There are more apartments for sale (and thus more open houses) in my building than there have been at any time in twenty years. The pricing is all over the place even for similar apartments.
The real estate agents seem a little overworked and stressed but I honestly do not know if that is because they are busy selling apartments or just from having to buff & fluff and show so many apartments and deal with so many anxious potential buyers and sellers.
In summary: I’ll go out on a limb and predict that the numbers will eventually show that inventory is still increasing. I do not think it is a good time to buy but there is certainly a greater choice than there has been. There also seem to be a lot of people looking around and apparently they are waiting for prices to come down.
Funny but pathetic: All the homes on my street, built in the 50s, have hardwood floors. They last forever, and even if you pull up the carpet you can sand and buff them back to life.
My neighbor remodeled her home, removed all the old floors and put in all bamboo. Why? Because "I now have a green home!"
She doesn’t understand that it’s much more "green" to reuse.
I would probably say to them what most people would say: hey hey HEY, come now! When I have seen kids do that stuff I have either made that response or said "good job loser" in a loud sarcastic tone. When they get in my face (which has occurred), I get back into theirs and act choloish telling them they are like a pathetic stereotype monkey and ruining their own community. Then I invite them to paint with me and note their name written on the credits wont ever be buffed, and that is immortal. Some hardcore fool cholos wave me off and say they or their homies are gonna tag it up anyways, and I try to call them out in the least confrontational way, making them look stupid is key to these self conscious fucks.
And response wise, a few negative responding older losers make a shit face and flip me off and carry on their ways (the more boneheaded types). Some try to get crazy with me and I set them straight (never been attacked once), and I talk "street" (sigh…) to them. At that point either they bitch out and leave or actually come and help me paint. The latter is the most frequent result, thankfully. Sometimes the punks I confont come back and tag my mural later, which I then fix immediately, and then put a derogatory "fix" to their other nearby tags or outright buff them all. These one assholes from a crew called "TV" became "transvestites" and "toy vaginas" whenever I saw their tags for several months.
Overall, the goal is to make them feel stupid for their childish actions. Then it is to sway them into feeling that what we are doing is a much more productive way of "getting up", or better yet, getting attention. I have more of my "work" running in LA than any tagger could dream of, all legally.
And I agree with you that is is pathetic and appalling how much older many of these guys are getting.
BTW, another good way to discourage the tagger is to yell "the cops are on their way" from behind a wall or somewhere they cant see you. But motion sensor lights are the best weapon, or having elacamp paint a nice piece of art that obscures any tagging with colorful compositions.
What a freaken waste of money to buff the river walls or have police go down there looking for taggers. The river is a graffiti mecca first of all, and is where people go to paint ornate graffiti pieces, and has been for over 3 decades. also, the probelm with painting over the river’s graffiti is the fact that this act will not just make the spraycans disapear from the hands of taggers, it merely ensures that they will spend their time vandalizing neighbrohoods and private property with much less aesthetically pleasing tags rather than the colorful complicated pieces many of these kids go down there to do. Before the early 90s when everyone began hating taggers rather than analyzing the situation and looking for a plausible solution, many policy makers recognized graffiti as a destructive act of social release for dysfunctional delinquent youth. they realized without places where these kids can go, practice making their aerosol work more complicated and effort driven, the crappy much more abundant purely bandalization taggin would proliferate, which is exactly what happened.
As an even more fucked up byproduct the climate of the graffiti culture changed from one of creativity and peer driven esteem and nonviolent battling, to violent gang banging-lite with much more outright tagging everywhere and much less concetrated areas of pieces and actual artwork. Liek I said before, i grew up in this era and was able to transcend the idiocy and vandalism into a productive art career that includes graffiti abatement programs (www.elacamp.org) and so did many other from my era of graffiti "yard culture". When the cops and politicos decided in favor of all carrot no stick policies is when graffiti became almost all tagging and little art work, as well as shooting, tagbanging and more destructive behavior rather than breakdancing and piece battling. As a kid who experienced this all and saw how it contributed to further social degredation in barrio communities I can attest to how horrible it became and how much worse being a latino teen in east LA turned. I was part of the last batch of Latino artist who came from graff backgrounds in the early to mid 90s, nowadays 99% of these kids cant paint a straight line but have tags running all over the city.
Graffiti was never a great thing (unless you were a poor brown kid or someone with somne serious esteem issues) and it has always degraded the aesthetic environment it exists in. But it also had a much stronger positive aspect that is almost nonexistant today. The LA river is one of the few places where the more positive art-related portion of graffiti still thrives, and these ignorant assholes want to squash it as well without thinking of the ramifications. Even that armenian clown buket for example (whose crew TKO is the posterchild of the "I tag to stay out of gangs, yet turn on a bunch of middle class whiteboys into acting like gangsters" scene that is big nowadays) is a good example of how concentrations of graffiti where it can be executed with time, patience and diligence is much more positive. His stuff in the river looks much more aethetically pleasing int he river, and his other crap all over town is quick simple nonartistic tags or bubble letters with little merit beyond vandalism and egotistical external self promotion. back in my day doing shit like that got you a chin chekc for burning it for everyone else, now it’s the styl eof the times.
But on the plus side, this free growing strain could probably be considered organic, which may make it attractive to the eco-conscious plastic surgery buff.
CurbedWire: Fighting in Beachwood Canyon, Sawtelle Blvd Online, Rowan Lofts
Again, my words are taken out of context, although some of the above comments in dissent of my own opinions are well taken. I haven’t resorted to personal attacks in expressing my opinion. I very much disagree with Fran and her tactics. She’s inconsistent and her protests lack integrity. Also, I never said or even implied that Durand Drive is somehow special or removed from greater Hollywoodland. All you need to do is drive the length of it to see that. Just like every other street in the development there is good, bad and downright ugly, including the sorry state of the pavement.
