LOS ANGELES DOES NOT REFLECT AMERICA

It's a truism that will come as a surprise to few.

Los Angeles doesn't really reflect the rest of America. Sure, this is the United States. We are Americans (most of us, anyway). And L.A. is Hollywood's perpetual stand-in for Anytown, U.S.A.

But personal-finance website WalletHub confirmed that Los Angeles is in a league of its own compared with the rest of the nation. The site looked at metrics such as age, gender, income, household demographics and housing tenure to determine "2015's Metro Areas That Most and Least Resemble the U.S."

In housing demographics, which include how long people have lived in their homes, median home price and vacancy rate, we ranked a sad 379th — almost the bottom.

But you already know about the city's nation-topping housing crisis.

Among big metro areas, L.A. still ranked fairly low — 49th out of 166. A WalletHub spokeswoman broke out some other data for L.A:

330th – Race

152nd – Household Makeup

295th – % of Population with Health Insurance Coverage Housing

380th – Tenure (Renter-to-Owner Ratio)

105th – Household Income

144th – Wealth Gap

311th – % of Households Receiving Food Stamps

200th – Educational Attainment

This is a city where minorities outnumber whites and the gap between rich and poor is huge. But some of the stats are startling. The home of Caltech, considered by some to be the best university in the world, is 200th in educational attainment?

We need to elevate our game.

The city that most reflects America, by the way, is Indianapolis. 

Via: LA Weekly

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Hotel California

“I hate the [expletive] Eagles,” declares Jeff Bridges as the stoner-turned-detective hero of The Big Lebowski, the classic Coen brothers film study of Los Angeles.

But even if you aren’t a fan of the bestselling band of the ’70s, you’ve gotta give the Eagles this: Their most famous song was so dead-on that it now explains our state’s economic, geographic, and demographic realities.

You’re a Hotel, California.

As Californians pick up the pieces from the Great Recession, the trend is clear. The parts of our state’s regional economies that involve Californians serving other Californians—construction, real estate, government—have been hit hard. But the economic sectors that involve Californians serving people from elsewhere—trade, technology, and export-oriented pieces of media, entertainment, agriculture, education, and health—are mostly growing. So it’s more important than ever for us put on a hospitable face for the world.

Friendliness to visitors is all the more crucial since we are producing fewer new California residents (because of big declines in California’s birth rate and in immigration) and since some of our fundamentals—relatively high taxes, heavy regulation, and decaying infrastructure—are unattractive. Any hotelier knows that when you’re overpriced and a little ragged around the edges, like, say, the Hotel Del Coronado, you must make up for it with good hospitality.

Especially when it comes to travel and tourism. The amount spent by visitors to California can seem small—it’s a little more than $100 billion, equal to the size of the state’s general fund, which is less than 10 percent of the economy—but its impact is outsized.

While famous attractions like Disneyland and the Golden Gate Bridge are important pieces of their local economies, tourism packs an even bigger economic punch in smaller inland communities with undiversified economies, where one or two steady attractions can be a lifeline. A report from Dean Runyon Associates finds that Sierra counties like Mariposa (Yosemite Valley) and Mono (Mammoth Lakes) get more than half of their local taxes via tourism.

Via: California Political Review

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