Still On The Move

This seems to be the summer for not being at home.

Susan and I spent a long weekend in Philadelphia in late April. In May it was our yearly week in New York, helping to lead a tour group thru the University of Wisconsin Extension on a Broadway Theatre and New York City field trip. Off to Europe in early June for a stretch (what, did you miss the 5,762 blog posts from that trip?). I spent the time between each of these above trips working in some place not my home, and now, with 36 hours at home after Europe, I was in Kentucky for several days and am now out in California for the weekend. (This isn't a complaint; it's one of the more enjoyable aspects of my job.)

My work life gives me constant opportunity to assess and compare how people live across the country. Flitting from place to place and having the daylight hours free to wander around and look at stuff leads inevitably to my mentally pitting one place against another.

I love California. They have In-n-Out Burger; how could you not love that? (That needs to have its own post, I think.) And I also adore New York, a fact of which (in the most tiresome fashion) I've not been secretive. Seeing the two back-to-back, I inevitably wonder what I like about them and how I rate those different assets. I wrote to a friend that after a week in New York, it was strange to come home to Appleton and walk the dogs around the city. Every street on Monday morning except the downtown's main drag was like a scene from the Andromeda Strain: well-manicured and clean and lived-in, but utterly empty. After the streets of several big cities, which are crowded virtually all the time, it's a bit unnerving to see only single people on the street, and then often a few blocks from you. Now, stepping out of my hotel in L.A. (well, technically about 45 miles East of L.A. in Ontario), the streets are very busy here as well, like New York, but not at all like it.

New York is in its own category for density, that's the first thing you notice. Density of everything: attractions, restaurants, cultural happenings, landmarks, and, above all, people. Manhattan's population density is one of the highest on the planet--maybe the highest, though if you include the other four boroughs, New York's density is not nearly so high as, say, Tokyo or Mumbai or Mexico City. This is not the place for agoraphobics. L.A. has the second highest population in the country after New York, but it's spread over a much larger geographical area and feels completely different. L.A.'s density is found on its freeway system. The freeway system here seems always to flirt with--and often to succumb to--gridlock. Well, New York's freeways are always jammed as well, but I'd venture that L.A. has five times the freeway miles as New York.

Which is part of the next point: New York is foot culture, and L.A. is car culture, something which informs each place to its bone marrow. New Yorkers get everywhere on foot, walking considerably more on average than Americans in general. It's surely one of the things that contributes to New York being a fairly healthy place to live. To go outside in New York is to mix, like cattle in a corral, with the great crush of humanity. There's something very distantly communal about life in New York, since there is no privacy unless you're in your home. Owning a car in Manhattan, unless you're very rich, seems absurd. Parking is almost impossible, and hideously expensive. You pay for a parking spot in Manhattan what you'd pay for a residence elsewhere. Insurance is much more expensive, since driving in New York is like playing bumper cars at the county fair, and if your car is nice it will quickly become not so and / or somebody else's car. And with public transit being so handy--that high density at work--it makes much more sense to use the "community car," the taxis and trains, and pay on a per-use basis. (After our visit to Amsterdam, one wonders why bicycles are not more prevalent in New York. Manhattan would be a good place for them.) You could rent a car occasionally for far less than the cost of owning one.

Existence in L.A. without a car is, by contrast, virtually impossible. (After being chauffeured around L.A. by a friend this weekend, I guess I should amend that: existence in L.A. without a car is virtually impossible, and having a car doesn't help that much.) You can't walk anywhere except in your immediate neighborhood. Public transit seems to work only for the few and the brave. In fact, I've seen homeless people in L.A. who live in their cars: it makes more sense to have a car and no home in L.A. than to have a home and no car! I'd bet the content of my neighbor's wallet that there is no homeless person living in his car in Manhattan for more than a night or two. But I learned this weekend that even having a car will not pave your way with gold. L.A.'s freeway system (which must be among the most extensive in the world), is running beyond capacity pretty much 24 / 7, and things are projected to grow continuously worse. My friend was delighted that his hour and a half trip from Santa Monica to retrieve me in Ontario was only marred by brief stoppages on the freeway--complete stoppages on a Saturday morning. This is, he said, the best it ever gets; during the rush hours (which now extend nearly the whole day), most freeways are a parking lot. It's not uncommon, he said, for people to devote 90 minutes and more for each direction of their commute. I don't care how good the climate is, life is too damn short for that. He is fortunate to be able to take city streets a mere couple of miles to and from work, but most everybody else is condemned to this commuting nightmare.

Freeways aside, for a car nut and machinery geek, SoCal's automotive culture is one of its biggest draws for me. As a motorcycle guy, I noticed that both New York and L.A. have a lot of them, but I suspect it's for different reasons. In L.A.'s car culture, people are all about the machinery, and there are huge numbers of really nice cars, and of more modest cars lovingly adorned and accessorised. People love their wheels in L.A. And the same climate that makes cruising a year-round activity also makes motorcycling a very practical thing. Bikes have always been a great way to get advanced technology and extreme performance for relatively little money, so even minimum-wage-earning kids can have killer wheels. I love that you could use a motorcycle year-round as a legitimate form of transportation in L.A., and you see a lot of that. I could almost move out there for that alone. You see a lot of bikes in NY as well, and especially scooters, but it's for more mundane practical reasons: they're inexpensive, they get great mileage, and you can park them almost anywhere, including on the sidewalk chained to a parking meter. In one swoop you've just solved one of the city's most galling problems. But you're back on the trains for three or four months of the year, so the bike isn't really a surrogate car. For whatever reason, you don't tend to see the kind of vehicle worship in NY that you see all the time in L.A.

Lastly, I think about the expense. New York, and Manhattan specifically, is an almost unfathomably expensive place to live. You simply have to be rich to live there, or be one of the lucky remaining few who have some grandfathered rent-controlled lease or the like. You see a lot of housing in New York that at first glance would appear to be just a small step away from being a squatter's camp, but it's a million bucks just to get your foot in the door. I had thought that L.A. must be not quite this bad, but this weekend has shown me the error of my ways. In much of L.A. proper, a tear-down is a million bucks. If you actually want to LIVE in the house, you'll have to do better than that. My friends are living in a nice but very, very small house that rents for what I pay for my mortgage in Appleton. And I have eight times the space and live on the water. I guess it's a question in both places of whether you want / need what the city has to offer badly enough to make the necessary sacrifices.

Back now from Europe, it's interesting to think of these issues as they arise abroad. I imagine most of the housing cost issues of New York and L.A. apply to all Europe's big cities as well, so maybe it's more a rural / urban thing than an American thing.