New Yorkers Are Fleeing To Los Angeles In Droves, Study Shows
NEW YORK, NY — It's one of the oldest rivalries in American migration: New York vs. Los Angeles. For the better part of a century, residents of the nation's two largest metro areas have been defending their chosen kingdom and dismissing the other on an endless loop of judginess between kitty-corner coasts. Ew, the traffic! But the sunshine! But the subway! But the garbage! But the skyline! But the coastline! But the bustle! But the chill!
In this tireless war of words, a clear winner has yet to emerge. But it's harder to argue against the numbers.
Thousands of working professionals have relocated to Los Angeles County from New York City in the past year and a half, according to a series of monthly "workforce reports" released this spring and summer by the job-networking site LinkedIn (and spotted by LA Weekly).
And it's not exactly a two-way street.
Since early 2016, according to LinkedIn, around seven or eight out of every 10,000 site users in LA reported moving there recently from NYC — making New Yorkers the No. 1 type of transplant in LA.
In contrast, NYC isn't even in the Top 10 destinations for LinkedIn users leaving LA, the numbers for August show. At this point, NYC is more popular among job seekers from Bangalore, India, than those from LA.
Of course, LinkedIn's data set is limited to its millions of account holders — who are, for the most part, skilled and educated members of the middle and upper class.
"Migration is dominated by professionals," explained Guy Berger, LinkedIn's resident economist — an NYC-to-LA transplant himself. "They tend to move more than people with lower education," he said, as "it's not cheap to pick up sticks and move somewhere else."
But at least among American urbanites with options, the LinkedIn economist said, an undeniable westward migration is in motion.
The forces apparently driving this exodus? LA's growing job market, he said, coupled with a weaker economic situation in NYC.
"LA took a little longer to recover from the recession, but now it's back," Berger said. Meanwhile, he said, "New York is seeing a little bit of the slowdown. It's a slightly weaker magnet."
Also, the obvious: cheaper rents and better weather.
Although the federal government hasn't released any official numbers on migration between NYC and LA in the past few years, U.S. Census data from between 2010 and 2014 showed a similar trend. Around 7,250 people relocated from NYC to LA County during this post-recession period, the data showed, compared to around 4,970 who headed the other direction (despite the fact that LA County is twice the size of NYC).
So, misguided or not, America's flitty transplant army seems to have made its coastal preference clear.
Somehow still not sick of the NY vs. LA debate? We've compiled a bunch of excerpts from our favorite literature — and bloggerature! — within the weirdly robust genre of coast-on-coast commentary, below.
(Know of any good ones we missed? Toss 'em our way, and we'll add 'em to the list: simone.wilson@patch.com.)
From "Which New Yorkers Should Move To LA?", a handy guide by Conor Friedersdorf for the Atlantic (2015):
In my experience there are two kinds of people who thrive in Los Angeles. The first tend to have the same disposition as did Bob Irwin: "Look. Look at it here. Look at how it is: calm, sunny, the palm trees. What is there to get all f---ing upset about?" Then there are the people (as likely to be New Yorkers as anyone) who aren't themselves chill in that way but are happiest in proximity to people who are. If you're neither type Los Angeles isn't for you. If you come anyway, please bring bagels.
From "Los Angeles And Its Booming Creative Class Lures New Yorkers," a painfully earnest trend piece by Alex Williams for the New York Times (2015):
It started with Instagram. Or maybe it ended with Instagram. Last fall, Christina Turner, a fashion stylist in Brooklyn, was dreading another New York winter in her cramped, lightless Greenpoint, Brooklyn, apartment while gazing longingly at the succulent gardens and festive backyard dinner parties posted on social media by her friends in Los Angeles.“I’d see all these old familiar faces of friends I once knew in New York, all seated at the same table,” said Ms. Turner, 32, who goes by the professional name Turner.
She could resent them, or she could join them. So in November, Ms. Turner dumped her furniture on Craigslist, piled into her battered Honda Accord and headed west, not stopping until she found a light-filled two-bedroom cottage in Echo Park, a neighborhood in eastern Los Angeles that is a magnet for young creatives.
