Dude, who even knows.
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One thing about LA’s freeze on building and attempt to hold “neighborhood character” is that the commercial mix of an area is often like, 15 years behind the neighborhood demographic.
Like, there were parts of Melrose Boulevard that I went to in 2008 that I was like “oh, this makes Melrose Place (1992-1999) make a bit more sense!”
I visited back down to Echo Park in like, summer 2019? after leaving in 2011, and like, the only new construction I saw – some townhouses up by the terminus of the 2 in this hot neighborhood you heard about on the other coast – was about equal to the amount of change I would expect on any given Portland eastside block between 13th and 48th over the same period.
But the stores on Sunset, which had been like, cheap/blue collar work clothes, or storefronts that carried all, but only, the stuff you got with WIC vouchers, or these 3 restaurants that were owned in common as basically identical meh Mexican cafeterias, finally matched what I’d’ve expected from the block down from The Echo/Echoplex
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Noticeably more motorcycles on the LA roads these days. I’m not surprised, it always seemed obvious to me that we’d resolve the “fossil fuel commuter culture is unsustainable”/“the physical and cultural form of America depends on fossil fuel commuting” dilemma by driving smaller cars and more two-wheelers. This is what people DO in pricey-gas, income-constrained situations like Thailand, Vietnam, and post-WWII, pre-North Sea England.
When I picked my bike, a ‘68 Honda CB350, I did it for the specs - modern bikes don’t really come in sizes between 250 and 700, and the price was right. But I was pleased with the look - I’d seen a few guys on vintage bikes around the neighborhood in the months before, and I’ve seen yet more still. They’re almost all guys, 25 to 40, tend kinda scruffy. It helps that the bikes really are still kinda cheap, though as the trend catches I hear prices are going up as the reservoir of barns and desert scraplots and old garages gets drained.
There are a few jeans-wearing girls on vintage bikes, usually between 150 and 300 or so, but the CFWG crowd sticks with scooters, as do people who like cozy domesticity but at least have the sense not to use the word “hubby”.
“Scooters - For Harmless People”.
Then there’s the BMW/Triumph/Aprila/Moto Guzzi crowd, who are mostly the kind of “hipsters” who own more than one $300 piece of clothing. Their scruff is professionally scruffed.
The guys with mopeds and underbones, I don’t know. I’m gonna take a shot and say they’re East Coasters into biking-as-transportation making the minimum possible concession to the fact that LA is an internally combusted town.
I’ve seen a guy or two on a Buell or a Hyosung, but it’s not really a “thing”.
Basically no one born after 1965 rides a hog, which is as it should be.
Then there’s another group I’ve been seeing tick up lately, one mostly nonlocal that I don’t really care for due to esthetic issues that map cleanly to class issues, and that’s guys on sportbikes where the fairings and their helmets both look like Jackson Pollock pulled a Dash Snow on some Ed Hardy. My impression is that these are your “white working class” union and post-union types driven by gas prices to downshift from the ginormous white pickup trucks they used to commute in to LA from the IE, or drive their dirt bikes out to the IE from LA.
One group is still rare enough that I don’t really know what their deal is, but I’ve gone from seeing them never to occasionally, which I guess might be a sign of the Next Big Thing. And that’s '90s-era Ninjas and other Japanese faired bikes with most of the fairing removed, which gives the bike sharp lines but an interestingly “dirty” look. They also don’t wear fucking Lisa Frank-for-bros helmets, which is a plus.
I am wondering if the Dream Center, this local fortress of Christian mercy, shut down for Easter. Or alternately bussed a bunch of people in for a meal or something. Because in the course of walking like 12 blocks round trip today I ran into like 5 scruffy people having incoherent conversations (with themselves a/o me), and none of them regulars. One young dude standing in the bushes by Taco Bell/KFC asked me for a light and when I said sorry I didn’t have one he said that’s okay because of that sport where you have to make polynesian grass skirts.