WHO WE ARE--Even though the San Fernando Valley is on the rise these days—a super successful CicLAvia, another one coming up, a movement for a light rail line —residents there are the most pessimistic of any in LA County about the direction in which their neighborhood and county are headed, says the Daily News.
The California Community Foundation, the USC Dornsife school, and the LA Times polled the region and found that 55 percent of the respondents who live in the Valley think LA County is moving in the wrong direction. (The countywide average was 49 percent).
That same amount of residents who responded—55 percent—feel that the Valley "will be a worse place to live in five years." Maybe they've got a negative outlook because they don't seem to trust the people they share the neighborhood with: just 24 percent of SFV respondents say they trust their neighbors, compared to 33 percent of polltakers in the San Gabriel Valley or 30 percent in the South Bay. (The countywide average was 30 percent.)
A rep for the firm that conducted the poll gives another possible reason for the Valley's low positivity: white people. He says that the Valley had the largest percentage of white respondents—59 percent; "about 15 percentage points more than average for the county"—and that in this poll white participants had a tendency to be more "pessimistic" in their responses. "White people were less optimistic, less trusting, less engaged; those were our general findings throughout the county," he says.
He also noted that overall, the Valley tends to be a bit more conservative than the rest of the county, and that since the county "is run principally by Democrats," that's another reason they might feel like the outlook is bleak.
(Bianca Barragan is associate editor at CurbedLA.com, where this piece was first posted.) Photo credit: LA Daily News.
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 82
Pub: Oct 9, 2015
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