The Bloom is Off the City of Roses

Pasadena, California was once paradise within a paradise. Now it's a graveyard for the California dream.

Downtown Pasadena is a dumpster fire.

A few weeks ago, when we were all in bed, an ear-splitting roar woke up my daughter. It kept getting louder and louder—a jet engine somehow outside our window. We ran to the yard and looked up: there were three news helicopters that looked like they were hovering directly over our bedroom. “The Feds finally got me,” I joked.

I checked the news:

I love a little gang warfare in the spring time!

Pasadena and Altadena are, even now, better places to live than, say, Hollywood, or anywhere in mid-city Los Angeles. You could escape of the hellish urbanism, the crush of tourists, the blight. You were blessed with beautiful mountains (now charred) and block after block of gracious 100-year-old Craftsman homes (now decimated). It is still “affordable,” at least compared to Silverlake or Brentwood or Venice. It has the Rose Bowl and Cal Tech and the Rose Parade and the Arroyo and easy access to everywhere (except the beach: that’s a haul).

It was a nice escape for my family from the sweltering San Fernando Valley and the overpriced, utterly insufferable westside, where we’d grown up.

But I have to ask: Is it over? Or rather: yeah, it’s over. But can it come back?

The Fire and the Ash

And of course in January everything north of New York Drive, the lovely residential street that marks the northern border of Pasadena and the southern edge of Altadena, burned to the ground. Overnight 9,000 of the most beautiful old Craftsman and Spanish homes you’ve ever seen vaporized to dust.

A few days ago I took this video on a walk north into Altadena:

(Okay, it wasn’t kale: you don’t have to tell me. I believe it was chard. And it’s not a crane, it’s a bulldozer or something. I was traumatized, my bad.)

I want people to return to live in these cozy neighborhoods. It’s going to kill me to see the fancy new construction that will inevitably replace the irreplaceable.

The beaux-arts world of artisans who spared no expense to add custom, one-of-a-kind architectural details to regular home for regular people—that is gone forever, for over nine thousand families.

Downtown Pasadena Down Bad

The saga of the YMCA building in downtown Pasadena represents every single thing wrong with this city, and utterly incompetent liberal California governance in general. The fools in charge will never miss an opportunity to miss and opportunity.

Pasadena is blessed with a City Hall building that is too good for the city. I have no idea what it’s for, but it’s lovely to look at. But the open plazas all around the building have been abandoned by the city and turned over to the growing hordes of homeless vagrants and disheveled men who loiter on every corner, day drinking, in the shadow of City Hall, around the corner from the city jail.

The historic YWCA and YMCA buildings, immediately to the west of City Hall, sit on a broad, sunny plaza that, in a sane world, would be bustling with tourists and families and residents. But the area is a ghost town. Both historic, architectural masterpieces now lay in shameful disrepair. The YWCA building was built by renowned architect Julia Morgan, the first female graduate of the Ecole de Beaux-Arts in Paris.

The area is now empty of everyone except the stray city employee, shuffling vagrants, and groups of men who loiter outside the stunning, wrecked Young Men’s Christian Association Building, which now operates as a quasi-homeless shelter to the unemployable and unhousable.

Over time, both gracious buildings slowly degraded and were virtually abandoned. The YMCA was turned into a low-income hotel.

The story gets even more sordid from there.

In 2017, the city inexplicably rejected an offer by Kimpton Hotels to buy the YWCA building and reinvigorate the area:

Back in April of 2017, the City Council failed to approve or disapprove a plan by Kimpton Hotels for a luxury boutique hotel project in Civic Center, essentially “pausing” the project. Councilmember Victor Gordo [who is now the mayor] said at the time, that pausing the project—which would mean no permits or construction for the time being, “if ever”—would allow the council and developer to “work together to look at the numbers again,” and make time for the Council to “consider other alternatives” for the historic property.

Naturally, they never considered other alternatives.

Sane people tried again in 2020, when some high-end boutique hotel developers who saw the potential came very close to acquiring it. But some obscure state laws about affordable housing scared off the feckless city officials.

And now, perhaps they are trying again. A few months ago, there was more movement:

The City Council on Monday voted to authorize the City Manager to amend an exclusive agreement with the developer in connection with the development of the historic rehabilitation and construction of the new building located on City-owned property at 78 N. Marengo Ave.

