Growing up in Southern California with a deep love for art, music, and culture, I always pictured myself as someone who would eventually move into the city. From a distance, Los Angeles loomed large. A sprawling metropolis filled with culture, ambition, and creative energy.
I grew up taking trips into the city, falling in love with LACMA, the Natural History Museum, the California Science Center, and countless other institutions that gave LA its distinct sense of place. To me, LA was a beacon. A global, artistic capital unlike anywhere else I had seen.
College as a Purveyor of Good Urbanism
When I was accepted into Loyola Marymount University, I was thrilled. Finally, I would get to live in the city I had always romanticized. LMU, perched on a bluff overlooking the west side of Los Angeles, felt like a miniature utopia. Compact and walkable, filled with classical Spanish architecture, vast green lawns, and beautiful gardens, it was truly a lovely place to spend four years of my life.
It was also, in retrospect, a rare taste of good urban design. It’s funny how college is often the sole experience Americans can get to live in a truly walkable environment. I’ll never forget the serendipity of running into friends on campus, walking to dorms or off-campus houses, and feeling like community was around every corner. For me, it was an environment where belonging was effortless, where social interaction was the default, not the exception. I made many friends by simply existing in these spaces, moving through the halls and walkways, attending my classes.
Serendipity With a Side of Europe
In 2018, I was fortunate to take a trip to Europe. I visited Berlin and Helsinki, and I remember not wanting to come home. I didn’t understand why at the time, but something about those places felt radically different.
In Berlin, it was the sheer abundance of people-centered spaces. I walked through neighborhoods like Kreuzberg and Prenzlauer Berg, where mid-rise buildings lined quiet, leafy streets and plazas hummed with life. Sidewalk cafes spilled onto the street. Transit stations were everywhere. It was the first time I got to consider the bus as a serious form of transportation.
I also stayed at Ku’damm 101, located on Berlin’s iconic Kurfürstendamm boulevard in Charlottenburg. The neighborhood was a perfect blend of old and new Berlin. I’d stroll down the wide, tree-lined boulevard in the evening, past glowing storefronts and bustling cafes, feeling a kind of casual public life I rarely experienced back home. Ku’damm had everything a great city street should: scale, shade, vibrancy, and rhythm. It showed me that a neighborhood could be dense, but still feel approachable and not overwhelming.
I remember taking the train to A Kind of Guise, a boutique fashion shop with a location in Kreuzberg. I missed their raffle, but the shop owner graciously helped me get the Adidas pair I wanted. He passed along insights on Berlin’s shifting identity, from its countercultural, anti-capitalist roots to its current cycle of gentrification, and how that was displacing the creative communities that once defined it. That exchange was unforgettable.
In Helsinki, it was the dignity of the everyday. Streets were calm. Trams glided quietly past. Public plazas like Senate Square and Esplanadi were filled with locals and visitors alike, lingering, talking, being present. Even the waterfront felt human-scaled, accessible, integrated into daily life. There was a sense of quiet confidence in the way the city invited you to slow down and stay awhile. Visiting in the summer also meant that the days were quite long and the Finns were either out of town on holiday or sun bathing in the public parks and beaches, which was charming to see.
I watched a group of Russian street musicians perform in one of the squares. They were members of the St. Petersburg classical tradition—maybe even from the Philharmonic—and played with warmth and grace. They chatted with me afterward, telling stories of their travels across Europe, performing in public spaces, bringing culture to wherever they went. It reminded me of the social serendipity I’d experienced at my college campus.
A Grueling Commute
The pandemic hit in 2020. I graduated shortly after and moved back home to Thousand Oaks out of necessity. I landed a job in El Segundo, and for the next six months, I endured a brutal commute up and down the 405 freeway. It drained every last drop of soul I had left in me. The traffic, the monotony, the constant stress… Day in and day out, I could feel my nervous system was getting fried.
As a kid, I dreamed of being a car designer. I filled boxes with drawings of futuristic vehicles. Growing up in America—especially in Southern California—you’re raised to love cars. Hot Wheels, racing games, the Petersen Automotive Museum… they’re everywhere.
Cars are part of the culture. We admire them, complain about them, shape our lives around them. But each day in traffic changed that for me. Cars stopped feeling like freedom. They started feeling like tiny jail cells. Ones we willingly lock ourselves into, for hours on end, just to get anywhere.
Eventually, I’d had enough. With some savings from work, I moved back to LA, hoping to reclaim some quality of life and escape the psychological toll of the commute. I found a surprisingly good deal in Mar Vista: an apartment just off Venice Boulevard, not far from my job.
