Good Fences
On neighbors, fences, gentrification and Los Angeles.
I lived in Hollywood for the bulk of my time in Los Angeles. Hollywood was home. It was where I worked and played. It was walkable, it had a buzz, there was always something going on and it was admittedly apart of living the dream to have a Hollywood address.
My first stop in Hollywood was a short-lived stint with an aging musician who was looking for help, not for love. Our cohabitation was stamped with an expiration date upon arrival, unbeknownst to me. Within six months I’d moved out and moved on about a mile away to my own comfy abode. A second story, one bedroom, lots of light, surrounded by foliage, hardwood floors and archways. Classic Spanish Style architecture. I loved that place. I loved everything about it until I didn’t.
There was no parking. Literally. I’d spend sometimes thirty minutes driving through the hills trying to find a spot, exhausted and sometimes ready to cry. Not to mention that roaming packs of coyotes one might encounter on these desolate sidestreet locations. The lack of parking eventually became an isolating factor. No one wanted to come to visit me because there was nowhere to park. No one cared enough to hike a quarter of a mile uphill to retrieve their car or to chance it taking a half an hour to find a spot closer. So as cute as my place was, I didn’t have much company. If I had a party it had to be during the daytime so that people could actually park and arrive comfortably.
In addition to the parking nightmare, which was eventually solved by paying over a hundred dollars a month to rent a spot, I eventually realized that there were literally no black people around. Not at the grocery store, or on my morning runs. Not at my favorite bar down the street, not at the post office. Nowhere. It was so bad that I was debating leaving Los Angeles, stating, “It’s nice but there just aren’t enough Black People”. Hollywood was catching the hipster spillover from Silver Lake and my Franklin Village was now becoming home to the ironically clad, Pornstache wearing hipsters who literally seemed to have nothing better to do than to get dressed and hang out hoping someone complimented them on their style.
My building was now an Airbnb hub and all the struggling artists were renting out their pads to cocaine-fueled tourists who wanted a “real” Hollywood experience. I had now graduated into the older tenant who screamed out of their window, “turn the fucking music down or I’m calling the cops”. It was time for me to go. My lifestyle had changed and Hollywood was changing but not in the direction I was comfortable with. A homeless person had barricaded himself in our laundry room and we couldn’t access it for a week. The property owner installed a flimsy fence that could literally be walked around for access. Next someone lost their mind in a drunken stupor and tried to kick in my neighbor’s door because he thought it was his girlfriend’s house. Plot Twist: His girlfriend didn’t live in our building. The homelessness was becoming increasingly more evident, there were people sleeping in vans and cars up and down the street and I no longer felt safe. So I moved. Below Franklin. Below Sunset. Below Santa Monica and below Olympic Blvd. I moved into what would be considered “The Hood” by the Beachwood Canyon/Hollywood Hills standard.
When I realized that for a mere $500 more a month I could have a 2.5 bedroom and 2 bathroom duplex with a garage I literally laughed out loud. I couldn’t believe I’d stayed in my little bachelorette pad for so long. I was moving on up to an adult-sized space that felt like a home. A place big enough to have a guest bedroom. A place big enough to host Thanksgiving Dinner. I had a yard and a porch and could imagine a garden. What I was not expecting were the challenges that come with a gentrifying neighborhood.
My new neighbors to the right of me collect things. Like mattresses and furniture left out on the streets. They collect things and pile them high on to trucks parked on the street. They have junk everywhere, which they hid well until I was fully moved in. It’s a lot. Like a lot a lot. Like really it’s too much. On the other side of me was a semi-retired woman whom I was immediately warned about by my neighbor with one eye, who was entirely too friendly for my taste. I checked the per capita income of the area and the crime rate and quickly surmised I was Hood Adjacent as best.
The collectors of things were mostly benign and I had my theories on why anyone would who work so hard to collect junk, wasn’t gainfully employed. The nosey semi-retired neighbor was the one I knew I was going to have to keep my eye on. First I noticed she had a habit of riding her Vespa across my lawn to access the street. To do so meant she had to cross her own damn driveway. It was evident by the deep grooves in my lawn and dead grass that she’d been doing this for a while. Then she started telling me that I needed to also start taking care of my neighbor's yard as they were making the neighborhood look bad. Now that’s not how this goes. That’s not how any of this goes. She had no boundaries. It was clear.
