Future of City--More Than a Name

I grew up in Cleveland. I don’t mind saying it. Cleveland, Cleveland, Cleveland.

It’s been Cleveland since my grandfather’s train fare from Ellis Island ran out, and it was Cleveland long before he stepped off the boat. Pioneers named the place, and despite the cloud comedians cast upon it, I never thought to try to change it. I never told anyone, on a whim, that I lived in West Cleveland. They would have laughed in my face. So why do we play this game in Los Angeles? Why do we think we’ve fixed a neighborhood just because we’ve changed its name, when all we’ve really done is raise the rent?

When I first moved to Los Angeles, friends warned me that I would pay more for the exterior location of an apartment than for the interior luxuries. To some extent that’s true everywhere. Location counts, even in Cleveland. But I was unprepared to deal with how much perceived location, as defined by an arbitrary community name, could influence prices--and people. My new neighbors, living directly across the street, were paying $100 more a month for their apartment, simply because it was over the line in upscale Toluca Lake and mine was in lowly North Hollywood.

The neighbors’ street had just as much litter as mine, just as many potholes and was just as far from the closest freeway entrance, shopping mall and hospital--because it was my street! It doesn’t make sense to me. Why have we let ourselves believe that a name is worth an extra hundred or so on a rent check or, worse yet, an extra hundred thousand on a mortgage loan?

Especially when local practice indicates that the names will need to be changed should they become tainted. Remember Sepulveda, a strong name from a strong general? It’s North Hills now. Nobody wanted to live in Sepulveda anymore, because of its faded image, but nobody wanted to move either. So they fixed the name. But what about the problems?

Back where I come from, you can’t change the reputation of your neighborhood by re-christening it. It has taken Cleveland years to climb out from under those jokes, and they didn’t do it by becoming Omaha. They did it by building the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, by cleaning up the lakefront recreation area and by renovating downtown. Wouldn’t our neighborhoods be better if we did the same?

My husband and I have just bought our first house. We attended open houses in “prestigious West Van Nuys” and slogged through money-pit “repos” south of the boulevard. But we bought on a lovely little block in plain old Van Nuys.

I see you shaking your heads already, worrying about resale value and whether the place has a security system. Don’t.

It’s true I can’t predict the future, but I can promise that no matter what happens to my neighborhood, I’ll never tell anyone we live in “west” or “north” anyplace. And I will never say I live “adjacent to” anything, either. Because adjacent to Buckingham Palace is only a euphemism for not Buckingham Palace, and I refuse to be defined by a negative.