire Malibu coastline is impacted by even more frequent fires), which decreases potential fuel build ups. But such frequent fires also encourage the invasion of nonnative species that are more flammable, leading to even more frequent fires and accelerated wildfire growth. By most Decembers, our fire season has been snuffed out by winter rains. (Rains brought welcome relief months earlier in the previous two years.)  But this year’s long drought dragged, incredibly, into late January, through the middle of our rainy season. The stage was set for relentless Santa Ana winds that would take over from there. As finger pointing mounts about details and specific responses to these wildfires, here are a few facts to keep the debates honest.

Unraveling Some Misconceptions

First, these firestorms had nothing to do with water diversions from Northern Cal. The state had just experienced two consecutive banner wet years that finally broke our two-decades-long megadrought and then competed for the wettest on record. Nearly all of our reservoirs were recently filled and our state water projects overflowed with more water than we could distribute and use. Unfortunately, the several months of recent unprecedented drought that followed those storms dehydrated the biomass that accumulated during the previous two rainy years, providing abundant dry fuels for ignitions. Our state’s water diversion and storage projects were performing well, but were surrounded by dehydrating Mediterranean plant communities interspersed with encroaching human developments, all enduring prolonged and historic Santa Ana winds. Only the details were left to debate in this landscape made for disaster, where millions of Californians found themselves within an expanding wildland-urban interface.

As example, the one relatively small reservoir that served Pacific Palisades had been “taken out of service to “meet safe drinking water regulations,” the DWP said in a statement. A tear in the reservoir’s cover made the water supply subject to contamination, the Los Angeles Times reported, leading the agency to drain it in February.”  … (meaning last Feb.). This left three one-million-gallon tanks to serve the Palisades, which were more than adequate for providing safe drinking and irrigation water and for fighting multiple structure fires. They obviously weren’t enough for fighting the stampeding wave of flames. Many fire hydrants designed to battle structural fires and smaller brush fires were also inadequate for such a colossal bombardment. Such details will be the focus of investigations into how heroic firefighters could have had a better infrastructure to support their efforts as winds peaked over 70mph. Many scientists, engineers, and firefighters question whether ANY water infrastructure could have made much of a difference in this firestorm fanned by wicked winds that also hampered air assaults. This was also the case in the Altadena inferno, where fist-sized burning embers were being blown up to a mile ahead of the fire front. 

Finally, for those of you not familiar with SoCal, our wildfires that spread into neighborhoods did not (and usually don’t) erupt and spread from a “forest’, but from our coastal sage scrub, chaparral, and related plant communities that help define our Mediterranean climates and ecosystems; so, “forest” management is not relevant. We’ve heard suggestions that our plant communities should be destroyed to protect nearby developments, but that would require clearing at least half-mile strips surrounding every structure. This would represent habitat destruction on a massive scale, accelerate species extinctions in our unique California Floristic Province, and wipe out thousands of natives and endemics. And they would likely be replaced by invasive nonnative grasses and other highly flammable biomass that act as conduits for fires. Proposed “clearance” on such a grand scale would also result in more frequent and catastrophic floods and debris flows out of these disturbed, vulnerable landscapes during nearly every rain event. We’ve seen this movie and its sequels play out too often: the very plant communities that protect us by absorbing floodwaters and stabilizing our slopes, provide habitats for a dizzying array of plant and animal species, and represent open spaces where we can appreciate and study our natural history, can suddenly turn on us by sending their burning embers.

Our careless developments and dysfunctional relationships within these very ecosystems that we cherish have been debated for decades and these difficult debates will (and should) continue into the future. It took many decades to build ourselves into this worst-case scenario fire corner. For more objective analyses and some back-to-reality answers, check out the links that follow my aftermath images, at the end of this story. As you view the following images, please remember that they are what remains of thousands of families’ hard work over many decades … shattered lives, hopes, and dreams incinerated into ashes.

