What Is A Neighborhood?

This is the first part of a two part essay, the second part of which will be published next week on March 24, 2022

What is a neighborhood? 

Is it a collection of buildings, roads, walkways, street lights?

Is it a group of people living in proximity to one another?

Is it an accumulation of histories, memories, some inked into the public record, others lost to time?

When I first moved into my neighborhood in 2012, I was a whole person with a whole life coming from a whole other state. I’d just turned 24 and I had come here for graduate school without much knowledge of Los Angeles, its neighborhoods, its ecologies. I settled on a small one-bedroom apartment across from an elementary school in East Hollywood because it was right next to the train line that could bring me to my new campus, USC, and because it had a small yard inside of a larger bungalow court. I’d never lived in an apartment with a yard, let alone a yard with an orange tree in it. It was over my budget but so was everything I’d looked at in this very expensive city. At least this place was quiet, low key, full of plants, near transit, and willing to immediately take my deposit check.

Every Friday morning in my new apartment, I’d lie in my bed and listen to the sound of the nearby elementary school’s administrator announcing that week’s star students over the intercom. After each name, I’d hear an eruption of small cheers from the students, their little hands clapping in unison. I loved this ritual. Hearing these kids yell excitedly for each other—whether in earnest or by sheer force of social expectation—made me feel like part of something. I clapped softly along with them sometimes, mimicking being in the classroom myself, remembering the feeling of being a child in my own elementary school 1,019 miles from here. Friday morning announcements became a routine I knew, a detail I associated with my new life in my new home, a part of my neighborhood. But I wasn’t necessarily part of a neighborhood, or at least I wasn’t part of the larger community that exists in my neighborhood. I was a single plot point in my own world, navigating a new life, trying to make connections, mostly returning alone to my small apartment, disconnected. My life in my new neighborhood was one-dimensional. I wandered through its streets, photographing its idiosyncrasies—the lighting bureau with its piles of lamp posts and its big yellow trucks glowing bright against a darkening sky at sunset, hummingbirds perched on razor wire, palm fronds that delicately framed the moon. I memorized the train schedule, drove in loops for nearly an hour in failed searches for parking on nights when I took my car out to other neighborhoods to see the small handful of people I knew in this city. I couldn’t have told you the name of more than a couple living beings within a 10 mile radius of me for the first few months. 

Slowly, I started to recognize people I’d see often. Mostly neighbors in the bungalow courtyard complex I lived in. There was this woman Michelle and her boyfriend whose name I forget and their dog Kingston who I called Ghost Dog because he was big and all white and quiet and would just watch me from his yard, which was directly across from mine. Bungalow courtyard complexes are conducive to community making in that they are shaped like a horseshoe, leaving that small, empty outdoor space between apartments open for all kinds of interactions to occur. I’d occasionally glimpse another neighbor as he sat on his front steps with a cigarette in one hand and an iPad in another. I didn’t know these people, but we couldn’t exist in our complex without constantly seeing one another. I thought maybe, in this way, connections would grow. But cigarette iPad guy moved out and then Michelle & Boyfriend & Ghost Dog moved out. Followed by a lot of the people who had lived in that building when I’d arrived. New people moved in. I didn’t know their names either. They’d stay for a year and move out as well. No one was here long.

Growing up in the suburbs of Colorado, I lived in a neighborhood where most of the neighbors were close with the other people on their street. Our neighborhood was very homogeneous, consisting almost entirely of white upper-middle class residents. Hundreds of nuclear families in single family homes in the classic suburban tract housing style. Tract housing communities are not very conducive to community building, as they often don’t include any local businesses, and rarely include local services or attractions around which neighbors could gather. Instead, the homogeneity of the population, in conjunction with the proximity of the homes to one another, is what brings people together.

In the early days of my childhood, despite the less-than-communal structure of tract housing, the neighborhood kids and I developed extensive networks of play. Our parents would share carpooling duties, would meet for dinners at a local restaurant, or would stand outside gossiping in the streets at dusk while the street lights slowly came on around them. It felt like a community. But in service to homogeneity, there was a Home Owners Association, an HOA that mediated our lives together. It told us which color we could paint our houses and what our landscaping could look like and it became the default forum in which disputes were mediated (and by mediated I mean someone would report someone else for some code violation and then the HOA would send a letter threatening to fine that person if they didn’t adhere to the code). 

We were a community with intermediaries. Rules and regulations we made for each other so that everyone would feel like they had some kind of control over the neighborhood they called home. In this way, despite the emotional intimacy we once shared, our relationships felt two-dimensional and transactional to me, since their otherwise organic nature was punctuated by a mediating body to which other people snitched on each other for having grass that grew too long, cars parked where they shouldn’t be, or picnic tables other neighbors deemed “unsightly.” And while my parents never utilized the HOA to make complaints, they were certainly the recipients of anonymous complaints that came from neighbors who did not know how to handle conflict without an institutional authority, so the neighborliness of our neighborhood felt disingenuous.  

My understanding of neighborhood living, informed by my upbringing, was two-dimensional at best by the time I moved to East Hollywood. And my relationship with my new neighborhood grew to be two-dimensional as well, somewhat resembling what I had known as a kid, but without the homogeneity or the HOA. Two years into living here, I adopted a dog and subsequently befriended other neighbors with dogs. We would let our dogs tire each other out by running them around in our bungalow courtyard. Sometimes we would exchange dog care services when one person went out of town. My dog started taking up residence in a few different apartments in my complex. Some days she’d be at Caitlin’s place. Other days she’d be with Jess & Bryan. Other times, I’d be the one to host neighbor dogs, much to my dog’s delight. Soon, neighbors with dogs were filling our shared courtyard space and while we watched our dogs play, we’d also drink a few beers, maybe some wine. Eventually we started feeding each other. Started throwing small apartment complex happy hours. People without dogs would hear us outside and join us. My dog learned how to jump the short fences that separated all our little yards. Eventually she lived everywhere. At any given moment, if she wasn’t with me, she was in one of the twelve apartments in my complex. And my apartment was full of the dogs of others, too. 