The proposed amendment follows a series of legal and regulatory hurdles. The City Council authorized former City Manager Steve Mermell in November 2020 to enter into an Exclusive Negotiating Agreement (ENA) with HRI for the disposition, development, and financing of the City-owned property.

Negotiations were paused in March 2021 pending resolution of a lawsuit related to the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), surplus property discussions, and the settlement of previous ownership claims.

CEQA is the notorious environmentalist fascist totalitarian government agency whose thugs who have halted progress on every building project in California. CEQA is why we have no high speed trains, and why it takes three years, or ten, or twenty, to get a building permit. CEQA is the reason Altadena will come crawling back instead of roaring back.

All government power in California has been ceded to CEQA, and if that means you have a giant, dilapidated historic building that resembles the worst slums of the inner city in the middle of Pasadena, so be it.

The Crime and the Tents

I’ve posted before about the proliferation of homeless camps up and down Lake Avenue, the main thoroughfare of Pasadena. You can’t drive it without passing a half dozen barefoot, dirt-encrusted zombies unconscious on the sidewalk surrounded by trash. Instead of tasteful wine bars, we get bus stops full of winos openly drinking 40s. Once a tranny meth head wandered down my street and overdosed on my neighbor’s lawn.

And I live in one of the nicer parts of town!

In October of 2021, I was caught in a drive by gang shooting in Pasadena. Literal Crips vs Bloods shoutout, with a Crip taking cover behind my minivan with me inside it. Here’s my account of the shooting:

I arrived at the park to retrieve one of my children from sports practice. As I pulled into the lot, I noticed a group of men hanging around a parked car. My inner systemic racist noticed that they were young, black, dressed like gangbangers, and smoking weed. My inner white privilege told me I should find a different place to park, immediately.

But I convinced myself that there was no way anything bad could happen here, in full daylight, in view of a playground full of kids. I called my husband and told him, “I think I just interrupted a gang meetup. These guys look like they have guns.”

“It’s broad daylight, you’ll be fine,” he said.

Thirty seconds after hanging up with him, I heard the unmistakable sound of gunfire close by. At first I thought I was dreaming.

The shots were very loud, because they were being fired three feet behind my car. The shooter was crouched down and aiming at the guys who had been standing around the parking lot and were now running for their lives. I watched him shoot one man in the stomach. The victim clutched his guts, screaming, and fell to the ground.

I tried to make myself as small as I could. I learned that you can’t get down very far when you’re stuck in the front seat of a minivan. The shooter kept blasting away, and I called my husband back, this time to say goodbye. He was an hour away, totally unable to help me, and I just managed to tell him what was happening. Then I braced myself in case a stray bullet came through my car, prayed, and waited for death.

When the shooting stopped, there was absolute silence. That was the moment I was most afraid, since I assumed the shooter would be searching for a getaway car, and I was the perfect carjacking prospect, since I’d been the only other person dumb enough to park in the lot. Take another car, I silently begged. Please don’t take this one, with the toddler car seats in it. Do you know how expensive those are?

I heard sirens in the distance. I waited on the floor of my car until a cop tapped on my window. As he took my witness statement he told me, “This parking lot is a gang hangout for the Bloods. What in the world are you doing here?” “Trying not to be racist!” I almost said.

Ah, the Bloods, of course. That would explain why the guys running away had been wearing red, and why the shooter wore a blue baseball cap. (The Bloods are one of the two big L.A. gangs; the other is the Crips. In the 1980s, even white kids from the westside couldn’t go out wearing red or blue, since the Bloods wear red, and Crips wear blue. It is as stupid as it sounds, and if you don’t believe me, go watch the Sean Penn movie Colors.)

The cop beckoned for me to get out and look at something behind my car. There were bullet casings all around my car, inches from my tires. “Your car is in the crime scene so we can’t let you leave,” he told me, as another cop strung yellow investigation tape around my parking spot.

Despite all of this, Altadena and Pasadena will eventually rebound, simply because of 1) weather (perfect) and 2) geography (pretty great). These things cannot be destroyed by the weak, foolish liberals in charge, thank God.

The only question is: will I be able to wait?

In a couple years, I might finally be able see what life is like outside of Crazyland.

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—Peachy