It seemed like a great move. I’d be closer to work, and I’d get to live in a more urbanized part of town. But what I didn’t realize at the time was just how much that stretch of Venice Blvd would radicalize me.
The Inequity of Arterial Roads
Unless you’ve lived on a street like Venice Boulevard, it’s hard to explain the low-level anxiety that comes from being steps away from a high-speed arterial. The constant hum of traffic becomes the backdrop to your life. Brake dust and exhaust settle on your porch furniture, seep through the windows. The asphalt radiates heat in the summer, relieved only slightly by a few aging trees stubbornly holding their ground.
My sleep suffered almost immediately. Sirens, headlights, motorcycles with aftermarket exhausts—some so loud they shook the walls—would wake me up every couple of hours. I bought blackout curtains to fight the light pollution, but nothing could stop the noise. Why police speed down this street at 60 miles per hour with sirens blaring at 2 a.m. is beyond me. It certainly didn’t make me feel safer, or more inclined to like them. And why does someone always seem to rip through the block on a Harley every night at 3 a.m.? I still don’t have an answer.
Even sitting outside was a non-starter. The apartment came with a raised front porch that I thought would be a great place to unwind. But the moment I sat down, the noise made it unbearable. Conversations became shouting matches over the roar of traffic and the occasional car stereo turned to full blast.
More than anything, I became obsessed with a single question: why did it feel this bad to live in a place that was supposedly part of the city?
I started to notice the injustice of it all.
This strip of apartments wasn’t just noisy and unpleasant. It was a buffer zone. A sacrifice layer. It existed to cushion a wealthier, gentrifying neighborhood tucked just behind it, full of $1-3 million single-family homes, tree-lined and quiet.
My neighbors were mostly poor immigrants. The multi-generation family across the hall had been there longer than anyone else in the building. They were raising two babies. If I couldn’t sleep, how were those babies doing?
That thought haunted me. This wasn’t just a personal discomfort. It was a systemic cruelty. This whole street was full of families like theirs. People who lived and died to the soundtrack of engines, to the smell of exhaust. Who bore the brunt of pollution and noise so others could preserve their peace and property values just one block over.
Death by a Million Tailpipes
Los Angeles remains the city with the worst ozone pollution in the country. This is due to a combination of factors, but very notably because of the sheer number of cars on the road everyday, combined with a lack of rainfall, that allows ozone and fine particulate pollution to pile up over time.
Studies in California show that noise and air pollution near busy roads lead to shorter sleep duration and difficulty falling asleep. This was immediately obvious to me and probably would not necessitate a study for me to agree with that fact. Though I’ve adjusted over the years, I still get disruptions from time to time that bring me back to this bitter truth.
Children living within 75 meters of busy roads face much higher asthma rates, with about 40-80% higher risk of chronic symptoms. In LA’s I-70 Corridor, an area no nicer than Venice Boulevard, asthma related ER visits are 62 per 10,000, nearly double that of wealthier zones. The lack of public interest in this kind of fact baffles me, for a culture that virtue signals about caring about children and their futures so much.
And if that wasn’t enough, another fact is that living near heavy roadways contributes to higher mortality from heart disease, lung cancer, stroke, and even dementia, due to elevated fine particulate matter and nitrogen dioxide. Cars are killing us in all sorts of creative and devious ways, and the most marginalized among us are the most impacted.
So when I lay awake at night, staring at the ceiling while another siren screamed past, I couldn’t stop thinking about those babies across the hall. About how injustice wasn’t just in the air metaphorically. It was literally in the air. In their lungs. In their futures.
And I began to see unhoused people differently, too. In Los Angeles, to be unhoused is to be pushed—often forcibly—onto the city’s most hostile terrain: these wide arterial roads. Underneath freeways. Into on-ramps and off-ramps. If I, with four walls and a bed, found the noise and pollution unbearable, what must it be like to try and survive in a tent next to six lanes of traffic?
And the worst part? It’s all invisible to the people who benefit from it. Just behind us down the block, those wealthier houses were shielded from noise, given buffer space from the pollution, that violence out of sight. Out of earshot. Out of mind.
Drivers cruised past in their air-conditioned cars, windows up, sealed off from the harm they were creating. Did they even realize? That their comfort came at the cost of ours? That every mile driven meant more toxic fumes, more brake dust ground into the air, more noise ripping through someone’s window at 3 a.m.?
That’s the cruelty of Los Angeles: comfort is carefully gated. Clean air is reserved. Quiet is zoned. Everyone else is left breathing in the fumes. Death by a million tailpipes.
Arterial Dynamism in Los Angeles
Los Angeles—like so many American cities—has a long history of treating poor neighborhoods as disposable. First as dumping grounds for pollution and freeways. Now, as testing grounds for new waves of development. The logic hasn’t changed, only the language. We still build for those with power, and we still do it on the backs of those without.