Next, I started noticing that when she walked her two huge dogs she never had the handy plastic bags that dog people carry. Then I started to notice big huge piles of dog poop on my lawn which as a non-dog owner is the last thing I want to wake up to. Repeatedly I asked her to stop driving in my lawn. I had my gardeners re-seed and fertilize so that I could have thick verdant grass. Inevitably she would find herself back driving on my lawn so it became clear that I would need physical barriers. I had to buy a powder to sprinkle on my grass to prevent dogs from coming near it. That helped, but we still had the pesky problem of the Vespa, the grass that wouldn’t grow where she drove and her alleged amnesia when it came to my requests.
I put up a garden fence. Nothing fancy. Something affordable to create a physical barrier denoting where my lawn began. I planted a raised bed garden in the space she’d been using to enter my lawn. In short, she no longer had access to my lawn. She was livid. First, she told me that someone was going to hurt themselves on my garden fence, to which I replied that they would have to be on my lawn to do so, and the whole point was to not have people and their dogs on my lawn. I told her that I was quite pleased that thus far no one and no dogs had been on my lawn and that the garden fence was doing its job. She was now forced to drive her Vespa on her own lawn which gave me great joy, because what type of hillbilly, shit is that anyway? Why are you driving on other people’s damn lawns?
At core what we're dealing with was classism, she owns. I rent. She believes as an owner she’s more invested in the neighborhood than I am. which to an extent may be true from a financial standpoint, however still didn’t own the block, she owned her home. No more and no less. She was drowning in debt, barely holding on to the home, and her anger was clearly being directed outward. In the years I’ve been here the neighborhood has changed. Slowly but surely more and more houses are going on the market. Some get purchased immediately some not quickly, some just overpriced and languish. More young families renting, more Asians with cash buying, less and less affordable deals. When I moved in there were a number of places within my price range constantly on the market. Now everything is at least $500 to $1000 more.
Nosey Nellie is not living the American Dream. She confessed to having over $70k worth of debt on her American Express as that’s how she’s been paying her mortgage. I often hear her in the backyard lamenting on her financial problems. She started to show signs of unraveling when she decided to grab her gun on the Fourth of July and ride around the neighborhood and ask people to stop with the fireworks because it was scaring her dogs.
Finally, she decided to put her home on the market. She can’t afford to stay here, something that must be a sad and difficult realization. I have sympathy for her, it makes me consider my own financial future as well as the pitfalls of debt. She’s preparing for her open house. I truly hope for the best for her and then she takes it upon herself to dismantle my garden fence because she has decided it’s ugly and it doesn’t want people coming to her open house to have to see it.
I lost my shit.
I cursed out her and her Real Estate Agents from my front porch in my pajamas. She’d gone too damn far this time. It was clear that her boundariless ass just couldn’t accept that she had no jurisdiction over my yard and that her opinion on how the fences looked was literally of no concern of mine as it stood as a barrier against her, her lack of boundaries and bizarre behavior. She lied. She said the Real Estate Agents did it. They lied. They said she did. They both lied and told me that they didn’t know where the fence was. I retrieved it from the side of my house and a replaced it, now broken and a slanted in multiple places. One of the men leaving the open house asked if it was a Halloween fence. I told him, “No it’s a keep people and their dogs off my lawn fence”. He laughed. I smiled.
There are too many stories floating around social media about white women, in particular, overstepping their boundaries, showing their sense of entitlement. I grew up in a multi-cultural neighborhood much like the one I live in. I grew up with an understanding of how to respect others and most importantly how to demand self-respect. Boundaries are good fences. They keep everyone safe. Those who cannot respect boundaries have a tough row to hoe because everyone around them will not want to play their reindeer games.
My little garden fence, although slanted and a bit weary for the wears stands as a representative that I have boundaries that will be respected. Her house that she can’t afford is on the market for $1.25M. Overpriced considering what’s being offered in our area for the amount. She’s often overheard in her backyard drunk, counting the spending the money in her head. She’s stuck between the reality of a lifestyle she can’t afford in a neighborhood that did not quite acquiesce, which ironically puts me square in the middle of gentrification. Something I never imagined would become so prevalent in my life.
