Daily Trojan Magazine
Are we still California dreaming?
Checking the pulse on the City of Angels.
By MJ MANNING
The City of Angels often gets a bad rap for a myriad of reasons. Whether it be concerns due to its high cost of living, fears about its crime rate or complaints about the people who inhabit it, the conversation around Los Angeles seems to be unfairly negative.
This sentiment isn’t purely colloquial — you see it all over the media, from the White House, where President Donald Trump claimed L.A. was a complete warzone over peaceful protests this past summer, to famous movies that mythologize the vapid socialities of L.A. and the parties they threw with pictures like “Clueless” (1995) and “Valley Girl” (1983). L.A. remains a highly fabled town, for better or worse.
Perry Johnson, a lecturer of communication who teaches “Los Angeles: Communication and Culture,” noted that the stereotypes of L.A. often precede it.
“[There are] stereotypes of Los Angeles being superficial, or not being an intellectual city, being kind of vapid, being a city where people are fake, or they just care about getting famous,” Johnson said. “[That’s] used as a point of criticism, like, it’s an unserious place.”
Mariella Faura, a junior studying public relations and advertising and an L.A. native, said premature criticism often dominates conversations about Angelenos.
“There’s nothing that bugs me more than when people here at USC are like, ‘L.A. is so fake,’ and ‘L.A. is so this,’ and ‘L.A. is that,’” Faura said. “I don’t know who they’re interacting with, but I would definitely define it as a misconception.”
Other cliches cast on the City of Angels, Johnson said, include that everyone is “super cool and casual and laid back, and everyone smokes weed and sings in the canyon.”
“Those types of stereotypes have a disproportionate weight in terms of what Los Angeles is viewed as,” Johnson said. “Some of that is a negative for some and a positive for others, depending on who you are and what you’re looking for.”
Despite these misconceptions and stereotypes, people still flock to L.A. in search of opportunity, change or even love. From Hollywood to your local corner store, L.A. is a city built on dreams — dreams of freedom, dreams of success and dreams of community.
Oscar Garza, director of Annenberg’s Specialized Journalism Arts and Culture graduate program, came to California from San Antonio, Texas, in pursuit of both love and a career in journalism.
“I moved to California for a relationship,” Garza said. “I didn’t really have this career path laid out, and so I tell people that I had this accidental career — I’ve kind of been in the right place at the right time in a few instances. … I ended up coming to work for the [Los Angeles Times], and they transferred me here to Los Angeles from San Diego.”
Faura’s grandparents were Cuban refugees, and while they initially fled to Miami, they decided to take a chance on the Golden State.
“My great-grandfather and grandmother and their family decided to spend the last $100 they had on a car, and they were like, ‘Let’s drive to L.A., ‘why not?’” Faura said.
According to a study published in 2024 by USC Dornsife’s Equity Research Institute, L.A. County was home to at least 3.5 million immigrants in 2021, 18% of whom were naturalized and 8% undocumented.
“[L.A. has] the biggest Mexican population anywhere outside of Mexico City,” said Sarah Portnoy, a professor in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures. “Since June, with the [United States Immigration and Customs] raids, [L.A. has been] pretty scary for anyone without papers … You go work at the car wash, and you get picked up and kidnapped, basically. … Yet, if you’re upper-middle class and white, you’re just fine.”
It’s worth noting that being undocumented isn’t a federal crime; rather, it is a civil offense.
According to the American Civil Liberties Union, “the act of being present in the United States in violation of immigration laws is not, standing alone, a crime.” However, “federal immigration law does criminalize some actions that may be related to undocumented presence in the United States.”
Capitalizing on L.A.’s already polarizing public perception, the Trump administration has used harmful language like “criminal alien” or “illegal” to socially justify the use of extreme force in “war-torn” L.A. to the broader American public.
“There was a pretty famous video of a community member who was arrested and was being zip-tied by ICE,” said Vincent Vasquez, a junior majoring in music industry and a Los Angeles native. “They had shoved him to the ground right around the corner from my girlfriend’s house. … You’d hear all the time about ICE being everywhere.”
In the wake of the recent ICE raids on L.A., residents from all over the city got together to protest ICE and the federal government’s actions toward their community.
“I think it [proved] that we’re willing to go to bat for other people that we might not know,” Faura said. “We’re very territorial when it comes to our city. That’s one thing — if you’re gonna mess with us, you’re gonna experience that tenfold. We’re gonna resist, and we’re not gonna just take it sitting down.”
According to Vasquez, it is from these very same communities — often oppressed minorities — where some of the strongest senses of community and culture come from.
“I remember growing up and we all knew just about everything that was going on with conflicts within each other’s neighborhoods,” Vasquez said about his predominantly Mexican community in East L.A.