The wagon train mentality, it seems, is taking hold among the L train set: Go west!
(Note: The originally reported price of Ms. Turner's new, two-bed paradise — $1,250, or $600 less than her "grim junior one-bedroom" in Greenpoint, Brooklyn — was later corrected by the Times. In fact, the Times amended, that was the cost of Ms. Turner's room alone.)
From "The Six Types Of Transplants Ruining LA,"a scathing listicle by Hillel Aron for LA Weekly:
1) New YorkersA variation on "the hater," the New Yorker puts a whole new twist on it, taking as gospel that his is the one true city — "The City." To New Yorkers, other metropolitan areas are doing it wrong: The pizza crust is too thick in Chicago, Boston is full of sports-obsessed hicks, etc. But Los Angeles? Gasp. Los Angeles isn't doing it wrong. Los Angeles is wrong.
And when an Angeleno visits New York? We're kind of like, whatever. Cool place to stay for a week or so, as long as you have a couch to sleep on, 'cause you have to be, like, an oil magnate to afford a hotel room.
Because you can love LA without being obsessed with LA; you can love LA but not have your identity be all about being from LA. Our history is not so overbearing, or buildings not so iconic, our accents just ambiguous enough to allow us to wear our LA-ness like a loose garment. Ours is a kind of freedom New Yorkers will never know. And that is why they hate us. They hate us because we are free.And so they move here. Go figure.
From "I Used To Love Her, But I Had To Flee Her: On Leaving New York," a personal essay by Gawker's former West Coast editor, Cord Jefferson (2012):
I've never felt more important than when I lived in New York. I was poor and my work was neither very good nor very well-read, and yet every day I'd wake up in my 10-by-10 room, its window looking out over my building's rusted trashcans, and somehow think I'd achieved another great victory.
Just over a year after moving to LA, I still feel a small twinge of shame when I tell people where I live. Los Angeles, despite being sunny, pleasant, and unique, remains a punchline to the 290 million Americans who don't reside here, even other Californians ("Oh, down there is just awwwwwful," say San Franciscans, thousands of whom prove "hippie" and "judgmental asshole" are not mutually exclusive).
New York City is a beautiful and thrilling place, and I cherish every wandering night and icy morning I spent there. But I've grown to love LA even more, particularly because its underdog status, and the way people point and giggle at it from their brunch tables Back East, makes it simple for me and my neighbors to ground ourselves. Angelenos have a reputation for being abnormally casual — flip-flops to board meetings and that sort of thing. Perhaps we're not casual so much as we're resigned: It's easy to find the lighter side of life when nobody takes you seriously.
From "A Few Of My Favorite Things," a nostalgic blurb on his time in LA by Cord Jefferson, the same guy who wrote the Gawker excerpt above, for the Los Angeles Times (2015):
I miss [dinner parties] acutely. New Yorkers barely have enough room for themselves in their homes, let alone several guests. Seating is a problem (I have two stools and zero chairs, for instance). And turning on the oven in the summer is a surefire way to make a small, stuffy apartment even more unpleasant. So New Yorkers flock to the streets.In New York, I'm always going out or meeting for drinks. In LA, I'd go to a friend's house and while away the hours drinking Tecates and grilling vegetables in the backyard.
People like to say that New York is faster paced than LA, that it buzzes in a way LA does not. There's some truth to that assertion, but it's probably a side effect of claustrophobia. The city never sleeps because its bed is too small.
From "Ice Cube Celebrates The Eames," an on-camera rant by O'Shea "Ice Cube" Jackson (2011):
A lot of people think LA is just eyesore after eyesore. Full of mini malls, palm trees and billboards. So what? They don’t know the LA I know. The good, the bad and the ugly about LA. The good: the Forum, the Five Torches, the Cockatoo Inn, Brolly Hut, Watts Towers. One’s man eyesore is another man’s paradise. The bad: the traffic. Each freeway has its own personality. The 405, bougie traffic. The 110 — haha — that’s gangsta traffic right there. There’s a difference. You gotta know where you at.
