Things to Make Your Brain Hurt

I have many things I want to write about but not a lot of time this week. I have work, as usual, and I also took on a quick freelance assignment which will take up some time after work this week. I do, at some point, want to discuss the recent Brookings Institution study which shows that the middle-class is shrinking dramatically in metropolitan areas across the U.S., with Greater Los Angeles ranked dead last in a survey of 100 American cities in terms of the percentage of middle-class/mixed-income neighborhoods. This is not shocking to me, since LA is both the capital of the entertainment industry, which is the source of an obscene amount of wealth, and also the capital of the working poor – see reports like the United Way of Greater Los Angeles’ Tale of Two Cities: Promise & Peril in Los Angeles. But as I read more about it, I am hit with the very dreadful feeling that Los Angeles, and indeed, many of our urban areas with this kind of extreme divergence, are not going to be very fun places to be in the coming decades if this trend continues. And I am a city gal, for better or worse. I’ll try and post more thoughts about this if/when I have time.