Most Angelenos Optimistic About City, Poll Finds

By DAVID FERRELL and DAREN BRISCOE

July 7, 2002 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

Traffic is worse than ever. Street crime and gang violence have been compounded for years by ever-unfolding police scandals. For a turbulent decade--through riots and O.J. and myriad lesser issues--it often seemed Los Angeles was falling apart. Now the fracture might finally come: a vote in November that would cleave north and south at the Cahuenga Pass.

Terry Beggs has seen it all since moving here in the late 1960s.

Fed up? Ready to move?

Not this die-hard Angeleno.

“It’s absolutely not perfect ... but it’s going well,” Beggs, 58, said of life in his Woodland Hills neighborhood and Los Angeles as a whole. “It could be terribly worse. I have high hopes for the place, that things will keep going well and kids will grow up in a better community.”

Beggs’ outlook might seem surprisingly optimistic, but he is far from alone, according to a Los Angeles Times poll whose results were released last week. Against the darker backdrop of international terrorism, wars, corporate collapses, a lingering economic slowdown and other global problems, Los Angeles emerges in a light that might even be called rosy.

Sixty-three percent of poll respondents said things are going well, or even very well, in the city, compared with 31% who think the city is faring badly or very badly. (Six percent were not sure.) The level of approval was even greater when people considered their own neighborhoods. Three residents out of four said, yes, they like the way things are going up and down the street.

Asians (83%) and whites (82%) expressed the highest level of neighborhood satisfaction, but opinions also were strongly favorable among Latinos (73%) and African Americans (65%) and in central-city communities long plagued by poverty and social ills.

The numbers are particularly striking when compared to Times polls of past years. The percentage of people saying they are pleased with the city today is twice as high as during some periods in the mid-1990s, even though, as South Los Angeles resident William Nelson said, much of the city still needs fixing.

“I’m pretty satisfied with the way things are right now, but I think, overall, nothing’s changed,” said Nelson, 65, an African American who moved here in 1960. The Sept. 11 attacks on New York and the Pentagon were “a wake-up call,” he said. “You start looking at things a little different.”

Los Angeles was spared those horrors and has experienced none of the devastation of Afghanistan’s Tora Bora or the suicide mass murders of Jerusalem. It’s been 10 years since L.A. was torn apart by rioting. It’s easy to be lulled by the calm, to see the sun and palm trees and feel a little upbeat, even if it’s still possible to witness moments of violence or feel the strain of racial mistrust.

Nelson lives near Crenshaw and Martin Luther King Jr. boulevards and rarely goes out after dark. His 21-year-old son, who is living at home, walked to the street a month ago and encountered some youths flashing gang signs. When he failed to respond, the apparent gang members fired shots, putting a bullet hole in his car, Nelson said.

The incident leaves Nelson unsure how to gauge his own neighborhood. It’s been “pretty stable,” he said, but there are “little things like that. It can be an aberration. It never happened before.”

Nelson, like others, feels a sense of well-being that is tempered by concerns that seem to persist forever. He decries the “lack of economic opportunities for black kids. There’s no new enterprises growing up in the community that are black-oriented ... no real black presence in terms of shops.” Yet he has also seen some easing of tensions between black patrons and Korean merchants--two groups that clashed tragically during the 1992 riots.

“Over time, they’ve gotten to know each other a little bit,” Nelson said.

Meanwhile, the Latino population has grown sharply, complicating the racial dynamics. The resentments and occasional conflicts are leavened with lessons to be learned.

“You look at the work ethic of the different minorities, you kind of sharpen your own program a little bit,” he said.

Such ambiguities frame much of life in so vast and diverse a metropolis. Romilio Lima, 40, is a Latino who lives near Koreatown. He also expressed a high level of approval for how things are going, but he does not paint a glossy picture of paradise. Crime and gang violence remain significant concerns. The Los Angeles Police Department has performed well despite the Rampart corruption scandal, Lima said, but he criticized citizens for not being adequately involved.

Lima worries about the schools and frets that the proposed secession of the Valley could cost the city needed tax dollars. Race relations are still not very good, especially between Latinos and African Americans, he said.

“A lot of people don’t want to learn English,” he said.

“There’s 10 or 20 houses on the block where we all know each other, but in the rest [of the neighborhood] people just come and go; nobody knows who they are,” he said. “Some people don’t know how to say ‘hi’ or ‘good morning.’ I think there are a lot of communication problems.”

Residents who believe that things are going poorly cited the same problems, but from more critical perspectives.