[embedded content]Who are these people who got a problem with LA? Maybe they just mad they don't live here.
From "8.4 Million New Yorkers Suddenly Realize New York City A Horrible Place To Live," a totally on-point work of satire by the staff of the Onion (2010):
At 4:32 p.m. Tuesday, every single resident of New York City decided to evacuate the famed metropolis, having realized it was nothing more than a massive, trash-ridden hellhole that slowly sucks the life out of every one of its inhabitants.
By Tuesday night, New York was completely abandoned. At press time, however, some 10 million Los Angeles–area residents, tired of their self-centered, laid-back culture and lack of four distinct seasons, and yearning for the hustle and bustle of East Coast life, had already begun repopulating the city.
From "My Lost City," an emotional retrospective by NYC-to-LA transplant Luc Sante for the New York Review of Books (2003):
Now, more than a decade after I finally finished my book Low Life, the city has changed in ways I could not have pictured. The tenements are mostly still standing, but I could not afford to live in any of my former apartments, including the ones I found desperately shabby when I was much more inured to shabbiness. Downtown, even the places that used to seem permanently beyond the pale have been colonized by prosperity. Instead of disappearing, local history has been preserved as a seasoning, most visibly in names of bars. The economy has gone bad, but money shows no signs of loosening its grip. New York is neither the Wonder City nor a half-populated ruin but a vulnerable, overcrowded, anxious, half-deluded, all-too-human town, shaken by a cataclysm nobody could have foreseen. I don’t live there anymore, and I have trouble going there and walking around because the streets are too haunted by the ghosts of my own history. I wasn’t born in New York, and I may never live there again, and just thinking about it makes me melancholy, but I was changed forever by it, and my imagination is manacled to it, and I wear its mark the way you wear a scar. Whatever happens, whether I like it or not, New York City is fated always to remain my home.
From "You Are Here," an essay by Hope Edelman, another NYC-to-LA transplant, for the anthology "Goodbye To All That: Writers On Loving And Leaving New York" (2013):
I know the truth: I'm not going back anytime soon. My daughters are children of freeways and wildfires and coyotes, not of subways and summer rain and gray winter slush. "New York" to them is honking and crowds and relatives they see once a year. But it's something entirely different to me.To me, "New York" will always be those three months in the brownstone apartment between move-in day and book release, when it was possible for a motherless seventeen-year-old girl to believe she'd found a secret portal to her future. The wondrous, magical New York was the one I fell in love with, the one that I still pine for. It's the one that got away. From "Why I'm Glad I Quit New York At Age 24" by ex-New Yorker Ann Friedman for New York Magazine (2013): It’s always struck me as hilarious that friends who tout their taste in undiscovered music and underground supper clubs were so loyal to the most popular city in America. New York is the prom king. He knows he’s great, and he’s gonna make it really, really hard on you if you decide you want to love him. New York is increasingly a city for people who are already on top, not for those looking to establish themselves. I’ve always been partial to the friendly guy who doesn’t know how hot he really is (Chicago) or the surprisingly intelligent, sexy stoner (Los Angeles) as opposed to the dude who thinks he’s top of the list, king of the hill, A-number-one. When I describe my West Coast existence (sunshine! avocados! etc.) to some New Yorkers, they acknowledge that they really like California, too, but could never move there because they’d get too “soft.” At first this confused me, but after hearing it a few times, I’ve come to believe that a lot of people equate comfort with complacency, calmness with laziness. If you’re happy, you’re not working hard enough. You’ve stopped striving. From "LA Glows," a rumination on the light in Los Angeles by NYC native Lawrence Weschler for the New Yorker (1998): The day of that infamous slow-motion Bronco chase — actually, it was already past sundown here in New York as I sat before the glowing TV in our darkening kitchen, transfixed by the unfurling stream of boband-wafting helicopter images, hot tears streaming down my cheeks — my eight-year-old daughter gazed for a while at the screen and then over at me, at which point, baffled and concerned, she inquired, "What’s wrong, Daddy ? Did you know that guy?" "What guy?" I stammered, surfacing from my trance, momentarily disoriented. "Oh, no, no. I didn’t know the guy. I don’t