My cousins live on Temple Hills Drive in Laguna Beach, California. I live in Long Beach, so when I went home for the weekend last weekend, I drove from my house to theirs, about a 45-minute drive. To get there from Long Beach, you take the 405 South, the 73 South, and then the 133 South. You can also take Pacific Coast Highway all the way, which is a much more scenic drive. Below is a picture of their home:
When I visited their home on this particular occasion, I decided to drive the freeway route. I noticed that the city is really off course from other parts of Orange County, and that you have to take the 133 Freeway for a really long time. Later, when I talked to my grandma who lives with them, she explained to me that my cousins have to take the 133 to get to any other cities in Orange County. This can be really inconvenient considering they go to a school in San Juan Capistrano, go to a church in Newport Beach, and play for sports teams in cities like Irvine and Mission Viejo. The google map route that I used is shown below.
The neighborhood in Laguna Beach that they live in is absolutely beautiful, and has great views of the sunset and the ocean. The street you take to get to their home is called Thalia Street, and it is literally a giant hill in which you really have to push the gas pedal to drive up. A majority of the homes in this neighborhood have large bushes in front of them for privacy purposes. All of the houses are pretty far apart from each other, and most of the blocks are very hilly and have narrow, windy roads. Once I witnessed this, I thought of the lecture series Wilford taught regarding geographies of difference. Although this neighborhood is not gated, the streets are all uphill and the houses are blocked by bushes, making it almost impossible for people to walk there. The city of Laguna Beach is a site of producing and maintaining difference and inequality. This neighborhood is the epitomy of limiting physical access through remote/difficult access. It also serves to limit social access- I know when I visit I sometimes feel like I don't belong when I park my green 1992 Jeep in front of their $3 million home. The cars are all extremely nice in the neighborhood, and every home inside is in the millions. Laguna Beach does not have a bad part in the entire city, but I think the purpose of this limited access is to create social difference from other cities. Visitors to this city are well aware that they are visiting, and could never afford to own a home here. Here is a picture of the view of their home from the street. As you can see, their home has complete privacy from the street.
Another glamorous place to live, Laguna Beach reminded me a lot of the neighborhood behind UCLA, Bel Air. Without taking this class, I would only assume that these neighborhoods have limited access because of the terrain that they were built on and not because of the way the city planners constructed them.
My cousins are a great example of the types of people that live in these communities. They all attend prestigious private schools, drive BMWs and Mercedes cars, and shop in malls like South Coast Plaza and Fashion Island. They are a republican family with a dad that's an attorney, a stay-at-home mom, have four kids, and two dogs. While reading the Post-Suburban California reading, though, I learned that Orange County is also the site of cultural and visual diversity. It is considered a "white-bread suburban tract"-in the 2010 census, the demographics of the city were 93% white. But, Laguna Beach is also the center of a large gay community and has had gay mayors and gay city council members. One of the less diverse cities of Orange County, it is definitely a great example of a post-suburban community with demonstrated geographies of difference.
Hi Maddy!
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading about your trip to see your cousins in Laguna Beach. I visited and blogged about Irvine a few weeks ago and I wanted to see if we have similar observations about these two places, which are fairly close to each other.
I think what you said about the 133 freeway is so interesting. I used to live in Temecula and my brother goes to UC Irvine and I haven't really noticed or heard about the 133 freeway, so to me, it already seems like such an exclusive freeway.
I also liked how you compared this neighborhood to Bel Air and how you described the hill as only accessible to someone with a car. When I read about things like these, it makes me wonder if urban Planners or the people who build these roads make conscious decisions to exclude certain types of people.
While reading your entry, I finally realized the meaning of Robert Parks' quote in a more social way. When he talked about cities being different worlds that do not interpenetrate, I used to think he was talking about the physical aspects of a city -- like how we can have Century City, which is a pretty urban place, only 10 minutes away from the beach. Now i realize though that this quote pertains to social interactions more than anything else. I'm sure that not only wealthy, white families live in Laguna Beach, but because of things like hilly roads and long freeways, if you don't fit into this world, then you don't really get a chance to interact with it.
i know, too, that there is a large immigrant population in Orange County, and it's so interesting to me that this neighborhood was able to remain a "white-bred suburban tract" throughout these years.
I'm glad you got to see your family and i loved all your observations. :)
Madison:
ReplyDeleteI really enjoyed reading your post about Laguna Beach. Like you, I also consider Orange County to be a part of the greater metropolitan Los Angeles area. Growing up in Hawaii, I would come to visit my dad’s side of the family in Los Angeles. However, during these trips we would also make visits to Disneyland and Orange County. Therefore, I have always associated Orange County as a part of the Los Angeles area. The entire time that I was reading your post, I found myself curious about the neighborhood wrote about. You did a great job describing what you saw and how you noticed the similar expensive houses and luxury cars. In order to get a bigger picture of the neighborhood I decided to use Simply Map to see if I could glean anything more. In order to narrow down my searches to the area that your cousins live in, I looked up the street you had mentioned and found a zip code associated to that area.
The first variable that I chose was to see how much of the census tracts are composed of a white population. This relates to what we have been talking about in class this past week when we were talking about the different axes of difference, and race is one of theses axes. What I found was that almost all of the census tracts fell into the highest category of 88.83% to 100% of the residents being white.
The second variable that I used was Average Household Income in 2010 by census tracts. I found that all of the census tracts in area fall into the highest category of $71,928.01-$320,032.00. This means that these census tracts have high average household incomes, which means this area is very wealthy, like you said.
In order to see another dimension of this wealth, I decided to look up a variable related to travel. Since many wealthy families have the means to travel outside of the country, I looked up the percentage of households that had traveled to a foreign country in the last three years. A few census tracts fell into the highest category of 71.55% to 100% of households traveling abroad within the last three years and then a few also fell into the lowest category of 0% to 46.77% of households traveling abroad within the last three years. There were also some census tracts that fell into categories in between those two. However, I did notice that the census tracts that fell into the same categories were also near each other. There seems to be a few communities that travel a lot more than others and then it trickles down to the census tracts that have households that do not travel abroad at all. I was intrigued by how much variation there was because I was expecting for all of the households to fall into the highest category because of the expensive houses and luxury cars.
While you already mentioned the Spencer, Olin, and Poster reading in your post, another part of the article that I thought went well with your post was when the authors were talking about how “consumer culture has become increasingly cosmopolitan” (17). This especially relates to all of the Mercedes and BMWs in the area. According to the article, this trend began after the 1960s (Olin 17). The “economic elite”, which are the types of people that live in this area of Laguna Beach, are the ones that choose the “taste trends” that the others in the area will follow (Olin 17). This “economic elite” tends to have “cosmopolitan tastes” in food, cars, and clothing (Olin 17). It seems as though this area around your cousins’ house reflects and supports what Spencer, Olin, and Poster are saying since you do see foreign luxury cars everywhere.
Great Work, Madison!