Blogging Social Difference in L.A.: Week 1

For the past 20 years I have been privileged to call one of the top 100 cities to live in America, my home. My family moved to this city in 1983 and since then they have seen the city grow from only one boulevard to multiple streets and heavy volumes of traffic. This suburb 30 miles east of Downtown Los Angeles is a small city with safe neighborhoods, rolling hills, affluent school districts, amazing landscaping and many leisure activities for the residents. In this cookie cutter city, I never realized the social differences until I transferred school districts for middle school and high school. The city has two different school districts for children to attend from grades K-12. I attended elementary school in the "disadvantageous" school district; my classes were relatively large, there were no advanced programs for students to enroll in and due to budget cuts many of our resources were cut. It was not until I attended middle school on the "better side" of the city that I realized how different the schools were. My new school had a morning newscast program, a state of the art library and countless after school advanced academic programs for the students to take part in. 

It was then I realized that despite being one of the top 100 best cities to live in America, this city still had many social differences. After living in the same city my entire life, I have ventured out into the concrete jungles of Los Angeles. By enrolling in this course, I am hoping to learn more about what causes difference in our local cities and neighborhoods and connecting these principles back to my experience with the different school districts in my hometown. The goal of my blog is to explore this city in multiple ways, visit various locations and identify how inequality effects the different social and geographical regions across this metropolitan city.  Like my hometown, Los Angeles has many individual cities that are overflowing with differences in landscaping and social inequality. Over the course of the next ten weeks, I will travel to different locations with different means of transportation and I will explore this rich city that is home to different socio-economic statuses, cultures and people. I plan to visit many locations that I have never visited before i.e. Chinatown, Venice Beach and take a journey on a bus through Beverly Hills. I will analyze and form my own theories based on the principles of what difference difference makes in Los Angeles. And lastly, I look forward to exploring the city that over three million people like to call home.