give a damn about the guy. It’s that light! That’s the light I keep telling you girls about." You girls: her mother and her. That light: the late-afternoon light of Los Angeles — golden pink off the bay through the smog and onto the palm fronds. A light I’ve found myself pining for every day of the nearly two decades since I left Southern California. From "Goodbye To All That," Joan Didion's iconic essay on the eight years she spent in NYC before moving to LA (1968): It is often said that New York is a city for only the very rich and the very poor. It is less often said that New York is also, at least for those of us who came there from somewhere else, a city only for the very young. I was in love with New York. I do not mean “love” in any colloquial way, I mean that I was in love with the city, the way you love the first person who ever touches you and you never love anyone quite that way again. I remember walking across Sixty-second Street one twilight that first spring, or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out out of the West and reached the mirage. ... I still believed in possibilities then, still had the sense, so peculiar to New York, that something extraordinary would happen any minute, any day, any month. I had never before understood what “despair” meant, and I am not sure that I understand now, but I understood [in my eighth year in New York]. Of course I could not work. I could not even get dinner with any degree of certainty, and I would sit in the apartment on Seventy-fifth Street paralyzed until my husband would call from his office and say gently that I did not have to get dinner, that I could meet him at Michael’s Pub or at Toots Shor’s or at Sardi’s East. And then one morning in April (we had been married in January) he called and told me that he wanted to get out of New York for a while, that he would take a six-month leave of absence, that we would go somewhere.It was three years ago he told me that, and we have lived in Los Angeles since. Many of the people we knew in New York think this a curious aberration, and in fact tell us so. There is no possible, no adequate answer to that, and so we give certain stock answers, the answers everyone gives. I talk about how difficult it would be for us to “afford” to live in New York right now, about how much “space” we need, All I mean is that I was very young in New York, and that at some point the golden rhythm was broken, and I am not that young anymore. The last time I was in New York was in a cold January, and everyone was ill and tired. Many of the people I used to know there had moved to Dallas or had gone on Antabuse or had bought a farm in New Hampshire. We stayed ten days, and then we took an afternoon flight back to Los Angeles, and on the way home from the airport that night I could see the moon on the Pacific and smell jasmine all around and we both knew that there was no longer any point in keeping the apartment we still kept in New York. There were years when I called Los Angeles “the Coast,” but they seem a long time ago. From "Goodbye, New York. Thanks For Breaking My Heart." by journalist Christopher Solomon, who only lasted a couple years in the city, for the New York Times (2010): What I love about you, New York, and what also breaks my heart is the same thing I loved and lamented about [the red-haired girl I chased East]: You are everything and yet you are slippery, standoffish, ungraspable. You will never need a me to be you. You are yourself, always. From "I Left New York For LA Because Creativity Requires The Freedom To Fail" by Moby, a world-famous musician from Harlem, for the U.K. Guardian (2014): During the 1990s, thanks to the cessation of the crack epidemic, New York became increasingly safer and more affluent, and less artist-friendly, but it was still the place I wanted to call home. What happened next reminded me of Gremlins: you're not supposed to feed the gremlins after midnight or they metastasize. Gremlin midnight came to New York sometime in the mid-1990s. I realized then that most people I met in New York were happily observing and talking about culture, but not necessarily contributing to it. It seemed New York had entered the pantheon of big cities that people visit and observe and patronize and document, but don't actually add to, like Paris. No one goes to Paris imagining how they can contribute to the city. People go to Paris thinking, "Wow, I want to get my picture taken with Paris in the background." That's what New York became, a victim of its own photogenic beauty and success.And, to again state the obvious, New York is exclusively about success – it's success that has been fed steroids and vitamin B. There's a sense that New Yorkers never fail, but if they do, they're exorcised from memory, kind of like Trotsky in early pictures of the Soviet Communist Politburo. In New