A nervous autopsy on the year in LA

Look back at it?

Our new year baby, the grimacing blue paint guy who somehow evaded hundreds of cops after the Dodgers won the World Series. (Photo from Reuters)

I was watching football on Hulu Plus Live TV yesterday and saw a Fox 11 local news promo that I found kind of disconcerting. Adding to the atmosphere of unease, I decided to record it by holding my phone up to the laptop screen.

This was the ad:

“2024 was a year that defined us more than ever,” the voiceover begins. Wow, I thought. That hadn’t occured to me but it the stakes of it certainly feel high.

Then a sequence of clips from some of the biggest local stories of the year:

• “Beverly Crest Storm” / “Sherman Oaks Mudslide”

• “University Protests”

• “DTLA Graffiti Towers”

• “Menendez Brothers”

• “Raid on Diddy’s LA Home”

• “LA Dodgers’ World Series Win”

• “Airport Fire/Castaic Fire”

And that was it. The things that happened in 2024. Did they define us more than ever? What is the definition we ended up with?

It feels like we have to start by grappling with the fact that “Menendez Brothers” did not “happen” this year per se. I’m also ruling out “Raid on Diddy’s LA Home” as a city-defining moment. The melee at the UCLA pro-Palestine encampment was certainly a big deal, but maybe not the most LA-specific story. Dodgers World Series and the Shohei Ohtani of it all, that was nice. Then a couple fires and mudslides and a spraypainted building.

What does that add up to? To me, the effect of seeing it all together was to make the year feel kind of… undefined.

Well, look: a Fox 11 promo is maybe not the most astute cultural summarizer from which we can learn what 2024 taught us about ourselves. But who else is trying?

One of the most discouraging things about seeking to define modern life in LA is that nobody else appears to have even bothered. What happened to all the trend pieces about the freaky stuff people are up to around here? “Scream Pilates: the LA Fitness Phenomenon That’s Getting Stars Evicted.” “Very Hungry? LA’s Newest Obsession Is Caterpillar Pupa Butter.” I don’t think we’ve gotten a condescending New York Times story about an “emerging enclave for young creatives” in four years. Remember this one??

That was seven fucking years ago! Aren’t we supposed to be the leading cultural exporter for Planet Earth? The perfunctory curiosity about the Erewhon blood smoothie only exposes how barren the observational landscape is. Does nobody care about us anymore?

Of course there have been a few broad attempts to document what’s happening in LA. But almost all of them have been mainly about what has stopped happening.

The trend in the entertainment industry? Leaving.

The trend in restaurants? Closing.

The two most-mentioned restaurants on Eater’s Most LA Anticipated Restaurant Openings to Know About in 2024 list, Scarr’s Pizza and Maydan Market, didn’t even open! (Maydan Market is now scheduled to open in February and has graduated to the 2025 list.)

Did we identify anything that people actually started doing this year?

Oh cool! Nice.

It also feels weirdly on the nose that our biggest local newspaper, which produced many of these headlines, has fallen victim to all of these same trends one by one. A lot of its staff were laid off or left. It closed part of its business. And now the owner is hoping to pull off a rightward shift.

“Balance is coming. Change is difficult.” Sounds like a kind of foreboding trend report! Not necessarily something I’d want to hear from my boss.

But wait: Time Out has a list of eight things to look forward to in LA in 2025. Finally, something nice to read…

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child apparates into Pantages

Dataland, a museum of AI art, debuts in DTLA

Oh god!

You wouldn’t know things in LA were this dire by looking at any of the standard metrics. Unemployment is down, crime is down, homelessness is down a bit, the economy grew. But it’s getting hard to ignore that the vibe economy is in a minor shambles.

Desperate for some kind of explanatory statistic to write about, I resorted to watching the Southern California Association of Governments’s Regional Council Meeting, where emissaries from the bottom third of the state gather to sit really close together and peek at each other’s Microsoft Surfaces.

These people were there for SCAG’s annual Southern California Economic Update, which is what it sounds like.

The rundown on LA was provided by Shannon Sedgwick, a senior researcher with the LA County Economic Development Corporation. Her report was not exactly boiling over with optimism. LA’s economy is projected to keep growing, but slowly, and by less and less over the next two years.

So whatever is happening now, it’s going to get a little worse at getting better all the way until 2027. Then the Olympics will happen, which will either mean something or not.

The one real bright spot is in health care — perhaps the only category where business and jobs are growing fast. “If I was going to tell anyone an industry to go into, health care is the one,” said the guy from Orange County. “Of course that’s driven by aging populations, increasing health care needs,” said Shannon Sedgwick.

Oh right. Aging populations. Hmm.

This is the thing: LA getting old is not just a matter of vibes. Our average age is increasing much faster than the rest of the country.

Between 2012 and 2022, the county’s median age rose by 2.6 years to 37.4 years old. The 7.5% increase was more than 50% higher than the national rate of aging.

