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.

One topic of concern that is familiar to Angelinos is the toll that the car culture has on the environment and quality of life in southern California. In a detailed and informative story map presentation, Amir Heibl, a GIS student at SMC, posed real-world geospatial questions while employing appropriate and innovative spatial analysis methods to address those issues.

We invite you to view his thought-provoking work entitled Gimme Shelter!

For those of you who are unfamiliar with GIS, it can be thought of broadly as the marriage of computer cartography and database management. More specifically, it is a computerized system for capturing, storing, managing, analyzing, and visualizing geospatial information. Crucially, the data in a GIS contains a locational element which allows for spatial analysis of anything plotted on the surface of the Earth.

GIS is frequently used to answer why things are where they are. In the case of many human endeavors, it also helps decide where things will go or be. Businesses increasingly use GIS for such tasks as locating their customer bases, maximizing the efficiency of delivery fleets, and finding the best location to put in a retail store. Governments use GIS for a host of applications. From knowing the location of a city’s fire hydrants, to managing critical habitat and open space, to tracking and understanding the movement of goods, services, and people though a city, state or nation, GIS helps administrators make informed and timely decisions with real-world implications for the people they serve.

But GIS, along with interactive mapping applications, can be used effectively as a tool for stimulating learning and inspiring critical thought. As we have now seen in Amir’s work above, GIS allows you to explore spatial data, ask questions about that data and display it in ways that provide insights and inspiration for others to follow up on or act upon.

If you are interested in learning GIS at Santa Monica College, please check out their offerings in Geography Program in the Earth Sciences Department.

** Rediscovering the Golden State: California Geography welcomes submissions of California-themed projects from students and faculty from any CA institution of higher education to be highlighted on our web site. This includes, but is not limited to, articles, papers, maps and presentations– GIS or otherwise).

Even if you are working/ studying outside CA, we’ll consider your contributions too provided the content has a clear and unambiguous connection to California geography.

For more information: info@rediscoveringthegoldenstate.com

The post Gimme Shelter! first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.

In our publication, we have examined how California’s wild economic roller coaster can quickly create individual and geographic winners and losers. Likewise, the economic and geographic distances between the wealthy and working classes have also become more noticeable as the middle class has shrunk during the last few decades. These trends have fueled astonishing transformations in our cultures and human landscapes. Particularly within the state’s largest coastal metropolitan areas, many neighborhoods have experienced a kind of gentrification on steroids.

Our book’s “There Goes the Neighborhood” special section focuses on these trends. You can see the results in places like San Francisco’s Fillmore and Hayes Valley, much of Berkeley and Oakland, and in and near downtown Santa Ana and Long Beach. Near downtown San Diego, gentrification has already done its work around the Gas Lamp and in North Park and Hillcrest and in other neighborhoods near Balboa Park. As similar powerful forces spread into Barrio Logan and City Heights, familiar backlashes of resistance are championed by locals who work to support small businesses and keep their cultures intact. Lively debates often turn contentious as residents struggle to define their multicultural communities and help determine who can afford to live where.

Silver Lake in Los Angeles is a poster child for debates and research about the good and bad of gentrification. Regardless of the sides you choose, it has already happened there and most researchers agree that it will intensify at least in the short term. This is a hilly neighborhood north of downtown L.A. and not far from Koreatown, Los Feliz, Dodger Stadium, and an adjacent Echo Park that is now following Silver Lake’s footsteps along the path to gentrification. Many observers agree that Silver Lake is already there, citing how almost all of the working-class families that populated this neighborhood just a couple of decades ago have been priced out. Who and what has replaced those mostly lower-skill, lower-wage people, many who were forced to move farther away from the service and construction jobs that hold this city together?

The new arrivals are often well-educated, higher-income professionals who can afford to buy expensive fixers and then spend hundreds of thousands of dollars designing them into their castles. They are also young professionals who are waiting to buy or are not interested in the responsibilities and obligations that accompany ownership, but willing to pay exorbitant rents to live cosmopolitan lifestyles that include shorter commutes. Yesterday’s YUPPIES have already evolved into a new generation of hipsters living as singles, couples, or small, young families with lots of disposable income. They want culture and are willing and able to pay for it. In Silver Lake, that translated into median home values of more than $1.1 million by 2018, 14% higher than the year before and about double the prices from just six years earlier. Median rent soared to over $3,900/month by 2018, also higher than the L.A. average.   

The trendy restaurants, juice and other bars, and specialty shops that decorate Sunset between downtown and Hollywood are clear signs: this is what gentrification looks like in California. And it may be coming to a neighborhood or business district near you.      

Extreme Gentrifucation

Homeless

Urban Forest

Remodeling

Diverse Views

Million Dollar Views?

Urban Cultures

The post Extreme Gentrification? first appeared on Rediscovering the Golden State.