Before we skip inland over to Altadena and the Eaton Fire aftermath, here’s just one example of what was lost in the Palisades. Some folks who couldn’t afford to buy a house on the beach opted for a mobile home and also lost everything. This real estate description paints a pretty clear picture of life there in the before times:
16321 PCH
Pacific Palisades Bowl Mobile Home Estates
Roughly $500,000-$1 million
What’s special
BREATHTAKING DRAMATIC OCEAN VIEWS MARBLE BACKSPLASHES CUSTOM CABINETRY EXPANSIVE MASTER SUITE SEPARATE PANTRY ROOM QUARTZ COUNTERTOPS HIGH-END FINISHES
MOVE-IN READY! This stunning, new construction custom-designed, 2-story beach home is perfectly positioned across from the iconic Will Rogers Beach in Pacific Palisades, offering an unmatched combination of luxury, convenience, and coastal beauty. The home’s prime location provides breathtaking, dramatic ocean views from Malibu to Catalina Island, visible upon upper level. Entering, you’ll be enveloped by a bright, open ambiance that seamlessly merges indoor and outdoor living. Natural light floods the home, illuminating the carefully crafted details throughout. With 2 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms, this home boasts soaring 9-foot ceilings and elegant double-door entries that enhance its spacious, airy feel. The first floor offers a convenient bathroom, while upstairs, the expansive master suite awaits with a dual-entry bath alongside a second well-appointed bedroom. Every inch of this home has been thoughtfully curated with high-end finishes, including quartz countertops, marble backsplashes, and custom cabinetry with pull-out shelves in the chef’s kitchen. The kitchen is equipped with premium stainless steel appliances, a Shaw’s farm sink, a gas oven, vented exhaust fan, disposal, refrigerator, dishwasher, separate pantry room, and stackable washer and dryer. Additional features include central heating and a tankless water heater, enhancing both comfort and efficiency. Outside, imagine crafting your ideal outdoor retreat on a spacious 320-square-foot second-story deck, perfect for lounging and entertaining while soaking in the endless ocean views. Dedicated two parking spaces and guest parking available, and 24-hour private security patrol. Residents enjoy access to premium community amenities, including a large heated pool, hot tub, billiards room, and a recreational area. Positioned near Palisades Village and top-rated schools, this home combines luxury with practicality. Cross PCH via a nearby crosswalk for quick beach access, and enjoy low space rent of $970/month with rent control, plus the added financial benefits of no annual property taxes or HOA fees. Purchase includes city and coastal approved plans for custom built deck for convenience.

Eaton Fire (Altadena) Aftermath

Altadena is only about 25 miles (straight line distance) northeast of the Palisades, but most locals would tell you that they seem worlds apart. It can take about an hour (depending on traffic) to navigate from one to the other and you might feel that you’ve been transported hundreds of miles from a beach once you finally arrive in Altadena. Adjacent to Pasadena of Rose Bowl and Parade fame, Altadena is nestled on the edge of the San Gabriel Valley at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. It looks up to the abrupt steep slopes (once covered by chaparral and woodlands) that tower all the way up to Mt. Wilson, all being lifted along a series of active faults. Cooling sea breezes often struggle to make it this far inland during hot summer days when the smog can get caught below the infamous inversion and jammed against the mountains. By contrast, during winter, this region can resemble a warm, sunny paradise when their spectacular snow-clad mountains point into crystal clear blue skies.

Compared to the Palisades, Altadena displays cultural diversity that is more representative of California. This is partly because the neighborhood known as Altadena Meadows was one of the few communities where black families were allowed to settle, back during the days when segregation was enforced and redlining ruled. Thousands of working- and middle- class families worked hard for decades to improve these neighborhoods, often hoping to pass their investments on to future generations. I learned about Altadena when I frequented Pasadena, enjoyed hikes into the local canyons, and developed a working relationship with the heroes of the Eaton Canyon Docents, led by Diane Lang. There at the renowned Eaton Canyon Natural Area and Nature Center, we trained docents to guide school groups and visitors eager to learn about the natural history of these treasured Mediterranean landscapes. We learned a lot of science while exploring the natural systems and cycles that rule our world and we soothed plenty of nature deficit disorders.