York, you can be easily overwhelmed by how much success everyone else seems to be having, whereas in LA, everybody publicly fails at some point – even the most successful people. A writer's screenplay may be turned into a major movie, but there's a good chance her next five screenplays won't even get picked up. An actor may star in acclaimed films for two years, then go a decade without work. A musician who has sold well might put out a complete failure of a record – then bounce back with the next one. Experimentation and a grudging familiarity with occasional failure are part of LA's ethos.Maybe I'm romanticizing failure, but when it's shared, it can be emancipating and even create solidarity. Young artists in LA can really experiment, and if their efforts fall short, it's not that bad because their rent is relatively cheap and almost everyone else they know is trying new things and failing, too. There's also the exciting, and not unprecedented, prospect of succeeding at a global level. You can make something out of nothing here. Take Katy Perry. She's a perfectly fine singer who one minute was literally couch surfing and the next was a household name selling out 50,000-capacity stadiums. Or Quentin Tarantino, one minute a video clerk, the next minute one of the most successful writer/directors in history. Los Angeles captures that strange, exciting and at times delusional American notion of magical self-invention. From "Brain Droppings," a book of essays by comedian George Carlin, who was born in New York and died in LA (1998): Concerning L.A. versus New York: I have now lived half my life in each of America's two most hated, feared, and envied cities, and you want to know something? There's no comparison. New York even has a better class of assholes. Even the lames in New York have a certain appealing, dangerous quality. One thing I find appealing in California is the emphasis on driving. I like to drive, I'm skillful at it, and I do it aggressively. And I don't mean I scream at people or flash them the finger. I simply go about my passage swiftly and silently, with a certain deliberate, dark efficiency. In the land of the unassertive, the aggressive man is king. I hope you can tell, the Apple is still number one in my heart. I'm so chauvinistic, I even root for New York to raise more money than Los Angeles in the Arthritis Telethon. And we usually do.California: bordering always on the Pacific and sometimes on the ridiculous. So, why do I live here?Because the sun goes down a block from my house. [embedded content]A quote from Brooklyn-born writer Jonathan Lethem, who permanently relocated to Los Angeles, in an interview with the New York Times (2011):"I do love New York, but it's also unbearable to me in some ways, and I compulsively leave it behind. It's not the best place to write. The mental traffic level is very high there. Here you have traffic problems; there, you have mental traffic problems." From "The Exile Of The Bohemians,"an obituary of sorts for the Manhattan and San Francisco art scenes — and a cautionary nod to the one in Los Angeles — by music writer Ian Port for Radio Silence (2015):
The challenge facing urban bohemias in the 21st century is a different kind of conflict from previous eras. It’s the rising demand for newly fashionable—and, in this country, relatively limited—urban space. American bohemians are in a state of slow-motion flight, perpetually facing the threat of exile at the hands of wealthier people attracted by the products of their lifestyle. Whatever this means for the established system of art production—in which bohemia has been a key incubator of talent—it clearly erodes the vibrancy and character of the country’s greatest metropolises. And it begs deeper consideration of how we allocate the finite and long-undervalued resource of dense urban space.Can Paris-style bohemias exist in more spread-out environments—or even in suburbs? The current migration of artists to cities like Los Angeles, Portland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit suggests that they can. The northeast side of LA, in particular, is ringed with now semi-bohemian neighborhoods like Echo Park, Silverlake, and Highland Park. There, one must drive a car (or ride a bike) to visit a café or see a concert, and life is lived more in private spaces than public ones. Though the staples of bohemia are present, it’s hard to believe that some price won’t be paid for the absence of the active street life that has so inspired artists from the days of Hernani forward. Sharing a sidewalk with a diversity of people is a vastly different experience from sharing a freeway with them.The LA sprawl isn’t necessarily detrimental. It offers inspiration of its own kind, along with more of the cheap space a bohemian community needs. But if it seems there should be more room for an influx of