Four days after moving to Los Angeles, I found myself at Bar Flores in Echo Park on a first date. Having lived in multiple European cities in the past years, Hinge has proven to be a tried and tested way to meet people and get to know a city. 

During my freshly arrived dating adventures, I was quickly acquainted with the term “transplant”: people who moved to L.A. (or any major city) from somewhere else in the United States — a domestic spin on the more international “expat.”

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I learned about the Westside/Eastside divisions of the northern part of L.A. county, and their respective starter packs (it essentially goes: beach-loving posh people in the west, entertainment hipsters in the east), and that Bar Flores, in my gentrified Echo Park neighborhood, is a notorious first-date spot, to the local single community’s immense fatigue.

Many transplants pass through L.A., undoubtedly coming here with expectations and ambitions. Queue “Californication” by the Red Hot Chili Peppers and “City of Dreams” by Tyla Yaweh. I see a parallel to Berlin, a socially and ethnically diverse city that has experienced the emergence of a similar large non-native community invading the city in the past decade and a half. 

Since the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, the affordability and freewheeling spirit of the city increasingly attracted artists and alternative partygoers, as well as a historically significant LGBTQIA+ community, creating a perfect storm of culture and hipness possible thanks to the city’s belated development at the hands of geopolitics. Having personally spent two one-and-a-half-year spells in Berlin, the city holds a close place in my heart. 

Already in 2018, some were saying Berlin had peaked and was becoming perversely gentrified. Not only was rent surging — driving many local residents out — but it seemed the city’s spirit had been affected. While Berlin’s popularity has only kept growing, my friends who have lived there since the early 2010s are left to reminisce on a time when the city promised something else than it delivered: young upper-middle-class individuals and businesses with buying power gentrifying the inner city district by district. As they continue this process, the districts of both cities lose what created their appeal in the first place. 

So if Berlin has peaked, what about L.A.? A glance at some 2018 data tracking gentrification throughout Los Angeles County shows the east side matured in its gentrification, with most of the west side in comfortably high-income status. Another glance on the more cheeky Hoodmaps denotes most east-side neighborhoods as “hip” and most west-side neighborhoods as “rich.”

More specific shades of this gentrification are most effectively spread through folk tales. An artist I met at a comedy show in my neighbor’s garage (which for someone who just moved here, felt like a peak L.A. type event), born and raised in Echo Park, told me the place had changed so much just during the past decade. 

Neighboring Silver Lake is famous for its significance in American LGBTQIA+ history and Brooklyn-esque hip status, some claiming the neighborhood peaked in the mid-90s as white yuppies started mixing with its resident Latinos and middle-aged gay men. Illustrating every trend-sensitive gentrification critic’s point is the existence of an Erewhon off Sunset Boulevard and a Shake Shack next to one of Silver Lake’s most historic bars, The Black Cat.

Meanwhile, L.A. County as a whole did shrink in 2023, and there has been a high-profile mini-exodus post-pandemic. But it’s hard to imagine a city so ingrained in global entertainment not continuing to attract talent of all forms. One thing is certain: L.A. attracts a different type of individual than Berlin or whatever the North American equivalent of Berlin is.

I’d bet the archetypical L.A. transplant is more intrigued by celebrity and the good life, the same aspects of the city that made David Bowie call for it to “be wiped off the face of the Earth,” but that is just a hunch. But that is also what gives L.A., the many things it has to offer and its unique flavor. 

Before moving, a good friend from North Carolina told me this city is simply what you make it; he has friends who are excited to be stuck in traffic here because they are stuck in traffic in L.A. Whether that excitement is rooted in the city’s star-studded legend or in freshly moved rose-tinted glasses, I wonder whether there are people who are that excited about sitting on a crowded afternoon subway commute in New York City.