All of it has been lost. Surrounding slopes, the nature center, homes of some of the docents (including Diane’s house), much of Altadena and more of Altadena Meadows has burned to the ground. We always studied and understood how fire plays such an important role in these ecosystems and locals even recalled when another wildfire burst out of the mountains and burned the old nature center in October, 1993. But this fire was different, as it was fanned by the fiercest Santa Ana winds that blew burning embers a mile ahead of the front. Just as the Palisades Fire was destroying everything in its path all the way to the beach 25 miles away, this fire would not stop at the base of the mountains. It was blown ahead right into the city, destroying entire neighborhoods that most people thought were far removed from wildland fires. Within one tragic day and night, Altadena and Pacific Palisades were connected in ways that some could not have imagined. The two previous stories on this website summarized the conditions that led to these tragedies and why they exploded out of control. But perhaps the key word is control. Nature’s awesome power reminds us that we cannot separate ourselves; we are just parts and players within these natural systems and cycles.

In case you missed it, positive messages and messengers of hope are gradually rising out of the ashes in Altadena. Here’s one example of a local artist who is making a difference in Altadena Meadows. It includes some video from the air: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYPmFS84SiA

This interview confirms how a reality check and building paradigm shift is necessary if we expect to develop more fire-resistant communities. (Thanks to Bill Patzert for sending it along.)

This is a very thorough summary of the corner we have built ourselves into, and our long LA fire history. Thanks again to Bill Patzert for sharing.

Here’s another LA Times article that sums up the problem and some potential solutions.

This Malibu Times article is dated, but leaves us with a rough fire history up to 2007.

If you’re in to geospatial imagery, check out these before and after NASA EARTHDATA images captured in January, 2025, by the MSI instrument aboard ESA’s Sentinel-2A platform.

This camera shows the advancing smoke and flames that eventually consume a Pacific Palisades neighborhood.

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

Here is a Pacific Palisades Aftermath Tour.

Let’s hope this will be THE END of our disaster stories for a while.

The post Cataclysmic Aftermath Landscapes 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.

The development and use of affordable renewable energy and our increasingly more efficient use of resources is keeping tons of pollution out of our air, water, and soil, while saving Californians billions of dollars in the long run. Millions of people and entire ecosystems are healthier as California helps to lead the nation and the world toward a cleaner and more promising energy future. As the state’s per capita energy use and greenhouse gas production continues to decline, individuals, households, and businesses have discovered a treasure trove of long-term savings that can be routed to improve the quality of our living and working environments. But since the devil is often in the details, what are these sources of energy and how reliable are they?   

The Golden State is progressing toward a challenging goal of 100% “clean” electricity by 2045. But it is important to note that, by 2022, such “clean” sources (according to the California Energy Commission) included all renewables (39+%), large hydropower (≈11%), and what remains of nuclear (≈11%) in the state. Solar, wind, geothermal, biomass, and small hydropower are considered renewables. But there’s something missing here that I’ll call small solar power (often referred to as passive), though it isn’t small at all, since it’s working for us everywhere on every day and it is the source of almost all the energy that surrounds us. 

The energy industry often divides active solar into two categories: solar thermal and solar photovoltaic. The larger projects have generated tons of controversy. For instance, the Ivanpah solar thermal facility, with a price tag of more than $2 billion, was touted as the world’s largest. You can’t miss it if you are driving through the Mojave Desert along Interstate 15 just before crossing into Nevada. This is where once wild open desert has been covered with giant mirrors to focus intense sunlight toward 450-foot towers where high temperature steam turbines generate electricity. The electricity is sold to you through companies such as PG&E and SCE, but millions of dollars of electricity are lost through wires transmitting it to distant urban centers. Meanwhile, the desert along Interstate 10 to Arizona is being covered with photovoltaic panels on BLM land that is now known as The Riverside East Solar Energy Zone. This includes the sprawling Chuckwalla Valley, which has become a sea of solar panels that has also been advertised as the largest such project in the world. In both of these gargantuan solar energy “farms”, enormous expanses of open public desert ecosystems have been sacrificed to gather and concentrate solar energy and convert it to electricity that then must be sent out to urban areas more than 100 miles distant.  