artists (and the gentrifying professional classes behind them) without utterly displacing the ethnic and working-class communities that have dwelled there for decades, that isn’t quite proving true. Even amid the endless boulevards of LA—or the supposedly empty expanses of Detroit—there are families with decades of history in the neighborhood whose ability to stay is threatened by the new arrivals. The same troubled process occurs again and again. Artists, looking for cheap space, move into inexpensive neighborhoods, beginning a transformation that seems inevitably to result in the displacement of the original residents, followed by the artists, in favor of the wealthy. Without economic and ethnic diversity, without both working people and artists, cities calcify into museum exhibits, tourist destinations, and homogenous country clubs for the wealthy. In an important way, they die. A quote from NYC art mogul Jeffrey Deitch, who had just been appointed director of LA's Museum of Contemporary Art but has since moved back to New York, in an interview with the New York Times (2011): "I drove around Echo Park, Silver Lake, Highland Park, and a lot of this reminds me of New York in the 1970s, where artists lived in real interesting neighborhoods near each other, and the rents aren't really that high. Compared to New York City, compared to London, the rents here are affordable. A studio space that in Brooklyn would be $6,000 a month you can get here for $1,000." From "NYC To LA To NYC To LA, Ad Infinitum," a parody by Cirocco Dunlap for the New Yorker (2016): When I realized that New York was a cesspit filled with the viscera of broken dreams, I decided that the time had come for me to move to beautiful, sunny Los Angeles.When I arrived in LA and realized that it was creatively dead, had a withered husk for a soul, and considered ombré the height of culture, I took the first plane back to New York.Of course, my plane landed in a sea of overstressed, overworked rat kings fornicating with cockroaches and three of my exes. So I bought a used Prius and drove cross-country straight to LA, because in LA people go on hikes. From the classic New York City film Annie Hall, by Woody Allen (1977): Rob: Get the hell out of this crazy city.Alvy Singer: Forget it.Rob: We move to sunny LA. All of show business is out there.Alvy Singer: You keep bringing it up, but l don't want to live in a city where the only cultural advantage is you can make a right turn on a red light. [In California]Annie Hall: It's so clean out here.Alvy Singer: That's because they don't throw their garbage away, they turn it into television shows. [embedded content] From "Leaving Los Angeles," a collection of LA observations by NYC person Meghan O'Rourke for the New Yorker (2013): A parlor game played by pretty much any New Yorker temporarily living in Los Angeles: a running tally of “How They’re Different.” After spending four months in the land of kale chips, sunshine, and helicopters, my list is almost entirely consumed by thoughts about driving. No. 1 (subjective, of course): Angelenos are terrible drivers compared to New Yorkers. They’re far too patient, calm, and forgiving—which is baffling to the East Coaster who finds herself sitting in the car many more hours of the week than in Manhattan. After all, shouldn’t these extra hours in the car just make everyone tenser, more impatient—more likely to gun through the yellow light, honk indiscriminately? Get over the relaxed driving—perhaps it’s all that medical marijuana in the air, or the vegan lifestyle (too enervated to care?)—and take a walk, and you’ll realize that no one else, like you, is walking hurriedly down the street, arms akimbo, as if they really have to get somewhere; they stroll instead, sucking down a coconut-milk smoothie, yoga mat under the arm. On the East Side, where I live, life is languid and full of the sounds of barking dogs. Pitbulls abound, and Chihuahuas. Bring your earplugs if you wish to have a peaceful walk through the bougainvillea-covered streets, or, if you prefer, take some tranquilizers, so the dogs, ready for some diversion to give them a sense of purpose, don’t make you jump out of your skin. From "The Joy Of Doing Nothing"by Helen Malmgren, an LA native who tried out New York for a spell but came back in the end, for the Los Angeles Times (2015):
