Southern California is the main homeless destination in the country. The Los Angeles basin is unusual. It is a bowl of surrounding mountains against a rare deep ocean upwelling current. We actually have fewer really hot Summer days near the coast than you might think. There needs to be a pattern that pulls the desert out over the cold ocean to make the signature SoCal beach days. The rest of the time, within a few miles of the ocean, the temperatures stay quite mild. San Diego gets hot, and just north of LA it gets cold enough to freeze in winter, but not within the basin. It also only rains for a few weeks total every year, and all of that will pretty much happen a week at a time. Up near the center, Sierra mountains are the likely cause.
No joke there are 100k homeless people in the LA basin right now.
Super interesting! As someone that was born and lived the vast majority of their life in Florida, LA is odd to me. I’ve been a few times. The main things we have in common are similar economic models, language (almost a different dialect tho), and are in the same federation. Mostly everything else is different. It’s almost a different country.
Here are some differences that stick out to me:
- Mountains and hills vs nearly 100% flat
- Deserts vs swamps
- Dry vs humid
- Sparse vegetation vs tropical rain forest
- Clay sand vs dirt sand
- Cold beaches w/ major waves vs warm beaches w/ flat water
- Barely rains vs daily storms
- Earthquakes vs hurricanes
- Mexicans vs Puerto Ricans, Cubans, & Dominicans
- Spanish names vs indigenous names
- Cowboys vs Southerners
So, you could almost call me a rocket boy. My grandfather was in Huntsville as a technical writer for the Saturn V, now I watch Vandenberg launches from my roof, with the second stage of Falcon 9 lighting off almost directly overhead from my perspective.
I lived in Tennessee/Alabama/Georgia up until my late teens, have family in the Orlando area, and my immediate family took vacations in Florida regularly when I was growing up. I’ve spent time in most of the tourist spots and stayed with family for awhile down there. In my teen my father traveled for work doing electrical retrofits of industrial controls that each took a few weeks to complete. I traveled with him for a little more than a year where we drove through or stayed in almost every state in the contiguous USA.
Indeed California is very different. I found it frustrating at first. After living here for a long time, things start making a lot more sense. There is a focus on avoiding a lot of the corporate abuses in the local community. Like Walmart and similar big box stores are largely hated here because people have tried to maintain local business culture. It is more broadly recognized how Walmart and similar ilk destroy local economies and create a dependency on artificially low price goods from a company with no ethics. There is more social awareness and political awareness here. There also seem to be more rich people that see a problem, get involved in some political niche, and tend to get things done. At least, when I looked into why some areas have really good cycling infrastructure versus others that do not, this was often the case.
Growing up in the South, people seemed to be very headlines hot takes culture. Like few people really cared or thought about the news or political headlines. I moved back to Georgia for a couple of years in my twenties and noticed the way information is tinted to the Right, and how many parts of life are just accepted as normal when in reality, it is all of those normals causing people the majority of socioeconomic problems in the first place. The big box brand corporate culture is essentially an export trade deficiency in the community and region. They export wealth and offer nothing in return, often they pay poverty wages and cost the local economy even more when they subsidize the wages of these workers. Corrupt governments will often give these institutions low or tax free status just for building in their jurisdiction. This is one of the largest reasons the South is so poor by comparison.
As far as weather here, this may seem odd, I know it did for me at first, but SoCal has micro climates. The weather where I live, a couple of blocks from the cliffs above the ocean, is very different than the weather just one mile away going inland. It can rain here and be sunny a mile away. The cold ocean upwelling is pretty strong here and the angle if the coast is south so there are no prevailing issues. When the sun is most intense and there are no major fronts passing from some distant equatorial storm tracking into the Pacific, this area gets marine layer clouds. Most homes here do not have air conditioning because they do not need them. It stays ~70F year round. A mile away gets hotter and colder by 10-20 degrees, but it remains stable here.
The waves are dependant on the ocean floor, winds at sea, and orientation of the coast line. Where I am at, there are never really big waves because the ocean shelf is like a hill side going down over 100 feet within 100 yards of the beach. There are some spots around with waves, but I’ve seen bigger on the Atlantic coast of Florida. I’ve been to some places, like this one spot in a secluded cove in Laguna Beach where the waves break right up against the sand. Someone lost a body board that was like 10 feet away. I went in to get it as I was the strongest swimmer there, with a divers license and all. Just past the breakers it went from mid thigh depth to well over my head in a single step, and the current pulling straight down HARD. I had never felt anything like that before. It took everything I had to get out away from it into deeper water, and then everything I had to get on the board and get back to the beach as it tried to pull me out of the cove.
In Florida, I’ve been pulled along the beach while playing in the waves where I end up some distance away from where I started, but deep water does some really unusual things.
It takes awhile to get to know this place. It took me 10+ years to really feel at home. There is a lot of subtlety that takes time to pick up on and understand why things are the way they are. A lot of it is an attempt at a more egalitarian society. It fails in some ways. A lot is from not-in-my-back-yard asshats, but overall it is a place that has more opportunity because people have fought to make it that way, and I find that endearing. After growing up half aware of they political eristic’s sophism, then moving back for awhile and noting the spurious nonsense, there is no comparable spin from here. The narrative has a Democratic focus, but it is not an equivalent spin or bowdlerized story like it is in the South. There is a certain freedom here that is nice, like it should be, even with its other flaws. At least that is my take.
Ok, but this has pretty much nothing to do with unexplained disappearances, especially given the large homeless populations in other cities that are not showing on here. But really, this map cannot be relied on since we have no idea where the data is derived from, and we can barely even see it due to the poor resolution