This place is aging like Jack (1996). And the engine of our oldening is a mass exodus of people under sixty.

We are losing our young, including many entire families, and failing to attract in new ones. School enrollment is way down. And the trend accelerated in the last few years, shoved forward by the pandemic. Last month a fellow named Hamilton Lombard at University of Virginia released a report on migratory patterns for 25 to 44 year olds between 2020 and 2023, and Business Insider visualized the data:

The top ten counties are all in Colorado, Texas, Montana, or Georgia. The little blood-red flattop in the bottom left corner is LA, with a 4% decrease in 25 to 44 year olds over those four years. It’s not Manhattan (down 9%) or San Francisco (down 14%), and thank god for that. But it’s not good, and though we don’t have data for 2024 yet, there’s no reason to believe we turned it around.

This feels like the explanatory thing, to me. The trend behind the trends. A shrinking creative industry, shuttered businesses, reduced tax revenues, more conservative voting — all of these patterns both reinforce and are driven by our youth shortage. And everyone knows what’s driving them out. Housing got more expensive and scarce as job opportunities in our leading industry diminished, pinching affordability on both the supply and demand side. A poll in May found that three-quarters of both renters and people in LA under 35 have considered moving out of the city because of high housing costs.

When does the loss of our young/kind-of-young population go beyond a cultural problem and become a fiscal one — and then an existential one? For a city’s economy and core services, 25 to 44 year olds are The Demo. They go to restaurants. They work. They see movies in the theater. Their children go to schools. They date and shop and drink and exercise. They are the little cobbler elves who appear every night and put in work, but instead of shoemaking they generate tax revenue.

Attracting people of this demographic was at one time the relentless focus of an entire generation of big city leaders across the US. And LA was good at it! This trend piece from 2015 was the kind of headline you used to see all the time:

These pieces always, always mentioned Instagram. Including this one, in the first two sentences:

It started with Instagram. Or maybe it ended with Instagram. Last fall, Christina Turner, a fashion stylist in Brooklyn, was dreading another New York winter in her cramped, lightless Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment while gazing longingly at the succulent gardens and festive backyard dinner parties posted on social media by her friends in Los Angeles.

This was around the time people were calling Eric Garcetti “the Mayor of Instagram.” You would occasionally find him posting as many as two sunsets in one night. But was it just the weather and the app that brought all of the Brooklyn stylist’s friends to LA? The same 2015 article had a secondary theory from perhaps the most New York possible reference point: Fran Lebowitz talking at a Vanity Fair party for the Tribeca Film Festival.

“L.A. is better than it used to be, New York is worse than it used to be,” Ms. Lebowitz said at a recent Vanity Fair party for the Tribeca Film Festival. The quality-of-life campaigns under Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg swept away so much that was gritty, quirky or exceptional about the city, she said, and as a result, “New York has become vastly more suburban,” while “L.A. has become slightly less suburban.”

Talking about how New York sucks now and used to be better is Fran Lebowitz’s main job, of course. But I’m interested in why she thought LA became “slightly less suburban” in the leadup to 2015. She wasn’t talking about crime, which had been steadily declining since the 90s just like it did in New York. What Fran Lebovitz might be talking about was young people in LA moving toward the city center, rather than out of Manhattan to the outer boroughs (or to LA).

Moby was also consulted, and he also talked about the rent:

Los Angeles, by comparison, is now where young artists “can really experiment, and if their efforts fall short, it’s not that bad because their rent is relatively cheap and almost everyone else they know is trying new things and failing, too.”

I was one of the young people who moved closer to downtown. Obviously people like me and the Brooklyn stylist — along with the trend pieces themselves — all did our little part to enable the affordability crisis. But there are ways for a city to absorb a new, younger population and maintain sufficient affordability to keep growing, allowing both the newcomers and longtime residents to stay. The main way is to build more housing. So are the city’s leaders and most dominant political factions focused on adding more rental units to combat the widening suburbanity? Aaaaaabsolutely fucking not.

There was one truly place-defining, unsuburban thing that happened here this year. A few months after J. Cole tried to compliment Kendrick Lamar, tens of thousands of people went to The Forum and chanted in unison about Drake being a pedophile for an entire half hour. The show and the song were an actual phenomenon that got the world interested in LA, after their creator put in work steering the focus from the pedophile stuff toward his hometown. For better or worse, it was the kind of thing that makes people want to live somewhere. But that doesn’t matter if there’s nowhere anyone can live.

So if none of the causal factors are changing, and in fact have been chosen by leadership to get worse, you have to wonder if we’re now loping into another year in more defined by what dies in the city than what gets started. Is there anything we can do about it? It’s kind of exciting to think that there might be a lot we can do about it. Is it possible that every dollar, minute, or vote we allocate in the city goes to making it younger or older?

Anyway. Something to think about for the next year. Balance is coming, change is difficult, etc. Hope everyone has a prosperous and fulfilling 2025.