Downtown's Other Face: Foreclosures, Drought and Blight.

DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — At the corner of 5th and Olive, two bags of trash sit in the late afternoon sun of a hot August day. Inside are two aging rodents with underdeveloped backbones—barely supporting their great girth—chewing through the garbage.

Outside the trash bags is the detritus of downtown: the recently resuscitated grass of Pershing Square, the sickly wheeze of throttled loft sales, the gutters filled with water run-off from sidewalks being hosed amid a wilting three-year drought.

Were a journalist to ask about the true state of downtown's real estate condition, they would be handled with jarring hands that would cause a common person to panic so as to help maintain that downtown appears healthy and active to potential loft owners.

While blogging about loft auctions and fashion events brings readers and revenue, the reality of downtown's real estate owners doing whatever they please continues without media scrutiny.

According to those who scamper round Pershing Square, many of the small minds that talk big tend to have only hot air to polish their bluster. The bloviating then floats as far away as west L.A., where the idea is sold that one should move to downtown and become part of what might be considered the dog-walking clientele.

"We don't mind them watering the sidewalks in the morning," said Anon Rat, whose Palm Tree residence is perched over 5th Street at Pershing Square. "It makes for cool mud, washes away the dog piss and brings all the glorious trash of the new residents right to us." Prior to the latest push to sell downtown to people who six years earlier would scoffed at the idea of moving to a place that their great-grandparents might have abandoned several decades earlier, it was only "burrito wrappers and tin foil from two-dollar tacos." Such conditions barely kept us alive, Rat added.

Fengshui Pigeon, Rat's neighbor, recalls those parched times in and around Pershing Square. "You would see a lonely patch of heavily protected grass, with guards chasing people off," lamented Pigeon. "The grass was watered for no other reason than to visually please the people in the tops of the nearby buildings. Then they opened it up and the little lap dogs literally pissed it away."
 

Once the pampered middle-class residents from elsewhere are sold, some as young as in their early 20s, new loft owners discover that the downtown scene is anemic. "What people are buying is yet another attempt to buy a central city core that has been defibrillated for a third or fourth time but may well be at the end of its time," explains Rat, whose east side residence on Hill Street was shorn from its trunk late last year to make way for brighter, shinier and new views.

Anon Rat's Hill Street residence is razed in late 2008.

Sometimes the loft owners simply remove their belongings and purchase another smaller studio, er, loft, and downtown foreclosures are constantly on the rise. "Stories about foreclosure sales are warehoused," Pigeon continued. "Tales of considerable water abuse in the midst of a drought, about illegal billboard blight even as the city sets aside a task force to aggressively pursue taggers, about the housing problems in downtown, are not covered by most downtown media. Such stories are packed away, leaving the monied criminals to escape the heat since the agencies that would pursue them are not pestered by the press to do their jobs."

"They always go after the little guys, while the big dogs make a mess all over the place and get away with all day long," Pigeon quipped as he waddled away to finish his lunch. Rat nodded in agreement before he returned to the sewers. A quick walk around Pershing Square shows that despite the changes brought to downtown, there is still a long way to go.

Comments

[Jane]

Thank you for doing a story on the blight, I mean plight of the rats. You are such a talented and wonderful person. Rats are people too!!

Jane Pigeon

[John "eats a steak for dinner every night" Smith]

The rat in the above picture is so super cute. You need to call PETA right now.

[EL CHAVO!]

Anon Rat is telling it like it is! Cuz really, who needs to know that another yogurt shop is opening up?

[Cum Dogg]

You are the most talented writer I have ever read! I love Eastside LA!