That area is just about 1½ miles from Akbar and its Craft Night and about half a mile from the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council meeting room. "I met a lot of kids and they had nothing to do," De Ocampo says. He says they'd reap great benefit from far-too-rare after-school and summer programs. Instead, "They get into trouble."
Lee Ringuette says the old South of Sunset neighborhood began to turn around about 2002, at the beginning of L.A.'s housing boom. People bought homes and fixed them up, landlords renovated apartment buildings, and younger, mostly white tenants started moving in where people from Mexico, El Salvador and other Central American nations had once dominated the rental lines. Since then, Barbara adds, "There hasn't been much turnover. This is a place people want to be." She's also met a "surprising" number of "showbiz folks."
Barbara is wary of the negative findings about Silver Lake in the L.A. Health Atlas, which was created by the L.A. Department of City Planning with assistance from Berkeley-based urban planning firm Raimi + Associates over a six-month period. It was funded by the California Endowment and the L.A. County Department of Public Health.
PHOTO BY AMANDA LOPEZ
Tacy Padua, CEO of Hollywood Sunset Free Clinic, says Latinos, mostly south of Sunset, live in a separate world from Silver Lake's pricey cafes.
Related Stories
More About
Beatriz Soliz, a director at the California Endowment, says the findings pose a potentially profound question. "What does it mean for someone in their 20s or 30s to move to Silver Lake?" she asks. "Will their lives be shortened?"
De Ocampo found the study to be "eye-popping" for anyone concerned about public health.
Barbara Ringuette, though, is thinking something else. She believes developers and City Hall politicians may use Silver Lake's infirmities to make the case for even more high-end projects. She says, "To say you need more development in South Silver Lake is not correct. Each of the pages and charts [in the Atlas] are interesting, but does it represent a clear picture? Not in the least."
She must have read the mind of City Councilman Mitch O'Farrell, who is already saying the Health Atlas shows a "problem" in parts of Silver Lake and Echo Park. O'Farrell's solution? "We need economic improvement and jobs," says the councilman, who is big on higher density and more building construction.
O'Farrell avidly supported the now-uncertain Millennium Hollywood twin skyscrapers; community activists have sued developers to prevent the project's construction. The proposed skyscrapers apparently are sited directly over, or immediately adjacent to, a perilous "rupture" earthquake fault that went unmentioned in the official Environmental Impact Report.
Clarke, the Silver Lake Neighborhood Council member and Herman-Wurmfeld's friend, also sees the Atlas data as having possibly been manipulated by city planners: "It makes me wonder how recently calculated is the information," says Clarke, whose personal motto is "Think globally, act locally."
In fact, one statistic in the report that got big play in a Los Angeles Daily News article, and was subsequently repeated by the Huffington Post, was overblown — at Silver Lake's expense. The Daily News noted that Silver Lake's life expectancy rate of 77.4 years ranked near the bottom of 22 other areas in L.A., placing the "Best Hipster Neighborhood" in the United States next to hardscrabble South Los Angeles' 75.2 years and West Adams' 75.6 years of life expectancy. But the Health Atlas researchers included in Silver Lake's life expectancy data from Echo Park (pop. 40,455) and Elysian Valley (pop. 2,530), as well as from much of poverty-stricken Westlake and Pico-Union. That almost certainly dragged down Silver Lake's life expectancy figure.
Despite this mixing of data from poor areas into Silver Lake's more lofty demographics, one telling statistic is the "hardship index," which is based on unemployment, poverty, income, education level and overcrowding. The parts of Silver Lake and Echo Park near the 101 freeway and Glendale Boulevard, where many low-income Latino families live and increasing numbers of people in their 20s and 30s have moved, rank alarmingly high on this index.
Meanwhile, life around Silver Lake Reservoir, a hilly, affluent area that's home to professionals and is said to have its own microclimate of breezes, is low on the "hardship index."
At a Silver Lake Neighborhood Council "values and goals" meeting in late July, attended overwhelmingly by white, middle-aged or older residents, by far the most often-cited problem was parking — high unemployment and deep poverty weren't mentioned. Also, there was something about sheep. As 40 or so people sat in a circle and talked about what really irked them, it was twice suggested that sheep should be herded along the jogging path around Silver Lake Reservoir as an environmentally friendly way to keep the weeds shorn.
Dr. Paul Simon, director of the Division of Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention at L.A. County's Department of Public Health, who lives in Silver Lake, says the Health Atlas shows that sections of America's hippest neighborhood are facing serious problems — issues far worse than a lack of parking spaces, or stray weeds in the pathway around the reservoir.
For Simon, a high child obesity rate, a "relatively high" density of liquor stores and the 11 percent unemployment rate in Silver Lake, Echo Park and Elysian Valley are standout concerns. By comparison, trendy Venice, whose intense pockets of poverty and gang violence are widely acknowledged even as Silver Lake's are met with arched eyebrows, has an 8 percent unemployment rate, according to the atlas.
Man on Honeymoon Busted for Soliciting Prostitute 
Top ten speed traps 
Ex-Police Chief's Book Details Arpaio's Negligence 
