Domestic bliss

The arc of gentrification goes from hip to Banana Republic in Christopher Hawthorne's witty summation of development trends downtown. This arc is a trajectory of decline - from one set of desires thought to be authentic (the hip) to another set thought to be false (mass retailing). "Once the train of gentrification gets moving," Hawthorne warns, "a kind of economic gravity takes over and the train rolls unstoppingly downhill."Except, Hawthorne notes - seeing a silver lining in a very dark cloud - the hipness train downtown has a long way to go before the awful terminus of Banana Republic and a Cheesecake Factory. The reason is the near collapse locally of both the housing and retail economies. The bust in 2007 "managed to freeze downtown's transformation from sleepy to energized - and freeze it at a particularly appealing spot."

For Hawthorne, downtown gets a stay of gentrification by virtue of stalled sales and the subsequent conversion of condominium projects into rental units. This pause promises to bring downtown "more teachers and designers" to rent those units and fewer Westsiders (I guess) looking to buy a noir-adjacent pied-à-terre.

"Teachers and designers" in sufficiently large numbers sustain a real neighborhoods, Hawthorne believes. And "enough" of this sort of gentrification apparently preserves some authenticity. "Too much" leads to the false pleasures of a Cheesecake Factory. Somewhere on this scale of desire is Trader Joe's - the chain store that downtowners, hip and unhip, long for but don't have.

What Hawthorne calls a "sweet spot" in the transformation of downtown, I'd call its state of domestication, which is the nagging question of the American West generally. In an often inhospitable landscape, far from sustaining community institutions, with limited resources (at least initially), how did the West become domesticated? And has it become our home?

Since at least the 1840s, with the rise of women's magazines and their emphasis on reforming domestic life, Americans have been anxious (often made anxious) about what we call home. (To put it in simple terms, "I'm sure my domestic preferences are right, but I'm judgmental about yours.") Most of the commentary on Hawthorne's essay follows that familiar pattern.

What interests me in the domestication of downtown is the durability of that process in the context of Southern California. Appropriation and reuse have always driven how we make our home here, from the Tong-va rancherias of the 1780s through the repopulation of downtown in the 1990s. Gentrification anywhere always make use of the debris of a previous era of domestication, but in downtown Los Angeles, over 160 years, we've been domesticating the same neighborhood again and again and only provisionally finding a "sweet spot" that answers our longing for home.

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