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Photos: Michael 73
5 Scenes from a world class city: Alhambra, Spain. People there live amidst history, nature and have a sense of pride in their environment.
Top image is the corner of Sepulveda and Victory in Van Nuys, CA. Not yet a world class city.
Strange that an influx of Spanish speakers hasn’t degraded the environment one bit in Spain. Could it be that illegal immigration has a minimal effect on the stupidity of how we live, govern and build in our city?
Here in Van Nuys 
such as sprawl, traffic, violent crime, smog, billboards, litter, and the poor quality of our education and health care cannot
Your list doesn’t even get down to the nitty gritty. LA isn’t ugly mainly because of the things you mention. No, the town looks bad because of all the worn-out, tacky properties that abound throughout the southland, much less the specifics of “stucco” and “power lines” pointed out in the post from ahm.
Say what you will about the new suburbs, but even they aren’t as unsightly as older portions of the Valley are. Incidentally, that reality runs counter to ahm’s claim that youngness is the prime factor for the ugliness of, as one example, Van Nuys.
As for an area like Hancock Park, it represents the exception to the rule, in that some time ago only neighborhoods for the moneyed folk were nicely put together. But when it came to the working-class families of LA? Forget about it. In their case, good aesthetics were laughed at and stomped on, by people in both real estate and local government, and many average Joe Schmoes too.
So is it any surprise that we in LA have a long reputation for being very sheepish about many parts of this city?
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Ridiculous? Innaccurate? Neither here nor there? Stupid?
How and why?
Hancock Park is a beautiful residential area about 80 years old. Spain is older. What difference does that make? You can build something nice today, that still respects the environment and neighborhood.
The ugliness around us does invite comparison to nicer places around the world because we arguably have much more money than most countries on Earth, but live much more poorly in our public spaces.
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Ummm, Andrew? Van Nuys is more compact and denser than Granada Spain. Los Angeles City is denser than Granada. The LA Urban Area has the same density as the core city of Granada and is roughly three times that of the Granada Urban Area.
Which one is suffering from sprawl?
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thats a ridiculous post, your observation is inaccurate, and its neither here nor there. Alhambra is steeped in thousands of years of history, whereas the power lines and ugly stucco on vanowen are only, what 50 years old? come on. dont make stupid statements.
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Exactly. Sprawl=decay. Compact=healthy
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Andrew,
Van Nuys 12,000/sq mi
Granada 7,000/sq mi
Where’s the sprawl?
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Well we have the wonderul KTLA and Hal Fishman who will devote 45 minutes to the narraration of a car chase on a freeway, and 10 minutes to a story about Lindsay Lohan and……..
Well if it gets ratings…..
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“Could it be that illegal immigration has a minimal effect on the stupidity of how we live, govern and build in our city?”
Most immigrants have little or no voice when it comes to governing and decision making for urban planning. On the contrary, I would hold mainstream media more of a culprit in that they shape public opinion on a grand scale. Why not have the media inform people about critical issues at hand in our city? As it is, this is unthinkable because it would mean one less million $ in their pockets. In order for massive change to occur, the mainstream population would have to embrace the idea of reshaping our city.
By the way, did you read the feature article in the LA weekly? Interesting 🙂
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Rob-
And I also strongly oppose illegal immigration since I know immigrants who had to wait ten years to become citizens. I’m also descended from people who arrived at Ellis Is. and went through the proper channels to become naturalized.
Having men stand on the street waiting for work, or seeing the vast amounts of people in our emergency rooms, schools and apartment buildings, who are not here legally is nothing to be proud of.
I just am pointing out that other objectionable features of life in this city, many of them functional, such as sprawl, traffic, violent crime, smog, billboards, litter, and the poor quality of our education and health care cannot ENTIRELY be blamed on those who don’t vote or pay taxes.
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Andrew,
We half agree. Illegal immigration is a scapegoat for a great many of our problems. The thing is that as long as we have the exacerbated problem of illegal immigration we are limited in addressing the dysfunctional built environment issues you and I agree need to be fixed.
Its been more than 600 years since the Moors were displaced by the Spanish and the scars are still there. A similar tipping point here is likely to have similar outcomes.
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LA government is inept, but so are most other governments in the world, even in Europe. One of the reason cities in Europe look so much better than our own is that they were generally built many years ago, and have had very little of the population growth in the automobile age that our society has been largely built on.
If you look at these pictures of a modern Spanish suburb (http://www.planetizen.com/node/24725) or any of Paris’ banlieues, you can see that European city planners of the modern period are in many ways almost as inept and stupid as our own. Almost.
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I’ll let my eyes do the talking. Take a look around L.A. and then compare it to what they are doing in any other city around the world and you’ll find we come up short.
Comparisons might inflame, but only because we are so angry at the wrong causes of our misery in L.A.
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Actually the beautiful Moorish city of Alhambra (from the Arabic for “red” describing the construction materials) was totally ruined by the influx of Spanish speaking invaders thus proving the old saying; that those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it. The sad thing being you are, by fiat, forcing me to suffer the same fate.
Andrew, you know the comparison is both inaccurate and inflammatory. I am disappointed.
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