As with other major power plants, these solar “farms” come with plenty of baggage. Habitat destruction haunts each project. Thousands of birds and other wildlife have been unintentionally killed each year by these behemoth projects. Precious groundwater supplies have been threatened. Desert dwellers and cultures that include Native Americans have also been impacted.

Desert devotees wonder why more solar panels are not being installed on top of existing warehouses, parking structures, homes, and businesses, in urban areas where the energy is being used. Even when the cost of storage batteries is added to solar installations, the payoff time is often less than 10-15 years, when consumers begin getting their solar energy for free for the life of panels that can last more than 30 years. And when homes or businesses with existing solar systems are sold, the seller gets more than their investments back from the added sales prices. Those who don’t want to pay upfront costs and take responsibility for owning and maintaining their solar systems are enticed by lucrative leasing arrangements; customers benefit from less expensive energy after paying a monthly fee to the companies who own and lease out the systems. Millions of rooftops and other urban spaces (including those for vital battery storage) are still waiting to harvest and store otherwise wasted and increasingly competitive solar energy for the taking. So why aren’t more families and businesses being encouraged to make such smart investments in otherwise underused urban spaces that can guarantee long-term profits?

You can see why the chorus of concerned citizens and energy experts advocating for more efficient, local energy production is growing louder. They argue that many of the most competitive sources of future energy can be found on our roofs and in our cities where energy is used and that destroying distant public lands and ecosystems is not sustainable. They also argue that local energy issues and problems can be more efficiently addressed with local solutions that help consumers gain control of their power sources. Similar controversies have swirled around some of the ubiquitous wind turbines that have sprouted above rural and remote regions across the state. I address some of these issues in my new book, The California Sky Watcher.   

And that leads us to the simpler and more pragmatic sustainable energy solutions sometimes known as passive solar. They often involve common-sense and time-tested planning with nature in practical ways that will allow us to save money, gain control of our energy destiny, and improve the quality of our living and working environments. Such solutions have been under our noses and calling out to us all this time.  

Many of us have already discovered the advantages of greenhouses, skylights, sunroofs, and sunrooms that allow natural sunlight in, rather than relying on artificial energy-consuming light and heat sources. And this reminds us that almost all the energy surrounding us is direct or indirect solar. It’s the energy plants use to grow and that animals store as they eat. Whether you are a vegetarian or an omnivore, you are using indirect solar energy to read this page and walk across the room. As covered in stories from my new book and on this website, solar energy creates temperature gradients that build pressure gradients that propel the wind. The sun’s energy evaporates water and lifts moisture into the air to fuel storms that provide life-giving precipitation. There it is, always surrounding us. Because there’s far more solar energy than we will ever need, we need to continue to find more efficient ways of harvesting, storing, and using it.

The simplest acts include opening windows during the day and closing them before sunset during the cool season. During warm summers, keep them open at night through early mornings and then close them when daytime temperatures rise outside. You will keep fresher, healthier air circulating during the comfortable open times and prevent sick building syndromes that can develop in closed spaces. Investments in efficient ventilation systems also cut AC costs in the long run. Plant deciduous vegetation along south-facing walls to shade the hot side of the house during summer; they will lose their leaves to allow more light in during winter. Follow the source of light and heat by keeping track of the sun’s location in your sky as it changes during the day and the seasons. Eaves and overhangs can be just the right length to shade walls and windows from high summer sun during summer afternoons and then allow direct sunlight to warm those surfaces when sun angles are lower during winter. Think of the dozens of other ways you can reconnect to the natural world in and around your own living and working spaces, relieve nature deficit disorders, reap the physical and mental health benefits, and save money in the process. After all, we are fortunate to live in plein air California, not Chicago.

