Wow Los Angeles Looks More Slummy Than The Bronx

Coming in a year later—you probably won't see this & I actually haven't seen the movie, lol—but I know that part of LA very well. In the 80s & early 90s Downtown east of Spring Street had got to be quite a massive skid row (& south of Little Tokyo). Comparing it with the South Bronx as a zone of urban despair is really pretty apt. There developed huge homeless encampments along Sixth Street, Wall, Boyd, back to the River & under & along some of the bridges.

One time I was in the LA River just past the 6th Street Viaduct shooting pictures at night. As I headed back to my car, a long line of homeless people with shopping carts filed past, entering the river under the same tunnel I had used to drive through. It was a long, silent & eerie procession, to where, I never learned.

Left LA in '94. Been back a few times since. Most recently in 2012, & I couldn't believe how changed Downtown has become. One example, the P&E Building, along 6th & Main, once pretty much in the core of skid row, now boasts a high end food boutique, and apartments marketed to upper middle class renters. All of that area has changed, gentrified, but also become much safer. But because the Midnight & LA Missions are still there, they're still the center for adult homeless in Los Angeles (Hollywood is where the youth go, by & large).

So they have actually "cleaned up the area" to a degree I never would have thought possible in my lifetime.

Now I live in NYC (Brooklyn, not the Bronx), but The Bronx is also much nicer than it was 20 - 30 years ago.