While our perennially sunny campus and quaint village please the eye far more than the gritty surroundings of our cardinal and gold friends across town, it’s time we look around.
Westwood’s roads are crumbling. Businesses are leaving. Their empty storefronts stain the visage of what has long been a successful cultural focal point for the west side. Robberies seem more prevalent. Until this week, even the weather was uncharacteristically glum.
As far as crime goes, students should be more alert to their surroundings when crisscrossing the village and apartments. But when it gets down to dilapidated roads and dimly lit streets, Los Angeles County needs to allocate more funding to the area.
If Westwood is left unaided, it will face more empty lots where successful theaters and businesses once stood. A cultural gem dating back 80 years will bleed into yet another instance of the massive greyness that Los Angeles is often disdained to be.
A city’s crime blotter is often an anecdotal barometer of its standing. Consider our immediate neighbors to the east: There is less crime in Beverly Hills because the funding exists for increased lighting, security and police.
Between January and Nov. 6 of this past year, 25 robberies were reported to university police. The Daily Bruin reported that 16 of these robberies occurred in the first week of October, when students were once again firmly nestled in Westwood’s hills.
Incidentally, there have been fewer reports of thefts in The Bruin and other local news outlets recently, and the police should be commended for their due diligence. Students should also avoid becoming prime targets for quick crime ““ walking around listening to an iPod or using a cell phone alone late at night is highly inadvisable.
And though it seems we all know at least one person affected by crime this past fall (“My girlfriend’s roommate’s car window was smashed in last night,” etc.), there is no need for melodrama. Westwood is still an incredibly safe place, especially given that it is in the second-largest city in America.
But these crimes nag for another reason, too.
Westwood is fading from the happening place it was when my father attended school at the university in the late 1970s. You can see it everywhere you look: the still-empty lot next to In-N-Out (now neighbored by the missing ExpressMart), the demolition of the National Theater at Gayley Avenue and Lindbrook Drive, the defunct trash pickup system of the apartments, the imposition of two behemoth, impersonal apartment complexes on Glendon Avenue, roads that make even the most liberal of Angelinos pine for a Hummer to conquer the rocky streets, the ever-increasing buying out and/or replacing of boutique businesses by global enterprises.
The recent string of robberies is by no means a deterrent to living in and enjoying Westwood. But the city has a responsibility to ensure that what was at least a center for social, cultural and commercial intrigue is maintained.
To be fair, both Los Angeles and California are in economic shambles. Some sources note that the city stands to lose as much as $114 million in state funding.
The fact that the hardest-hit departments were those of Health Services and Mental Health (losing about $14 million each) makes asking for smoother roads in Westwood a bit pretentious. But fear of pretension should not translate into a lack of effort or action.
The county took up the issue this past election by passing Measure R, a half-cent sales tax increase that is estimated to bring in an additional $40 billion over the next 30 years.
Much of this sum is intended for roadway repair and construction, and it is imperative that a proportionate amount of this money be allocated to our zip codes.
Perhaps with increased funding and attention from the county, Westwood can reclaim its rightful place as Los Angeles’s premier district.
Tired of biking over foot-wide cracks on Veteran? E-mail Makarechi at kmakarechi@media.ucla.edu. Send general comments to viewpoint@media.ucla.edu.