A Carless Majority
“With their cars, Angelenos go places,” Cees Nooteboom wrote in a 1973 essay called “Autopia”: “They travel infinite numbers of kilometers in a world that continuously remains Los Angeles.”
“For a Californian, leaving his car means leaving his own humanity, consigning himself to another power, abandoning his own will.” That is how Umberto Eco thought of Los Angeles when he wrote “The City of Robots” in 1986.
Dependence on automobiles remains one of the most abiding stereotypes about LA. But the 2000 census shows that only half of driving age residents in central LA—the area once served by the city’s now defunct streetcar system—own a car. It’s as if the streetcars were still around.
For the carless, applying for jobs in the city Nooteboom characterized as an ‘endless labyrinth’ can be a challenge. At the time of my writing, for instance, the two most recent job posts on the Los Angeles Craigslist are in Covina, CA and West LA—36.9 miles apart. Getting to either from where I live in Hollywood—near the subway and several major bus lines—would take well over an hour (and three buses)on public transit. The MTA’s website told me so.
Almost by definition, job applicants spend more time per job opening than employers do per applicant: finding the job listing, inquiring about an interview, getting there on time, waiting your turn, and getting back home—these things take time. Few of the interviews I’ve been on in the past few months have lasted more than 10 minutes, yet most have required a solid three hours of investment. In this, I am lucky: riding a bicycle can make cars look sluggish during LA’s interminable rush ’hour’ (s), and I’ve been able to borrow a moped or a car to get further afield. I’ve met people in Van Nuys who took the bus from East LA, people in Beverly Hills who’d come from Long Beach and Inglewood. And yet these are the admonishments that decorate vague internet job listings—“do not to waste our time” with “generic cover letters” or “without a head shot.” Whose time is being wasted?
Over the past few months, I’ve applied for jobs I didn’t really want and perhaps for jobs I couldn’t conceivably get. But I didn’t expect it to be such a stretch to work folding dinner napkins for a catering agency or taking people’s movie tickets downtown. Aspiration is at the core of a job search—you’ve got to sell yourself the best you can.
A 2002 MIT study of access to employment among welfare recipients in Los Angeles found that car ownership significantly increases likelihood of employment as well as access to jobs with a reasonable commute time: low income mothers without cars spend nearly twice as much time getting to work as those with cars. Another study by researchers at the University of California Transportation Center found that car owners in Watts had access to 59 times as many jobs within an hour’s commute as did those who relied on public transit. Clearly, if you are applying to jobs and you do not own a car, you are going to spend an awful lot of time doing it.
For all the coverage of ‘funemployment’ since the recession began, there hasn’t been much about the time it takes to find a job, or even look.
By and large, the industries that have lost the most jobs in California over the past year—manufacturing, transportation, construction, and ‘other services’—are those that employ the 45% of adults in Los Angeles without any college education. It follows that unemployment would be disproportionately high in low income brackets, and that competition for available jobs has been strongest among low-wage workers.
A recent LA Times article pointed out that “Nearly 11,000 people have applied for 400 jobs at the swanky W Hollywood Hotel & Residences slated to open in Hollywood early next year.” Though the hotel be swanky, the vast majority of these positions are low-paying service sector jobs, and the people applying for them are likely to be in what writer Tom Wetzel calls LA’s “carless majority.” With these odds—more than 20 people jostling for every bellhop’s coat and dishwasher’s apron—how can you avoid a bit of wishful thinking? And if all you’ve got to show for it is a long bus ride through what the Guardian once called “the noisiest, the smelliest, the most uncomfortable and most uncivilised major city in the United States,” well, at least you didn’t stay at home.