The best California architects know how to design smart buildings with more sophisticated passive solar features. It might take a little more planning ahead, but such short-term investments will lead to long-term rewards that just keep on giving. Double-paned energy-efficient windows (with Energy Star ratings) and doors and improved insulation have become the standard for good reasons: these upgrades cut energy costs as they allow you to better regulate the air in your home or business when temperatures become uncomfortable outside.  Here is just one website from the U.S. Department of Energy that summarizes passive solar strategies. Here is another good introduction. You can also encourage efforts to become more efficient by supporting nonprofit organizations such as Sustainable Works. They have helped thousands of students, residents, and businesses save money while they also cut pollution and save our valuable resources.

We all use energy that can have negative impacts. But we are rediscovering how to create more comfortable, healthier living environments that will limit those impacts and save money in the long run. Sometimes it’s as simple as going back to nature. But it also requires that we work together. And in the bigger picture, that’s where Community Choice Aggregation (CCA) has made major progress across the state. At least 25 CCAs serve more than 200 communities in California that work together to pool their electricity loads, increase efficiency and grid resilience, and encourage renewable energy projects. The combination of simpler solar solutions outlined here, CCAs, and countless related efforts are moving the state toward a much greener and cleaner energy future … and proving how every Californian can make a positive difference.    

Check out these sources for more:

Community Choice Aggregation (CCA)

Inside Climate News reports on groundwater stresses from desert solar projects.

California Energy Commission

Passive Solar

A Passive Solar General Intro and Summary

NOAA Solar Calculator

Sustainable Works

California Academy of Sciences
The Academy’s Green Roof

California Air Resources Board Greenhouse Gas Inventory

US Green Building Council

One Architect’s Top 15 California Showcases

The Guardian Article

The 2023 Annual Global Climate Report summarizes how California is just another example of more general temperature trends around the globe.

The post Simpler Solar Solutions 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.

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.

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.

You may choose to read down this page with its traditional style, but if you would rather view the same story with all the technological marvels of a Story Map, click to this link and you can skip this page: https://arcg.is/inzjD

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.

Today’s L.A., Tomorrow’s World?
As developing communication and transportation technologies continue to dissolve global borders (at least in the long term), we know that such interaction and diversity foretells humanity’s future; today’s L.A. represents a glimpse into that future. So, does California’s and L.A.’s cultural experiment represent a beacon of light, a warning sign, or something between those extremes as we imagine humanity’s future on this planet? 

Tasting the World in a Day
More than 20 years ago, we started a project that would help shed light on how L.A.’s people and landscapes are reflections of our world, how the world is being changed by L.A., and how this great experiment is progressing. We repeatedly bused up to 50 people through L.A., stopping to survey specific neighborhoods and cultures. Nearly two decades ago, scholar Lisa Harrison designed our first guidebook by piecing together the stacks of articles and research projects we used to inform us about each location. Here is the expanded, refined, and updated 2020 version. This was and continues to be our attempt to experience, examine, and better understand as many different cultures, neighborhoods, and landscapes as possible in one L.A. day. Call it what you want; we call it See the World in a Different Way: Eat Your Way through L.A.

Reexamining Cultures within Landscapes of Reality and Vice Versa
This cultural tour includes a lot of history, but has been updated to just before the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. It is intended to unveil the genuine working parts of L.A., the rich cultures and ethnic foods championed by its people, and the sometimes hidden stories about these cultures and neighborhoods that are too often overlooked in the media. Throughout the years, our theme has been reworked and recast by local food critics and cultural researchers from many disciplines with somewhat different perspectives and spins, while others have even used our title, all recognizing and celebrating these unparalleled opportunities to learn about different people, cultures, neighborhoods, and cuisines. During 2020, we watched as the COVID-19 pandemic, social upheavals, and the resulting wildly erratic economic environments closed some of the businesses we visited here and began rearranging  these urban landscapes in surprising (and often heartbreaking) ways that offer new learning opportunities.

