Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 4- Palos Verdes

This week I decided to take a trip with some friends to Palos Verdes, which is approximately 30 miles from UCLA. Palos Verdes is actually a group of several small cities on a peninsula. These small cities include Palos Verdes Estates, Rancho Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills, and Rolling Hills Estates.  This beautiful area, called P.V. or the Hills by the residents, is an affluent community that enjoys a fairly close proximity to Los Angeles but at the same time it is not on any major highway making it isolated.  I went there to visit a friend who lives in a very beautiful home in an area where most of the homes are estates and some have stables and horses. The city is on the coast and my friend’s home is within walking distance of the beach. As I walked around her neighbourhood I noticed that the majority of her neighbours were older Caucasian couples that had probably lived in that area for the past 40 or 50 years. One thing that was fun to see was that on her street there were several peacocks that would randomly roam around. Beautiful plumage but terrible sounding. Of course this got me very excited and I asked my friend about them. Apparently one of her neighbours breeds them on their estate and there are now several peacock colonies in the city. This was an interesting surprise and an indication of what life might be like in the Palos Verdes area.  Of special interest to me was the fact that some of the scenes from the Disney movie ‘Pirates of the Caribbean’ (my favourite movie) were filmed off the coast of P.V.

            We went walking along the beach, about a 15-minute walk from her house, and I noticed that there was a sort of pattern in the type of residents there. We were there around 3:00 pm on a Thursday, which was probably the reason that there were very few children on the beach and people we saw were mostly elderly couples and mothers and their babies, others were probably at work or school. The people who had the opportunity to go to the beach on a Thursday afternoon were people who were either retired or probably not the main income provider for their families.

            In our lecture discussions we talked about the migration of families in the middle and upper income brackets to the suburbs. The city of Palos Verdes is a perfect example of this type of relocation. Decades ago families moved out of the city centers, which had become overbuilt and industrialized, and moved out into the periphery, where small communities of homes, schools, and shopping centres were created. Many of these families (including that of my friend’s) derive their incomes from businesses and jobs that are in the city centers so they have to commute every day into the city for their work. Unfortunately Los Angeles has a very poor mass transit system and this has forced these commuters to use their cars. This in turn has over burdened the already busy highways of the Los Angeles area and the daily commute is quite a nightmare. But suburbanites accept this as one of the costs of living is a relatively safe environment. Their main concern is the well being of their children and so twice a day they will sit in the two-hour plus traffic jam and accept this as a consequence of their desire for a better life. 

            The contrast to the hustle and bustle in major cities was quite evident. People seemed friendlier and more relaxed as they went about their daily lives.  I can well understand why they are willing to put up with the inconveniences of traffic and distance because the rewards are quite wonderful.

Best photo I could take without getting attacked