I care very much about the community as a whole. Otherwise why would I bother with these posts (ok don’t answer that one)? I’ve lived in it since 1998. I could have moved three times since then. I’m also an amateur Hollywoodland history buff. People forget that the community was only half developed when the original planners gave up. It was intended to support homes of various sizes up to and including an enormous mansion for Mack Sennett above the sign. It was never supposed to resemble low income housing.
This new project, again, my opinion, does not violate the spirit of the original Hollywoodland. You may argue about the esthetics of the design but that is highly subjective and relative. Is it something that I personally would build? No. Do I prefer it to a lot of what I see gets built up here without a peep of dissent from those who oppose this project? Well, yes.
I agree that the choice between one big house and four small is somewhat false in that no one is forced to build small houses out of hardship. But what of that? I’d still rather have one large house than four small ones. I bet there isn’t a person who has commented on this blog who hasn’t nearly had a heart attack due to a run in with an oncoming car in the hills.
It’s very utopian to hope that people who own multiple lots (I own two) will keep them undeveloped in the spirit of preserving the flavor of the community. But there is a real cost to these lots. Taxes, brush clearing, watering are just three. Never mind the fact that land prices have skyrocketed in the past ten years. It’s silly, never mind a violation of economic law, to expect someone to carry that burden without expectation of a return on investment.
Someone brought up the Oaks. I love that neighborhood. The houses are HUGE. The landscape is no different from ours. I get that they’d like to put the kibbosh on future large homes. It seems like once anyone gets "theirs" they’d like to keep everyone else from getting the same. Does that make sense? Is it fair?
This homeowner has lived in this house and has been working on it since before I moved into the neighborhood. It’s not a spec house. I believe he wants to live in it. But so what if he doesn’t? He followed every rule and is now paying the price for it. You know what happens to the people who don’t follow the rules? Drive down Durand and look at all the ugly, street level, fences in direct violation of the specific plan and you’ll get your answer. Nothing. Their projects get built. And not a squeak from Fran’s cabal.
What gets me is that I can’t figure out what motivates them. It definitely isn’t logic. All I can gather is that they have something against the concept of "bigness." What’s wrong with "big" per se? As opposed to -
Whimsically ugly paint jobs, lawn ornaments and sculptures.
Cheap, view obstructing, fences at the street level.
Lot leak.
People who use their garages for storage and park on the street making it treacherous to navigate roads (never mind ugly).
People who can’t seem to bring their trash cans in off the street.
The horrible condition of our pavement.
Ugly spec houses carved out of hillside supported by caissons.
People with yards that look like permanent job sites or junkyards.
Homes with overgrown, underwatered, or unlandscaped yards.
As for me, I’d rather have this project than any of the above.
CurbedWire: Downtown's Brewery Art Walk, Graffiti Battle in Highland Park
Who in Sup. Molina’s camp actually thinks anyone with an inkling of knowledge of this stretch of the Arroyo Seco believes that the graffiti mural event has attracted more graffiti than was already there? The riverbed was a freaken collection of graffiti to begin with, and when DPW would clean it the walls would always get retagged within 2-4 days (I know this because i pass by weekly). The graffiti murals were a lot nicer than the peeling patchwork of beige shitpaint the county uses to buff walls or the much less artistically inclined tags and gang graffiti that was on those walls 24/7.
And speaking of the Supervisor being mad at graffiti proliferation in river channels, has she checked the decades old stuff along numerous riverbeds within her district, including the graffiti mecca LA river? Our concrete channels became graffiti galleries because of their neglect and the eradication of places/"yards" where it was once allowed to exist before the tagbanging era. I sincerely hope the Sup. and her staff wasnt naive/dumb enough to think this event would eradicate graffiti’s presence in the river (which is totally irrational and the premise they are acting on now, which in my eyes is a self declaration of stupidity or an excuse), or that someone from FOLAR didnt make overambitious promises about what this event would do.
The goal of events like this is most importantly to beautify a neglected and blighted area, which is exactly what the "meeting of styles" did. Even if you are one of those dogmatic idealogues who cannot distinguish between a tag, clover 13 gang placa and a $3k piece by Mear or one of the MSK whiteboys selling in a snooty art gallery; the finished product added a lot more color and artistic expression than the random tags that compiled there before. And the mural’s presence did not invite more graffiti, the arroyo’s neglect and history as a graffiti collection did, if you want to mess with taggers all you need to do is hang out at the Home Depot or McD’s parking lots at 3 am on a thursday or saturday because they are there like clockwork with or without the murals around (and have done so for years if not decades before "meeting of styles"). So the event did do its job, as the riverbed is (or was for a minute) a bit nicer to look at than whatever neighborhood/crew decided to hang out there and get high and tag that week.
The graffiti abatement comes in several forms, direct and indirect. The direct abatement is in the fact that several hundred taggers spent their paint and time planning, sketching out and painting the murals rather than vandalizing other property. The taggers (whether they know it or not) also required some self discipline to put more effort into making a nice piece in one location rather than a compilation of tags and bombs all over the city, and they recieved peer prestige and positive outside feedback for using their deviant hobby in a positive manner which may possibly coerce them (thru their low self esteem) into more positive actions. The indirect abatement comes in promoting graffiti (a usually negative thing that holds a lot of social prestige among delinquent youth) as a positive outlet, and providing kids a place to paint and hone their skills into better artwork and a possible future in the art/design field.