A City With So Much, Including Obstacles

I am one of a few native Californians having been born in Hollywood and raised in Pasadena. For most of my youth, I thought California was the center of the universe. There was nowhere else I wanted to live. But that was up until about ten years ago. For nearly a decade, I lived unhappily in the City of Angels and I just hoped for the best. I hoped for less traffic and better air quality. I hoped the streets would be in better repair and that the necessary maintenance wouldn’t worsen traffic. I hoped property values would cease to skyrocket, so that I could one day afford to buy. At one point I found myself hoping that L.A.’s population would decrease. I prayed people would stop moving in while others moved out. And yes, I soon realized how unrealistic my hopes and dreams were.

In some ways, I felt being a native made living in L.A. harder to accept. I remembered when the traffic wasn’t so bad and when there was actually a time of day that it ended. I remembered when there weren’t so many people competing for the resources that California has to offer. Yes, I remembered a kinder, gentler California. Given the information I had, I made a decision. I realized it was more realistic for me to leave than it was waiting for others to leave. At least I had control over whether or not I stayed.

With my mind set on leaving California, the first city I had on my radar was Vancouver, Canada. I flew there and remembered feeling a breath of fresh air that it wasn’t overcrowded or polluted. In fact, I felt Vancouver had yet to reach its capacity, whereas if L.A. had been a club, the fire marshals should have been called in years ago to shut it down. Although Vancouver didn’t work out, I did manage to escape from Los Angeles and to settle in the dirty south in Atlanta, Georgia.

Soon after I began learning what Atlanta had to offer, I also began analyzing exactly what had not worked for me in L.A. It took me a while to realize L.A. had become a veritable city of obstacles. I began to realize that I had constantly encountered barriers and roadblocks in the most unlikely of places. Even if I just wanted to meet a friend for drinks, I had to drive. It's the way L.A.'s infrastructure works. And it's not uncommon to encounter a traffic jam at nine pm on a Tuesday, or at eleven pm on a Sunday. And once I had braved traffic, there was still the issue of parking, and then waiting on line in the more popular spots.

Obstacles to the simple things are hard for me to accept. Something as simple as going jogging isn’t always an easy task. During my latest visit to L.A., I decided to jog the Runyon Canyon trail. It was early on a Saturday morning, between eight and eight-thirty am. To my dismay, I was greeted by roughly twelve other drivers hunting for parking. After five or so minutes of driving around, I decided to go where parking was not an obstacle. But this is the main problem with L.A., and likely with many other big cities. There is too much of everything. The upside of this phenomenon is there are always a zillion things to do. There is never a reason to be bored. The downside is the number of obstacles. Just like the population, it grows with every year.

In addition to these little nuisances, there are also the premiums that Los Angelenos pay. Property values are astronomical in comparison to many other cities. Taxes are more. Gas costs more and car insurance is more. And due to the financial crisis, California residents are being asked to pay for things that never used to cost money. Parking meters are popping up everywhere, even in areas that are not commercial hot spots. In my youth, parking was never a problem.

Hopefully, this hasn’t seemed like an L.A. bashing session. That was not my intention. In fact, I am only writing about L.A. because it’s what I know. The point of my story is that we must begin taking into consideration the factors that make us happy. Each year there are surveys about the quality of life in different cities across the world. Los Angeles doesn’t rank highly in these surveys and I suspect it is because it is not an easy city. But that’s the good news. There is a whole world out there for us to explore.

To see the 2009 top 50 cities quality of life rankings, please visit:

http://www.mercer.com/referencecontent.htm?idContent=1173105#Top_50_cities:_Quality_of_living