Why Has L.A. Lost Its Sense of Community?

Something’s going on in Los Angeles’ neighborhoods. And a lot of people don’t like it.

“People don’t know their neighbors,” says Jay Rubin, 29, a real estate agent from Van Nuys. “They never knock on their neighbor’s door. They never know anyone on the next block. . . . You usually only see your neighbors when there’s an earthquake.”

Marc Goldfarb, 25, a textiles investor from West Los Angeles, agrees: “I wave to my neighbors when I’m out jogging, but it’s very hard for them to wave back. They think they are going to be manipulated. If you say ‘Hello,’ they think you want something.”

Mike Lande, 46, a Van Nuys resident and supervisor of a sheltered workshop, says: “When I was growing up, I had been in every single house on both sides of the street. In my street now, I’ve been in three homes other than my own, and I’ve been here 12 years. My neighbors haven’t shown me any overtures of friendship and cooperation, and I (have) done the same.”

The problem, as many people see it, is that Los Angeles neighborhoods no longer fill a function that neighborhoods once did--to provide residents with security, support, friendship and a sense of belonging to something larger than themselves.

“We form neighborhood communities in large part because they satisfy some yearning in our souls,” says sociologist Charles Murray, a research fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research.

But many Los Angeles residents say they consider their neighborhood simply a place to sleep, shower and change clothes.

A Change for Many

This is a change for many people, especially those who have lived in other parts of the country and the world.

Dominick Lucente, a 28-year-old West Hollywood actor, recalls that the working-class Italian section of South Philadelphia where he grew up was warm and vital.

“People were real,” he said, noting that on Christmas, all the neighbors on the block visited each other. In the summer, police used to block off streets and there were block parties. “You had a real sense of belonging,” Lucente said.

Los Angeles residents’ sense of community has been reduced by many things, including their homes, cars, schools, laws and the size of their city, experts say.

The high cost of housing, for example, has driven neighborhoods apart. In just nine years, the California Assn. of Realtors reports, the median price of a house in Los Angeles increased more than 100%, from $94,380 in 1979 to $191,474 today.

And while in the 1950s and ‘60s it was financially possible for a husband to hold an outside job and for his wife to stay at home, “nowadays, it takes two people to put a roof over your heads,” notes Michael Hawkins, 37, a San Fernando Valley refugee who manages a restaurant in Palm Springs.

This has meant more women than ever have been forced into the labor force, leading to a virtual “evacuation of single-family, residential neighborhoods during the day,” says Maurice Van Arsdol, USC’s Population Research Lab director.

Empty streets in residential neighborhoods have become so common that foreign visitors often wonder where the people are. Even native Californians traveling in unfamiliar areas get frustrated by how hard it can sometimes be to find a pedestrian to ask directions of.

Housing’s high cost also drives the generations apart. With prices rising so fast (up 22.7% the last year), many new families say they can’t afford to live near their parents or in areas where they grew up. And, for many people a house isn’t so much a home as a hard-eyed business investment, “one of the few tax shelters most people can afford,” says Glendale real estate agent Les Feeny.

Size, Transit Hurt

The overwhelming size of Los Angeles (464 square miles) also works against its residents developing deep feelings of community, with a lack of public transit making the problem worse. At least in a bus or train, says UCLA urban planner J. Eugene Grigsby, riders get a sense of the neighborhoods they pass through. But from freeways, the neighborhoods are a gray, peripheral haze. “You can’t see any community,” he says.

That Los Angeles came of age in the automobile era is a blessing and a curse. Although cars have given Los Angeles residents unprecedented freedom, convenience and mobility, that all came at a terrific cost. What gives cities their vitality, urban planners insist, is lots of people out on the streets and sidewalks, walking, talking, reading and observing the human spectacle.

It happens in some areas of the city, particularly in ethnic communities. But many Los Angeles residents don’t live like that. Each morning they back out of the garage, close the door by remote control and never have direct contact with another person until they arrive in their office’s subbasement garage. The Southern California Assn. of Governments reports that of the 25 million trips county residents make daily, 96.4% are in private cars; in 72% of the trips, the driver is alone. Instead of being “face-to-face, rubbing elbows with people, in an automobile you’re totally isolated,” Grigsby says.

Some planners say city zoning laws also foster and protect single-family residential neighborhoods so much they exclude other possible uses that would increase a sense of community.

European Mix Appeals

Many travelers, for example, find European cites charming and more livable because they conveniently and agreeably mix commercial and residential uses; there are small shops and street cafes in residential neighborhoods. But the zoning in Los Angeles, for example, not only discourages such uses in residential areas, it also makes it difficult to provide child care or medical care in neighborhoods, says Martin Wachs, head of UCLA’s Urban Planning Program.

