Housing Marxist
Hellmouth 2015 to 2025
Los Angeles is only livable on Sundays. You discover this as you skirt across town to look at barely habitable 1-bedroom apartments that run $1700 a month. Each listing insists you make 3x the amount in rent and you have credit above 750. Apparently ready for immediate occupancy but you have to chase the landlord down, often finding yourself going through so many bizarre internet portals, and sometimes concluding an owner probably doesn’t even exist. Which would make sense, because this 350 sqft. crawlspace overlooking the dumpster seems too good to be true.
After looking at an ‘artists loft’ on the third floor apartment on a hillside in El Sereno that’s being shown to you by ‘a friend of the owner’ you decide that an unobstructed view of the 10 freeway is not worth the 2k price tag. You humor the ‘housing liaison’ by saying you’d like to see an application, but you can’t stop thinking about the heater in particular, which is essentially a gas burner covered over by a dented aluminum tent.
You slink off back to the Inland Empire and go to the recycling center where you drop off the cans you’ve collected in the garage from the past year. Your shoddy calculations say with your branded fizzy drink addiction you must have something like 600 cans. You fill two bins and the man hands you back $22.60. For some reason this feels like an unfathomably inadequate figure and you sit there staring blankly at the cash in your hand. You think back to all the times you’ve seen an elderly woman roaming the streets of K-town with multiple shopping carts overflowing with cans and naively thought it must be worth her time. You pocket the cash and depart, embarrassed about how little you know.
The place you’re staying now isn’t really a home, more like a temporary arrangement with a rapidly approaching expiration date. When you pull into the driveway you look forward to your dog greeting you at the door. He gets anxious after 11 hours between the legs of your commute, but he’s in good health even if you don’t really know how you are yourself. Good thing too, because his rent is worth $75 extra dollars a month according to most of these apartment listings. Luckily he’s a smaller pup because that figure goes up in increments of 10 lbs. It doesn’t specify how big your car can be, but for $150 a month the fixed space is available.
You receive some rejection notices from a couple highly questionable options on the market. A 1BR in Boyle Heights with no hood over the oven, but at least it’s directly under a tiny window (makeshift hole in the wall?) for convenient ventilation. A cramped but viable spot located on the third floor of an apartment complex in Glassell Park with no elevator that is in your budget but unfortunately your last 6 months of bank statements don’t reflect that. Lastly the $1500 roach studio out in Sunland with a 65 pound dog barking on the balcony next door that you watch this stay on the market another six weeks while the leasing agent ghosts you entirely.
While you lay in bed that night you look at an article in the times where a special interest group made up entirely of landlords is lobbying city hall to refer to those in their ‘profession’ as ‘land providers.’ You think about setting yourself on fire as you stare at the ceiling with this disturbed suspicion that you’re attached to predetermined tracks like a car at the wash. You can’t seem to break the invisible hand dictating your every operation. Caught in a revolving effort of needing to meet someone, eat some place, live somewhere.
Los Angeles is only livable when you’ve accepted that it’s killing you. The scent of fresh exhaust pipe wafts through the open window, reminding you of the ‘easy access to the 110’ so highly touted in the listing.
A landlord points to the ‘vaulted ceilings’ of the ‘three’ bedroom you felt was overpriced but reserved judgement for the in-person walkthrough. Standing in the unit you feel your down-played expectations weren’t down-played enough.
‘What do you do?’ she asks.
‘I’m a baker.’ You’ll tell her, strategizing an awkward exit.
‘Wow, that’s so great, good for you.’
The patronizing sing-song tone stings more than you could anticipate.
Good for you? Suddenly you’re overcome with the deep urge to mug her, take all her money, drive off in her Mercedes, if she’s such a fuckin fan of your work. Good for you?
You’re already scrolling a new apartment listing by the time you’re unlocking your car. This one is in your old neighborhood, and nostalgia plagues you as you whip by the park you’d walk to every day during your covid year. You’d sit on the bleachers overlooking the baseball field and smoke weed, the kind of thing you wouldn’t do as a teenager, paranoid that your future was something to preserve- something worth protecting.
Los Angeles is probably the most livable in the middle of a full blown disaster.