There’s more to say about this. About redlining, disinvestment, urban renewal, freeway expansion, and the racialized politics that underpinned it all. But I’ll save that for another post.
For all its problems, Venice Boulevard is also dynamic. Alive in a way sterile suburbia could never be. This is where LA’s density is allowed to exist. Along these loud, imperfect corridors, I watched a city in motion. New apartments rose constantly. On my walks along the street, I saw the construction of numerous projects for dense infill housing that brought thousands of new residents. With them came new businesses. Coffee shops, restaurants, small retailers. Some catered to the long-standing community, others to a wealthier, younger demographic. It was a mix of gentrification and amenity. A complicated, evolving ecosystem.
Amid all this, I discovered the Great Streets initiative from 2017. A pilot project that brought real change to the very stretch of Venice Boulevard I lived on. The city reduced the number of traffic lanes from six to four, added protected bike lanes buffered by parking, and upgraded pedestrian signals and crossings. Collisions dropped. More people were walking. More people were biking. The data was clear: it worked. It made the street safer and more humane, with minimal impact to throughput and commute times.
I grew to appreciate these changes deeply. I walked everywhere I could, often to local businesses, always using the new crossings. I felt noticeably safer crossing the street on foot. It gave me a tangible sense of hope that Los Angeles not only could change for the better, but was actively changing. But the implementation felt fragile, even temporary. Plastic bollards were routinely knocked over by cars. The paint faded. Delivery trucks blocked the bike lanes. The protected lane only existed on one side of the street, so cyclists going the opposite direction would often ride against traffic just to feel safer.
One evening, I witnessed a driver make a sharp turn into the neighborhood and hit a person on an electric scooter. The rider was clearly injured but managed to get back up and ride off in shock. I still wonder if he’s okay. These kinds of collisions happen every single day in the city, often permanently altering the lives of those involved. It’s a grueling reality for a place centered on the convenience of car transportation, at the expense of public safety.
Despite the improvements, many drivers dismissed or ignored the changes. Some neighbors were openly hostile. I remember one man stopping to chat with me on my porch, complaining bitterly about the “liberal agenda” to remove traffic lanes. This was four years after the project was completed. It was a telling reminder of how deeply entrenched car dominance is in LA’s culture.
Still, learning about the project sparked a curiosity in me that was truly a turning point for my politics. For a brief moment, this street asked a question rarely posed in LA: what if a street wasn’t just for cars?
Finding the Words
Years later, the memories of college life and my European trip started to resurface. In 2022, I stumbled upon videos from a creator called Not Just Bikes, a Canadian living in the Netherlands, explaining in detail why Dutch cities felt better. I went deep down the rabbit hole. I learned about zoning, street design, traffic calming, induced demand, the history of American suburbanization. I started to understand why my life in LA felt so fragmented, so anxious, so solitary. I started to see that what I had experienced abroad wasn’t a fluke, it was the result of intentional design choices.
Urbanism gave me language for things I had felt, but couldn’t explain. It gave shape to a kind of grief I didn’t know I was carrying. And it gave me hope, too, because if bad cities are designed, good ones can be, too.
To me, it felt like waking up from the Matrix. The more I learned, the more I saw it everywhere. LA, I realized, is full of contradictions. We have density, but more often than not, it’s placed right along loud, dangerous, car-dominated corridors like Venice, La Brea, and Pico. We build apartments facing six-lane boulevards with no trees, no safe crossings, and nowhere to walk to. Meanwhile, the quiet, leafy streets just behind those corridors are protected, reserved almost exclusively for single-family homes and mansions. In LA, comfort and quiet are privatized. Everyone else gets noise and fumes.
I grew angry. Not just at the noise and fumes. But the systems that allowed this to be normalized. At a government that underfunds transit but widens highways. At a culture that treats cars as a birthright and housing as a commodity. At the way we’ve built a society that quietly inflicts violence on the most vulnerable people. Kids growing up with asthma, unhoused neighbors driven mad by all the traffic noise, families forced to trade safety and health for an affordable place to live.
I started to see the street not just as a place, but as a symptom. Of deeper choices. Of political cowardice. Of whose comfort we protect, and whose we sacrifice. And I can never unsee it. I didn’t just want to complain, I wanted to understand how we got here, and how we could get out of this.
Living on Venice Boulevard didn’t just frustrate me. It radicalized me. It revealed to me a country that had either lost its soul or never had one in the first place. It showed me that the shape of a street reflects the shape of our values. And in Los Angeles, those values need to change.