yeso
Local surfers have long romanticized Oxnard! There’s a lot of allure to a quiet working class beach town that’s mostly farmland with great waves every winter and a history of having some of the most violent and territorial locals. In general there’s a weird juxtaposition between the quiet beach town feel and the history of gang culture, nardcore, extreme localism etc. It’s being gentrified like everywhere else, though more slowly than places in LA county. Millennials With Money From Other Places seem to be sticking to the eastside and expanding east from there and largely have not recognized that Ventura county exists yet (besides Ojai as a weekend destination where one can wear a felt hat with a wide brim and drink wine). You’re probably for sure the only person in the Midwest who romanticizes it haha.
It’s interesting reading everyone’s thoughts and feelings about LA. More than most places it feels like a place that everyone, including people who have spent very little or no time here, has really strong personal feelings and opinions about. I once went to an artist talk and right at the beginning the person said, “LA doesn’t have history the way the east coast does so you have to make up your own history” which was one of the dumbest things I have ever heard. There’s a ton of diversity and really deep history and culture here. It’s a cool place if you’re not necessarily into mainstream culture and want to go off the beaten path and soak in some of that stuff. I feel fortunate to have gotten to grow up here before social media and gentrification started really blowing things out in the mid 2000s onward. I felt like the Bay Area vs LA thing kind of fizzled out around that time too. One of the benefits of the huge sprawling nature of the place is that it can’t be totally whitewashed and ruined as quickly as more compact cities like SF, so it feels like there will always be pockets and neighborhoods that retain some culture and have normal people living there. For the record, I would call anything in that little rectangle made by freeways “downtown” including the fashion district, little tokyo etc.
