I grew up LA in the 60’s and 70’s. I graduated from Granada Hills High in 1980 and for the most of the next 23 years I was living in other cities. In late 2003 I returned and lived the last few years of my mother’s life with her in the house that I grew up in acting as her support system. She has passed away and I am back now on my own living in another part of metro LA. (An interesting footnote that Stu and Heidi’s departure might happen coincident to my return.)

Living again in my old neighborhood as I did the changes to it were something that impressed me greatly and I learned that the reason that “you can never go home” is that your “home” will never be there, even if the four walls and roof and mother who raised you within them are still there. Things simply change so rapidly in a city like LA that the life you knew is very much a thing of the past when 23 years have transpired.

The easiest way to see this was in racial and ethnic terms. Granada Hills, a modest middle-class neighborhood then and now, was largely a white enclave when I was a child. The Catholic grade school I attended was so lily-white that there was but one Hispanic boy in my class over 100 students. This a remarkably contrasting situation to today’s majority Hispanic LA. Today that same school is a small sea of brown faces (mostly Filipino-Americans, if I had to guess) and the roles that I and young Mr. Mezzaros played then would today be just about exactly reversed.

This is not a story of any great novelty, of course, but observing it in the context of the whole eventually raised a question in my mind that I have not seen addressed. That is this: why with all of the uproar and upset in certain quarters about the dramatic racial and ethnic evolutions in LA (and elsewhere) is no correlation drawn between it and the reduced rates of local violent crime that for years I have heard reported? I am no sociologist tracking any of this in detail, but anecdotally it is my definite impression that while LA has become less white it has become less violent.

If such as this intrigues you with respect to your project you might look to see if my impression is correct. Thank you.