Finally, there came a time when the dogs became incidental to our bungalow community. People started living in the complex longer. Two years, three, four. We began to witness whole phases of each others’ lives unfold. Friends and family of tenants would visit and they’d be greeted by a community. We BBQed and sat on the courtyard steps for hours talking and laughing. We knew intimate things about each other. People fell in love. People got divorced. We watched each other chase our dreams, we watched each other fail, watched each other succeed. I had never felt so connected to or supported by a community before. And while everyone had different boundaries and shared themselves and their time with each other in different ways, there was no HOA to report to, and instead there was a feeling of safety and trust. I’m not saying we all loved each other. Some of us didn’t even particularly like each other. But we lived together, three-dimensionally, exchanging resources but also sustaining a level of emotional intimacy, constantly in relation to one another.

We had this one neighbor. She lived in the complex for maybe six years and she was insufferable. She had three little dogs, and one day she came home from work to find that one of them had died from ingesting a toxin. She screamed so loud we all heard her. Within 30 minutes, two neighbors were driving her and her remaining dogs to the vet while three other neighbors started cleaning her apartment, ridding it of the signs of tragedy her dog’s death had wrought. Someone did her laundry, another mopped her floors. Someone left her flowers. By the time she returned home from the vet, her house was clean and tokens of sympathy awaited. We didn’t even like her. She wasn’t kind. But she was a person and she was suffering and we were there, her neighbors, so we did what we could. 

When the pandemic hit nearly eight years into my living in the bungalows, the community we’d built in our complex helped us to stay sane. We were all trapped at home, but we could share outdoor space safely. I made us a massive group chat and a spreadsheet where people could list the resources and skills they had to offer. I went through a hard break up and even though I couldn’t hug anyone, I could stand outside and be held simply by the proximity of people who cared about me. One of the couples who lived in the building was supposed to get married. When they had to cancel their wedding and decided instead to elope alone at the courthouse, the rest of us came together to throw them a small outdoor wedding party in our courtyard for just neighbors. One neighbor did people’s hair and make-up. Another DJ’d. I took the wedding photos. Others decorated with flowers and lights. We drank and danced and ate cake outside at a small distance from one another until deep into the night. 

What does it mean to live in a neighborhood? 

To fall asleep surrounded by a hundred other beating hearts sleeping just ten, twenty, fifty feet away in their own beds in their own apartments, all of which are connected through concrete and wire and plumbing and the infrastructures that make up a city?

My apartment complex is just one of a small handful of bungalow courts on our block. Like many other blocks, we also share the street with some other multi-story apartment complexes, some unhoused neighbors, and a few commercial and municipal buildings. The other complexes on the block are largely filled with families or the remnants of families that have shared this street for decades. As you might have guessed from my description of my apartment complex with its many people and dogs and no children, we were the anomaly on the street. Not just an accidental or coincidental anomaly, though. We were an anomaly by design, an anomaly created by real estate investors who simultaneously projected and thus created shifts in the racial and economic demographics of the neighborhood. While my apartment complex isn’t filled entirely with white residents, it resembles my childhood neighborhood in that it is filled with residents of a similar economic class. None of us have a lot of money, but we are culturally and sometimes economically different from the many working class Latinx families who have lived on this block for decades. 

I admittedly had no idea what gentrification was or meant when I moved to the neighborhood in 2012. Back then, I was living one-dimensionally. I was thinking of myself, of my life, my needs as a grad student. My needs and my choices converged to land me in my apartment on this street in East Hollywood. I showed up on the block some day in mid-July 2012, signed a lease in a place I knew nothing about, and stood outside my new building for a long time trying to orient myself. Two neighbor kids from the building next door, one in his teens and one in  his early twenties, approached me. They asked if I was moving in and why. They told me the building had just been renovated a year prior. They told me about growing up in the neighborhood, what they loved (the friends, the parties), what they didn’t (the cops, the gang). They gave me parking tips and told me where the local grocery stores were. They showed me a slab of concrete in front of my apartment complex and explained that mounted on that slab of concrete used to be a payphone. The payphone was taken down, according to them, because too many people had been shot there, but the foundation remained literally cemented into the street’s architecture. They introduced me to their dog, their mom, their friends. They invited me to their kickbacks in front of their building. And then one day, the woman who’d owned their building died and the building was bought by some big investment company who offered the boys’ mom cash for keys in a language she didn’t speak. She signed something the boys had told her not to sign. At least this is the story as I know it. Within a few months, they were gone, moved to East LA. 

The same thing that happened to them happened to at least three other families in their complex. Slowly people were being bought out. Apartments were renovated one at a time. The garden full of herbs and peppers that lined the front of their building was torn out and replaced with massive succulents. A gate was installed at the courtyard’s entry point. The block got quiet. No more parties. Half the block’s young kids seemed to have disappeared over the course of a summer, leaving mostly aging parents, a few new small families, and an influx of young professionals with dogs. 

What is a neighborhood?

Is it a bunch of people who made a bunch of decisions that led them all to the same place?

Who gets to make decisions about where they live?

Who gets to make decisions about who has to leave?

(read part two)