Historic Diversity Spreads Outward 
To say that L.A. has grown to become the planet’s most diverse metropolitan area is now an over-simplistic understatement. This is why we don’t have the room in this guide or the time in one day to visit all the cultures and neighborhoods that combine to make this complex conurbation. For instance, we will miss the largest concentration of Vietnamese people outside Asia in Little Saigon, Orange County. We will miss the largest concentration of Cambodian people outside Asia in Cambodia Town, Long Beach and the too-distant, but renowned “Little India” business district along Pioneer Blvd in Artesia. We will also miss the largest concentration of Chinese people in North America (now in the San Gabriel Valley). And we don’t have time to visit the largest concentration of Armenians outside Armenia, centered in Glendale. And did you know there are more Pacific Islanders in L.A. County (especially concentrated in South Bay cities) than anywhere beyond the islands? Many of these cultures and their neighborhoods (such as Leimert Park, the epicenter of African American culture in L.A.) have been the focus of separate stories on our web site, but they are just outside the boundaries of this route.  

Anchored Ethnic Enclaves
Cultural geographers and anthropologists have sometimes debated whether some of these neighborhoods might be considered ghettos, ethnic enclaves, or a little of both. You might be challenged to make your own assessments in each case, knowing that an ethnic enclave is usually a neighborhood populated by people who voluntarily surround themselves with those who share similar and familiar cultures, all living within their personal comfort zones. In contrast, outside forces (such as discrimination and lack of economic opportunities) tend to enclose people into ghettos, where they are forced to live in poverty. As one example of an enclave, Southern California and specifically L.A. is also home to the largest Persian population outside of Iran. Concentrated on the West Side, you will notice their footprints (representing diverse religions and cultures) especially along Westwood Blvd in Westwood. Just as other ethnic and cultural groups have adopted local nicknames, many Iranians have even used the terms Irangeles or Tehrangeles or Irangelinos to reaffirm their connections to L.A. Many of these neighborhoods are just a little too far away from our one-day driving, walking, and dining trail, but they and many others have at least earned a shout out and a separate visit.

Concentrations of the Largest and the Oldest
Fortunately, we do have time to visit neighborhoods that have been home to the largest single concentrations of Koreans, Central Americans, and Mexicans beyond their original homelands, the first official African town in the state, L.A.’s oldest Little Tokyo, Chinatown, Greek, and Jewish districts, and a wealth of intermixing cultures along the way. Join us on this more “compact” journey by vehicle and on foot that should take at least a full day, including your sampling of ethnic foods. Though our complete one-day tour is designed for quick stops, you could easily consume an entire day surveying and experiencing each of these neighborhoods and business districts. Look over our guide before you decide.

Discovering and Experiencing Change
The COVID-19 pandemic and social upheavals that cast economic chaos across California in 2020 did more than break hearts and kill dreams in these neighborhoods. They left new opportunities to do fresh research and make new discoveries about who and what has disappeared or survived in a brutal sink or swim economy and landscape that rewards resilience and punishes those lacking the financial cushions to weather such storms. Note the changes since we updated our tour (just before 2020). Can you sense a greater disparity between the haves and have nots, or has the collapse of long-established landmarks opened doors to new residents and entrepreneurs with fresh perspectives?

Let’s Get Started with Caution and our Curiosity
You are warned not to try the tour from about 3-7 pm on weekdays as you will be overcome by L.A.’s notorious traffic monster, though that inconvenience has become a possibility almost any time. You can try public transit, since many of the stops are along corridors, but this may become a complicated and frustrating experience in such a sprawling city with a transportation system mainly designed to get people to work or school or specific events. And finally, the directions here are subject to obvious changes caused by construction, redirection of traffic flows, and your own instincts about how to stay safe and avoid trouble and delays. Use your best instincts to find parking; some stops are more challenging than others, so read all parking signs carefully. Put on your walking shoes, your seat belt, and bring your curiosity and appetite to explore the cultures and cuisines of L.A. and our world as these landscapes speak to us. Simply click through the 25 pages in their proper order as we guide you through the tour.      

The post Cultural Tour of Los Angeles: Eat Your Way through L.A. first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.