The city is also home to thriving queer communities, especially in neighborhoods like West Hollywood, where over 40% of its residents identify as LGBT. For Faura, she’s found her own queer community closer to campus.
“I would describe my community to be a group of people who are really supportive and kind and would be willing to do anything for me,” Faura said. “My community is basically the queer community, and we’re just there for each other.”
Yet despite this strong sense of community throughout L.A., pressures like rising property taxes and California’s famous natural disasters may be driving people out of the city, Portnoy said.
“As somebody who works on social justice issues around food and housing, I think we’re all concerned about the effect of rising gentrification and housing costs,” Portnoy said. “With the Olympics coming up, especially right around USC, many local people might get displaced, or their rent [might go] up so much they can’t stay in their housing.”
While the 2028 Summer Olympics brings the promise of great change in L.A., like improved public transportation infrastructure, it may come at a cost to L.A.’s most vulnerable, Johnson said.
“Oftentimes communities that are already the most marginalized are the most impacted and have the least power to speak,” Johnson said. “The city [is] very likely to just relocate unhoused populations in order to uphold a particular image for the media coverage that will come.”
With rising housing costs and a recently declining unhoused population rate, L.A. has the opportunity to build the infrastructure to make lasting change. The cost of living proving to be a major barrier to this change.
The sales tax rate in the city of L.A. is 9.75%, 2.25% above the national average, while the average rent for an apartment sits around $2,163 a month, compared to the national average of $1,493, according to Zillow. With the national median personal income being $45,140, the average rent in L.A. eats up $25,956 a year, more than half of a person’s average income, compared to $17,916 a year with the national average rent.
“The cost of living is a lot here, and I think for some people [there is] no choice but to leave,” Faura said. “Because if not, they’re going to go completely bankrupt.”
To combat the rising cost of living, some are taking action to alleviate the situation for their fellow Angelenos.
Portnoy has her students participate in local nonprofit organizations like Hunger Action Los Angeles and their Market Match program, which provides additional money for locals who receive CalFresh to use at some farmer’s markets. The students also work with the Garden School Foundation, an organization that teaches students the importance of growing, cooking and compositing their own food.
To Mathilde Espinosa, a senior studying history, the people are truly the heart of the city, and finding ways to envelop yourself in the local goings-on helps you appreciate the city on a deeper level.
“It’s a city that you need to know [in order] to love and you need to have a lot of patience exploring,” said Espinosa. “The city, to me, is so mythological. I think it stands in for a lot and represents so many things … There are so many possibilities, and I don’t mean career possibilities; on a random day, you have so many opportunities to have just life-changing experiences.”
It’s commonly said around campus that students at USC live in a bubble isolated from the rest of the City of Angels; if one is searching for community in L.A., Espinosa said that they need to look further than just the red brick confines of University Park Campus or tourist attractions.
“Even when [students] do decide to leave, it’s to very artificial places in L.A. like the Grove, where it is literally a bubble,” she said. “[It’s] just an example of people going to a place that doesn’t even represent what the city is.”
Whether it’s taking the train, bus or car, there are many options for students to immerse themselves in L.A. and get a better understanding of what the city is truly like.
“L.A. is so spread out, it’s a city that’s hard to get to know,” Johnson said. “Echo Park is different than Highland Park is different than Eagle Rock is different than Huntington Park is different than Boyle Heights is different than Santa Monica is different than Venice. But all of these places comprise what we think of as L.A.”
While the city’s reputation may precede it, many of its storied attractions and culture have been lost to time — such as the fabled Garden of Allah Hotel on Sunset Boulevard, demolished in 1959, or more recently, The Friars Club, a favorite of the Rat Pack, was demolished in 2011. The January wildfire in Altadena burned down the historic Andrew McNally House and the Robert Bridges House in the Palisades.
“This is a city that’s so bad at preserving its own history,” Espinosa said. “My dad would always tell me these really cool stories about hanging out on the Sunset Strip in the ’90s and all these places I wanted to go … Those things are just gone. But I think what’s wonderful is [that] at least L.A. is interesting enough to have those memories made … even if physically those spaces aren’t there anymore.”
But L.A. remains a city of possibilities with countless memories to be made. For the student who can get beyond the borders of the Department of Public Safety zone, there is an entire world of cultures and communities to appreciate.
From seeing world-class talent play at historic venues, to strolling through the Griffith Observatory or Grand Central Market, to even something as basic as shopping on Melrose Avenue — there’s so much more to L.A. than just University Park Campus.
“A great thing about Los Angeles is that the stories never end,” Garza said. “There’s just so much to explore.”