A cache of perfectly made pasta makes up a wall in the walk in. Sit down joints and Michelin starred kitchens donate meals they’d usually charge $65 dollars for in the wake of the carnage. A vast reservoir of restaurant produce floods over the city as if it may solve the ongoing crisis. Suddenly, without warning, you can just have it.
Hordes of product flood in on the beds of pickup trucks and back of delivery vans. Men carrying boxes of pizza keep flowing through the door, stacking them 5 feet high on your prep table. Pallets of alternative milk appear that the local despised ‘health food’ store may just be trying to clear out of their stock and reams of organic eggs overtake the reach in even though the price they average these days is something like $13/dozen.
Your brain will not be able to fully digest the dissonance you experience eating stewed brisket over farmers market broccolini while your bags wait packed by the front door in case the calamity brewing a few miles away bubbles over and finds its way to your street. You can tell a lot of people on this block aren’t even risking the chance. The parking thins out and the usual bursts of weird dance music your neighbor listens to around 2AM magically disappears. And it may dawn on you that Los Angeles may only be livable when you can get the fuck of dodge whenever you want as you watch people hop into their car and scram to Temecula for the weekend.
When you first move to this city you will collect reject friends from every neighborhood imaginable. You’ll find yourself meeting someone at the Culver City ‘arts’ district in some strange ice cream shop that does that thing where they scrape their wares off a frozen metal plank. You’ll drive around Pico-Union for 40 minutes trying to find a place to park for the sleazebag warehouse show where dudes that give you the creeps crawl out of every doorway, tipsy off modelo, yacking about whatever hot streak they’re on lately. At a hillside spot in City Terrace hosting a hipster halloween party you will burn the clutch on your car as you try to back up into the driveway, gassing the slutty vampires sucking down parliments with that torched rubber smell that clings to everything.
You will learn unimaginable things about people when you step into their homes and hear the stories about the shit they have hanging on the walls. Your conception of their childhood becomes a little more informed as they carefully explain how they came into this living situation while leaving out choice data points about their parent’s income. Their schedule and wardrobe and attitude begin to make sense. You’re rarely surprised by the time you walk in to see their collection of mid-century modern regalia.
You’ve never lived in a ghetto but you certainly know what one looks like. You’ve seen bad neighborhoods all over the country. Richmond, Watts, St. Louis, Wilmington. You’ve experienced the sensation of walking down a block in a neighborhood deciding in in real time that you maybe shouldn’t be there. You can recognize the general luck (and clear privilege) you’ve had, managing to keep a series of stable roofs over your head even though one day you’ll be reading a book based in Los Angeles in the early 90’s where the protagonist, staying in Mount Washington, narrates looking out on the hillside below taking in the ‘Spanish slums’ that populate the valley you used to live in. Ironically this was easily your favorite neighborhood you’ve ever lived in during your time in Southern California. You think back to that little concrete patch overgrown with weeds that broke through the bed of mulch. You miss the possums living under the shed out back and the garage with the bent door that hung off the hinges and let dust blow inside every fire season.
You will move to LA with this absolutely moronic notion that you’ll be remotely the same person for any substantial period into the future. You will find soon enough that the people like this, who appear to glide seamlessly from one career marker to another, are the same people you can’t stomach trying to make conversation with every day. Yet you continually find them in your orbit, or maybe you’re in theirs. You’ll spend galactic cycles circling around each other, when, suddenly, after eons, they’ll appear like a ghost outside of establishments you never fathomed sharing with them. Hearing your name and attempting to discern where and when you know this face from.
You will spend years taking it all in. Every freeway exit and dead end cul-de-sac. You will, idiotically, assume you and the people camping out under bridges and passed out on sidewalks are somehow different. They’ve somehow lost their way in a more unique and self-destructive way than the *circumstantial* way you’ve lost yours. Years roll along with this acceptance of their less-than work-ethic or dubious proclivities because there’s a fine line of division in your brain you hold when you simply cannot accept that you may share overlapping features with the destitute eyes staring through you. There is no way you and this naked person laying in the gutter, high off some opiate concoction are in the same class of character as your full-time employed ass. Because if you were, then the looming threat of similar existence draws closer with each passing apartment rejection. The road to perdition is simply paved with shit luck and worse credit scores. The death knell creeps towards you with every flip of the calendar page.