avrillavigneamvs240p:

i feel like the only reason there’s a small part of downtown LA with skyscrapers is because people felt like a large city is just supposed to have them in some part

Those skyscrapers are the result of a slum clearance project on Bunker Hill, which was previously old Victorians, once upon a way-back time the classy suburbs of tiny little baby LA, that had become flophouses. Also it was an attempt to lure banks, and their taxes, back from independent cities like Glendale and away from the planned office development of Century City which turned into a giant traffic clusterfuck. (In part because of terrible midcentury modernist planning, in part because of its defeat - the freeway system was designed on the assumption of a freeway decked over Santa Monica Boulevard, but Beverly Hills got it cancelled because ugly and poors and the rest was built intact.)

At ground level a lot of these buildings are blank, multi-story high stone walls. In City of Quartz Mike Davis talks a lot about how this is all militarized fortress architecture in response to riots and poverty but also that hill is really steep such that one side of the building is three floors deeper (or taller, wevs) than the other, and there’s basically no demand for Class A office space in which half of the floor has no windows, and not much foot traffic with any money to spend. So you might as well just stick infrastructure (electrical, water, HVAC, elevators, anti-earthquake suspension systems) in there.

LA has basically been trying to make downtown happen again ever since the 1950s, and it’s always just around the corner, there are some hilarious stories in there. Like, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a classic Gehry design, had to have its curved metal surfaces roughed up after they focused and reflected light so well it was blinding drivers and raising the temperature by 20 degrees in nearby office buildings.

Also LA had this strong-council weak-mayor system where the council kind of lets each councilman run their district themselves with no coherent citywide vision, while departments like the DWP and LAPD got to run themselves. So when Governor Reagan shuttered the asylums and people initially tried to make a “neighborhood services” system to replace it, under NIMBYist pressure everyone refused things in their district, except downtown which didn’t really have any residential constituents of any influence, so all the shelters and rehabs and services ended up there, and in consequence parts of downtown became the homeless district, with tent cities on the sidewalks and addicts wandering zombie-eyed in the street. Downtown’s revival is right around the corner for real this time though promise you guys, lofts and artwalks, so the city’s been sparring with the ACLU and whatnot to get the authority to hassle them away.

It was a big part of the new city charter a decade or so to fix that system (also to preempt Valley secession, also to create Neighborhood Councils as a Potemkin government timesink for Concerned Citizens) but then Villaraigosa (a weak mayor indeed) pissed it away and the council’s clawed most of its power back. Villaraigosa’s election was basically the story of the Eastside Latino/labor branch of the Democratic machine affiliated with Gil Cedillo’s Latino Caucus triumphing over the Westside Jewish/professional branch to install its smile-in-a-suit figurehead.

LA is a terrible place. You’ll notice that anyone who makes money in LA immediately spends it on not living in LA, either through migration or seclusion, or else is an absolutely horrible person.