You want to know why I moved back home to Southern California? It has to do with work, and weather, and a certain way of doing nothing.In many ways, I'm a workaholic. I obsess over projects, sleep too little, miss meals and drag my laptop everywhere, on every vacation. But I also grew up during the '70s and '80s in Santa Monica, where we learned — I would even say we perfected — a particular approach to doing nothing. It went like this: Lie on the beach. Feel the sun on your eyelids. Hear steps approaching in the sand. Hear steps fading away. Shift your leg a little. Flip. Think about nothing.I'm not talking about meditating, or working on a tan. I'm talking about letting yourself drift, effortlessly, through a little bit of excellent weather before returning to your daily life.Honestly, I'm not sure why this is so important to me now. I think it's related to feeling like you're still a kid, no matter how old you get or how much work you have to do.I left Santa Monica to become a journalist in New York. New Yorkers never do nothing. Whenever I tried to slip away and do nothing in Manhattan, I always just ended up on my phone, telling someone I'd be back at my computer shortly.Eventually, my work took me all over the world. I saw amazing places, unforgettable places. But I never saw anyplace where people would just drop whatever they were doing and zone out for a while in the sunshine, the way we do in Southern California. There are the siesta cultures, of course, but siestas usually involve eating and napping — a beautiful tradition, but not quite what I'm talking about here. From "Why I Am Leaving New York City," a brilliant piece of comedy by Mallory Ortberg for the Toast (2014):
I remember the days when pigeons died without melting into the sidewalk, then re-forming several blocks away with an extra black band around their necks. They just died. Whose New York City is this?I spent all my money on hand-pulled marshmallows, but then a wizard took them, so now I don’t even have that. New York City took my marshmallows. From "Hello to All That: Why I'm Staying in New York Until I Die," a contrarian take by Zachary Lipez for Vice (2015): Apparently the streets of LA are paved with artisanal, locally sourced cheese, and former NYC residents are falling in love with what the Times calls LA's "scruffy bohemian spirit and laid-back mood." I say go with God, young Fievels. I will not engage in cross-coastal slander as the notion that one town is better than the other is, on the face of it, absurd. I don't hate LA. I like to go there and hang out in the sun with New Yorkers (who tend to gather and congeal in an expat smugness that I find appealing/bracing). I also don't buy the notions of the city being inherently vapid. Too much good thinking and genuine profundity has come out of LA artists (from Fleetwood Mac to Octavia Butler) to dismiss Angelenos as being the sun-soaked, THC-devoted, water-bugging-on-the-surface-of-their-own-existence Californicators that they sometimes portray themselves as. Leaving New York for a merely more comfortable life would seem like such a betrayal of the city, a betrayal of my younger, mostly (or somewhat) harmless delusions. And while I have no problems with you people now leaving, I would like to ask a few favors: First, take Vampire Weekend with you; second, don't blame the gentrification you caused for your leaving if you're not from here (you sound like a lifelong cokehead railing against the cartels after he gets sober); finally, please don't write a "Leaving New York" essay. It makes us suspect that that was your plan all along. From "I Love It When You Leave New York,"a very New Yorky farewell note by Kate Dries for Jezebel (2016): In their attempts to make themselves feel better about not wanting to hack it here, the thing the authors of these essays don’t acknowledge is that they are giving those of us who stay a gift. The easiest analogy I have is: When you’re not fond of the dinner being served, you’re just leaving more for the the people who do want it. Feel free to leave, I say (even feel free to write about it; however, unless bored or forced, I will not read it). Make room for the willing, as one less person in this hot trash city who doesn’t want to be here is a happier place for all of us. Take it from my good friend Kara Brown, who has left New York for Los Angeles but does not comment on the supposed superiority of her choice except to say (when asked), “It’s pretty chill.” From "LA Vs. New York: Kids Edition," a set of telling street interviews with children from both cities for Jimmy Kimmel Live (2015): Q: What do you think about people from New York?A: They're kinda cranky sometimes. They kind of ignore you when you go there.
A: People are crazy.
A:Very nasty. [Q: What kind of nasty things are there?] Like rats. And a baseball team. Q: What do you think about people from LA?A: Not really on the bright side. They're not that bright.
A: I think they're mostly into plastic surgery, because they really want to look perfect.
A: Slow. [embedded content]This story has been updated. Lead photo by Simone Wilson/Patch. Graphics courtesy of LinkedIn
Get free real-time news alerts from the Hollywood Patch.Thanks for your feedback! Now share it with your friends!Thanks for your feedback. Originally published August 7, 2017. More from Hollywood Patch
Comments
Post a Comment