Some Are Not Impressed

Westsider Peter Griffith, 40, has experienced no swell of civic pride amid the flurry of antenna flags and bumper stickers that sprouted after Sept. 11.

A man with diverse ancestry--both Jewish and Muslim--and light brown skin, he might be taken for Asian Indian, Latino or Middle Eastern.

Griffith said he feels the suspicion. When he walks his dog--part pit bull, part ridgeback--the police sometimes cruise behind him, he said.

“You feel like, ‘OK, they don’t get it,’ ” said Griffith, who has lived in his neighborhood for years. “I don’t want to give the impression I’m being harassed by police. They do good things. [But] it’s a town where people don’t understand each other. The mechanism for understanding race has never really existed here. If you’re not black or white, I don’t think there’s a true interest in the cultures that exist in Los Angeles, and the differences between them.

“In a way, it’s a good thing; you can blend in, and no one cares,” he said, but it also makes him wary. “My worst fear is that one day I’ll be walking down the street, I’ll be shot in a drive-by because I’ll be mistaken for some other culture, and the police will come along and not do any investigation. Then it’ll be written up in the paper that I was killed in gang violence. To me that’s Los Angeles.”

Charlette Livingston sees a very different Los Angeles from the suburbs of Granada Hills, far from the worst of the crime and gangbanging.

She taught high school in the Valley and now, at 80, is retired and living on a fixed income.

From her vantage point, the unrest of years past has dissipated, and today’s big issues are being handled with due attention.

“Race relations have improved,” she said. “We’ve gone through some pretty awful times here ... [but] I think things have settled down and people have realized that everybody is equal. I feel pretty good about that. Now there’s nothing I can fight for--and I’m a fighter. There’s no side to take. Everything seems to be rolling along.”

Livingston remembers visiting China many years ago, when her husband was alive, and the way people clamored to meet a couple of Americans. They seemed to base their hopes for the future on the standards that America had set. The pride she felt then has been reaffirmed by the patriotic spirit of recent months--seeing the flags, hearing the likes of Marilyn Horne and Robert Merrill singing American anthems on the radio.

“What I do realize is there is no place in the world quite like where we live,” Livingston said. “I don’t care, they can talk about Europe or South America or Canada or China or anywhere else, but somehow I feel this is the best of all possible worlds. There is hope here. It doesn’t make any difference if your family came yesterday or in 1620. I don’t think any place in the world has that.”

The only matter that troubles her, Livingston said, is the Valley’s plan to break away. Having lived in Los Angeles her entire life, she thinks it would be “a tragedy” to chop the city in two.

Los Angeles is so immense, so confusing, that few see it wholly in one light. Those who rate it highly find faults, and those who critique it harshly see blessings.

Diana Donner, a marriage and family therapist in Sherman Oaks, is one of those who think things are going “pretty well.” But the city seems too big to her.

Traffic Gets Low Marks

“The upkeep of roads is terrible,” she said. “So is traffic congestion. There isn’t any kind of rapid transit [in the Valley]. That’s one of the things I hate most about L.A.--and I love L.A.”

Someone in her community was stabbed not long ago. The schools are not what they should be. “I’m leaning toward supporting secession right now, but don’t know how I’ll vote in November.”

Patricia Glennon, 67, a resident of the Palms area of the Westside, gave the city a poor grade partly because of the schools--”We’re turning out functional illiterates”--and partly because of potholes, traffic and sewage contamination of the ocean.

Property values are high despite the long stock-market slide. That is great for older homeowners but a terrible hurdle for young people seeking a place to live, Glennon said.

“I’m unhappy with a lot of things,” she said, pausing, but added that there are good parks and museums. “We have the beach. The weather’s nice. The air quality’s not bad. We get a nice ocean breeze.”

The crime in her neighborhood is not so awful--mainly graffiti and car break-ins. She feels safe. She is happier than she at first lets on.

“I’ve lived in Miami ... San Antonio, Texas ... Denver. This is still the best,” Glennon said. “There are some kooky people out here. I’ve lived here 45 years. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Life in Los Angeles

How do you feel things are going in Los Angeles these days-very well, pretty well, pretty badly or very badly?

LA Westside S.F. Holly- Rest of

city Valley wood Central Southern

Well (total) 63 76 61 70 63 58

Very well 10 12 9 11 9 12

Pretty well 53 64 52 59 54 46

Badly (total) 31 20 35 23 30 36

Pretty badly 21 14 25 22 19 23

Very badly 10 6 10 1 11 13

Don’t know 6 4 4 7 7 6