In Defense of Knowing One Neighborhood Well

The great lie about Los Angeles is that you have to conquer it — that being an Angeleno means having a take on all four hundred neighborhoods, a favorite taco in each one, an opinion about the fastest route between any two points. I'd like to propose the opposite: the truest way to live in this city is to know one small piece of it completely.

Pick your radius. Mine is about a mile. Within it I know which sidewalks buckle over which tree roots, which houses go absurd for Halloween, where the good shade is at every hour of the day. This is not small-mindedness. It's depth over breadth, and depth is the thing this city's sheer size is always trying to talk you out of.

A city of ten million is not comprehensible. A mile of it is. And here's the secret: every insight worth having about the whole city is available at the scale of the mile. Housing, traffic, who's moving in, who's being pushed out, what's being built and torn down and mourned — all of it is legible from your own block if you're actually looking.

So this is a standing invitation: shrink your radius. Walk it. Learn it. The city will still be there when you look up, and you'll finally have earned an opinion about it.