My family recently spent some time in the beautiful and always impressive Southern California. This is where I was born, where my father and grandfather were born. And in some ways, it feels very much like home, while in others, it's as foreign to me as a completely different country.
What I'm interested in at the moment, however, is something I just noticed while looking at Google Earth. Yes, I know I'm a geek - and you love me anyway. Thank goodness.
I was noticing the different and contrasting ways in which the city looks from this image. Taken at a virtual altitude of about 50 miles, this image includes the Santa Ana range slashing across the middle of the image, with the Santa Monica Mountains and the San Gabriel Mountains on the north. The San Gabriel Mountains are the closest I got to snow until after I was eight years old and moved to Utah. It snowed that night, and in the morning I woke to the strangest and most beautiful sight I'd ever seen. It was this time of year, and the snow melted off quickly, but it was quiet and cold and beautiful. But I digress...
Notice the areas of lighter colors as they spread across the region. These are largely the roofs of vast warehouses, signifying industrial areas in the region. These areas seem to center around rail access as laid out in the early part of the 1900s. Because the rail lines operated on steam locomotives, access to water was vital to their survival and performance, so the rail lines generally followed the streams and rivers. Further, the railroads need to operate on a very gradual slope, so they follow along the paths that the rivers follow as well. The freeways came later, but not much later, and are used to connect, interconnect, and by-pass certain areas.
On the far easterly side, above the cities of Norco and Eastvale, and just below Rancho Cucamonga (which is a name I just love!) is another large area of warehouses and industrial uses. Still located along traditional rail lines, this area is much more recent and is quite obviously more dependent on surface transportation. In fact, the rail lines in this area seem largely ignored, perhaps a missed opportunity for commuter rail or freight lines. This area has developed along a much more orthogonal grid pattern, rather than in the organic lines that rivers and rails prefer.
On the westerly side, there are the large swaths of land that are used for warehousing and manufacturing supported by the coastal resources (ports and airports) and the oil refineries. These serve to cut off the beach cities from their neighbors and create an isolation between the two industrial regions - the coastal and inland areas. This is also where, interestingly, the traditionally more blue-collar and economically disadvantaged areas of the region are located. No million-dollar homes, here - these areas sell for half as much or even less than what areas just a few miles away are selling for.
All of this has implications to the urban form as well as broader social concerns. As the "have" regions continue to do well, compared with the "have nots", there is a split between which cities have access to better resources and which continue to be underserved. Since a large portion of a city's revenue comes from property taxes, those which are disadvantaged financially will most likely continue to be that way, with property values remaining depressed. These cities, thus affected, will not be able to offer services that other cities may be be able to do fairly easily. There needs to be a cooperative agreement of profit sharing between cities like Beverly Hills and Compton so that everyone benefits thereby. A regional approach should be implemented to promote growth and progress across city lines. It's never too late to begin with the way things ought to be.
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