Why is Los Angeles disliked by so many people?

Posted on January 5, 2012 by Alissa

Reversed out

“It’s not a city, it’s an endless urban sprawl. Carpet store, lamp store, plumbing store, carpet store, plumbing store… on and on for as far as the eye can see.

Backing up that urban sprawl are suburbs that either have character but are old and shabby, or are little cookie cutter boxes made of ticky-tack, or are obscenely expensive, masturbatory dwellings for the over-privileged.

Things are so spread out that the idea of walking anywhere is laughable, so to get around from one plumbing store to another you sit in seemingly endless gridlock. No matter where you’re going it takes at least a half hour to get to. The highways aren’t much better than the surface streets.” —Ian Peters-Campbell

  1. “The people who live there don’t seem to realize how dirty it is. Even the nice parts look like they could use a thorough cleaning and a good coat of paint.
  2. It takes a minimum of 45 minutes to get to anywhere from anywhere within LA county, no matter where the start and endpoint are, and how you get there.
  3. For the most part Angelinos have all the warmth of moon rocks. Reminds me too much of DC.
  4. For such a huge, populous city they have a serious lack of culture. Anyone expecting entertainment opportunities like you would get in NY, SF or even DC will be sorely disappointed.
  5. Most parts of the city don’t feel safe. And this from someone who is from DC.
  6. It’s super expensive, but you don’t feel like you get anything for your money, like you might in New York.” —Eric Ruck

“Traffic is the complaint I hear from friends who visit there.” —Tom Worth

  1. “The fact that it’s an ugly city with few areas of spectacular beauty to its credit.
  2. You HAVE to own a car to live there successfully.
  3. It takes a lengthy period of time to get anywhere around there.
  4. It’s an expensive place to live.
  5. The ever-present air pollution.” —Jan Mixon

“The biggest misconception is that LA people are ‘too Hollywood.’ For one, LA is a massive city with a very diverse economy. You can go many days without running into a ‘Hollywood type’—unless you are in the entertainment industry.” —Steve Raymond

  • “Cars (smog and pollution)
  • Traffic (smog and annoyance)
  • Materialism (Hollywood)
  • False hope and shattered dreams (Hollywood)
  • Lack of appealing cultural hub/identity
  • Urban sprawl
  • Cars
  • Traffic” —Josh Siegel

“Apart from the Hollywood sign, the beaches and boardwalks along the Western edges, and the grimey abandoned-downtown-from-every-zombie-movie-you’ve-ever-seen, it’s all very plain-looking, and repetitive. Accomodating. Flexible. Mutable. Ever-adapting. You always feel just a bit that LA is live-editing itself to appear as relatively inoffensive to you as possible.

Layer on the pollution, the weird movie scene, and the low-income areas, and as an outsider or occasional visitor, it’s really hard to imagine ever living there, or ever having a good reason to do so, barring being discovered in one way or another.” —Dean Blackburn

  1. “For most of the 20th C, New York had a monopoly on TV networks, magazines, books, newspapers, and public opinion. The hatred of LA really got going with the Brooklyn Dodgers moving to LA. A special venom was saved for defectors, like Jay Leno,and others who moved to the promised land. Now that Bloomberg has rescued New York and LA is getting worse, there is a feeling of ‘I told you so.’
  2. For San Franciscans it is genetic, part of the culture, but no overtones of envy.San Franciscans know they have the best and that LA is not even second best. If you paid a New Yorker, he might move to LA, people from SF and the Bay Area would not. At one time SF was worried about the increasing financial power of LA and then came Silicon Valley. Game over.
  3. Crime movies are filmed in LA.
  4. One of the best arguments against LA is Bobby Fisher. At any other time in his life he is world famous, he performs at the top of his game. He moves to LA and is not heard of for 20 years and nobody lifts a finger to help him out of his eccentricities. This is a one-industry town and there is no community to help you.
  5. There are oil derricks visible from the beach, as well as homeless people. Ipanema or Cannes it is not.
  6. Your choice is city view or ocean view, you can’t have both. So who planned this place?” —Fred Landis

Answers taken from Quora question “Why is Los Angeles disliked by so many people?” Comments have not been edited for spelling and grammar errors. See also: “Why do some people hate Los Angeles?”

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  • Anonymous

    Interestingly enough, all of these sound like they could have been written in 1988, when I left LA for graduate school in New England and did not return. If anything, all these have been amplified with sprawl. So the fundamental issues are not dealt with but are repeated outward until they hit a natural or economic barrier. Ocean, mountains, dessert, lack of access to water supply, another city, housing collapse, collapse of defense industry, etc. 
    The dirty city remarks are also interesting – like when you see a celebrity in person, they have a crusty artificiality to them. LA is old and artificial at the same time. That is either charming or not. As time wears on the city, it is less charming. 
    For certain great cities, like Paris, old and dirt was amazing at certain points in time, because it was genuine and layered. Krakow, Poland was also this way after Communism ended but before Poland took off economically. It had become so interesting because of benign neglect. But LA does not suffer from physical neglect. It suffers at least more than many other great cities from a kind of cultural, architectural, and social malaise. I am probably not the first to say that.

  • http://twitter.com/bgfa Bert Green Fine Art

    After living in Los Angeles for 13 years (I just moved to Chicago recently), I was made aware that most of the criticisms of LA were the usual, garden variety clams of “plastic-ness”, superficiality, car-culture dependence, etc. They always made me laugh, though, because I lived there (downtown) without a car for years and met some of the most amazing people from all over the world. These critics were themselves people who were focused solely on Hollywood, and who would never dare explore the city of transit, no matter how easy it might be. Go figure.

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=708020490 Chris Loos

    The criticism of LA from San Franciscans cracks me up.  They hate LA because its “full of assholes”.  But doesn’t the superiority complex make them the assholes?

    I also met someone from the Bay area recently who told me they don’t like LA because it “doesn’t have the diversity of San Francisco”. It was a strange thing to hear. I feel like this is the most diverse place I’ve ever lived, and I’ve lived in extraordinarily diverse cities like DC and London before I moved out here. Meanwhile when I visit SF I feel like I’m just surrounded by a bunch of other white people.