Should anyone have the temerity to suggest such uses, “people show up in large numbers and say they don’t want the traffic, they don’t want the noise and they don’t want the intrusion,” he says.

Though Los Angeles is a cosmopolitan city, its very diversity can cause problems when it comes to building a sense of community.

“The root word of community is common , and a lot of people don’t have anything in common,” says Rubin, the real estate agent. “On a typical block you have someone from Asia, (someone from) Mexico, a Jew, a Catholic. There’s nothing to bind them.”

Indeed, more than 59% of Los Angeles residents weren’t born in California; in some public high schools, 25 to 35 languages are spoken.

Random Groups Don’t Work

“Communities don’t exist when you throw a whole bunch of people together at random,” says sociologist Murray, who has just published a book, “In Pursuit,” dealing in part with the issue of community.

“The whole point of community,” he says, “is that it is people who know each other and people who have affiliated with each other for a particular reason. They coalesce around common views and common values.”

Some urban planners finesse the question of the seeming decline in the sense of community. They say that communities now need not be limited simply to a neighborhood. It’s not geography that matters. What matters is professional or personal interests.

Los Angeles now has many “communities of propinquity,” widespread, overlapping groups of professional people with shared values or interests, says Wachs, the UCLA planning expert. These are communities of writers, architects, accountants or lawyers.

But to Murray, this is a semantic sleight of hand.

Not Satisfying Centers

“Most people’s lives are defined by the physical neighborhood in which they live,” he says. “And for most people, these are not satisfying centers of life.

“Everyone who grew up in a small town or rural area knows what I am talking about,” he says. Community, he notes, “is all the ways that people interact as neighbors and friends and helpers. And that has pretty much disappeared from Los Angeles.”

Murray says communities have declined because they have lost their functions. He cites what has happened with public schools as an example. Participating in the school system, he says, offered neighbors chances to get involved in their community, meet other parents and help achieve something of vital importance for their children--a good education.

But he argues that parents lost interest in the schools over the last 25 years as they lost control over them to other institutions, such as the courts, educational bureaucracies and teachers unions.

Although the consolidation of central school administrations seemed to be a good idea to make the educational system more efficient, in the process, “we took functions away from neighborhoods,” he says. “We took glue from the neighborhoods. We took energy away from the neighborhoods.

“Much of what we observe as rootlessness, emptiness and plain unhappiness in contemporary life may ultimately be traced to the many ways . . . in which social policy has excised the option of taking responsibility” for all kinds of everyday matters, especially those in neighborhoods, he adds.

In a nation settled by the restless, Los Angeles is a far, final and unhappy frontier for many people.

A study published in November by Robert Levine, a psychologist at Cal State Fresno, ranked 286 American cities by their suicide, divorce, crime and alcoholism rates. Los Angeles had some of the worst rates in nearly every category, which shouldn’t be surprising, Levine says: “People who move a lot tend to have a lot of problems.” If for no other reason, having left friends and family behind, “they don’t have the social support they once had.”

And it’s a struggle to establish any sense of community, many Los Angeles residents say.

Search for Privacy

Rubin, the real estate agent, blames this in part on Los Angeles residents’ relentless search for privacy (56% of the city residents won’t even have their phone numbers listed). This indifference to community can, at times, be striking.

Recently when Rubin flew to Uruguay to visit a high school friend, the friend’s entire family--uncles, cousins, and even friends of his buddy’s brother--showed up to greet him at the airport. But when he returned to LAX, not a single person met him. He took a bus to Van Nuys and called his parents to pick him up. “And they complained about having to come and get me,” he says.

Karen Rubin, a 37-year-old Hollywood businesswoman (no relation to Jay Rubin), says it’s hard to build a sense of community in Los Angeles because she finds she can’t even count on people here to make firm appointments. They’re all tentative unless re-confirmed--up to the last minute.

“I don’t know how many times I’ve made plans to do something,” she says. “I wrote it down in my appointment book. I’m dressed and ready to go. And then an hour before, I get a phone call: ‘Are we still on? Gee, I’ve got something to do. Can we do it another time?’ ”

Not Neighborly

Mary Contreras, a 33-year-old high school English teacher who recently moved from Redondo Beach to Carlsbad, misses the neighborly feeling that allowed her to just drop in on friends. “Nowadays I do it and I feel as if I’ve been incredibly rude. It’s not seen as a friendly gesture.”

After six months of living in a new neighborhood without really meeting anyone, Contreras and her husband decided to invite over all the neighbors for a friendly get-together.

“I sent out 20 invitations for coffee and desert,” she says. “I hand-delivered most of them.” She baked cakes, brewed coffee and opened a bottle of wine. “And not a single person showed up.”