...am always shocked when I visit Los Angeles at how little green space there is -- how, amid league upon league of unending, uniform suburb there is just nowhere to walk in something resembling a natural environment. It is horrible !! The triumph of money-lusting developers over everything that might be called human !!
When I lived in El Lay proper I was going to college. I lived on Sunset Plaza Drive in the 2100 block - so I was pretty high up - higher than the smog line - which I could see below and above said line (gray, brown, blue) - imgaine! Blue sky over El Lay - not that those down below could ever see it. The ambient air temp was always 10°F cooler than down on Sunset BL - just five miles down the road.
Anyway, there was a cliff-dropoff across the road from where the house where my partner and I lived. "Somehow" the property was approved by the city of El Lay to be built upon. Never mind that said lots were always deemed "unbuildable" because all it took was to pay-off the right person/people in the El Lay planning department and a
developer built three
spec homes after dividing the property into three different lots - you know the type: Built on speculation that once completed they would sell at over $1m apiece (in 1989 prices!) because of the foundation pilings had to be drilled deep, deep into the hillside of these cantilevered homes.
This was my very first experience with graft and payola.
Gotta love smELL Lay.
