California
I was a true L.A. snob. Long Beach forced me to open my eyes
Good morning, and welcome to the Essential California newsletter. It’s Saturday, Aug. 17. Here’s what you need to know to start your weekend:
How Long Beach forced me to leave L.A. snobbery behind
I grew up in the smoggy shadow of Hollywood, which I always felt gave me a bit of unearned cachet.
When the world watched the Oscar afterparties unfold on TV, I just glanced up at the searchlights sweeping the sky in front of L.A.’s most overpriced restaurants and the news choppers circling above the phalanx of limos snaking down Sunset Boulevard. Movie and book backdrops that seemed so exotic to outsiders — “Shampoo,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills,” “Play It as it Lays,” “Double Indemnity,” “Less Than Zero,” “The Big Sleep” — felt like familiar tours through the old neighborhood.
When I got my first job as a reporter in The Times’ suburban Orange County office, my colleagues offered excited suggestions of things to do in my uber-hip West Hollywood neighborhood. The breakfast place where Quentin Tarantino held court. The industrial Thai eatery inhabited by Johnny Depp. The rooftop pool bar used as an “Entourage” backdrop.
I was too embarrassed to admit my Friday evening plans typically centered on Chinese takeout and a date with Hugh and Barbara on “20/20.”
But it didn’t matter. I felt a bit cooler just because I lived in close proximity to cool people.
Then I moved to the Long Beach area.
Mine was a typical Gen X Southern California migration story: Cheaper housing, shorter commute, “discovering” a place before the hipsters arrived, and in my case, being closer to work friends trying to make it on a journalist’s salary.
At first, I leaned into the Tinseltown snobbery with my L.A. friends. I’ve never seen so many Buicks and Oldsmobiles in my life. Will I ever watch another Wong Kar-wai movie again?
Learning to love Long Beach
Looking out at downtown Long Beach.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
But few of them ever ventured down the 710 Freeway to visit. And it did not take long for me to find my place here in ways I never could in West Hollywood. I fell in love with the scrappy charm of a city without airs that was never really ready for its close-up.
The wave-free beach where each view of the ocean must include a cargo ship or an oil well. The rows of vintage bungalows with the chimneys curiously cut off (thanks to the 1933 earthquake). The pickled egg as the city’s favored delicacy and a rickety ocean liner as its top landmark. How one of the most culturally diverse communities anywhere still can’t shake its boring Midwestern roots (Times columnist Jim Murray joked that the city was formed “by a slow leak in Des Moines”). The way there were always people dressed down as much as me
Long Beach is the seventh-largest city in California, and its port some years is the biggest in the country. Yet to the outside world, it never could escape second-banana status compared with the glamorous metropolis to the north. Every few years, there was the article declaring Long Beach the next big thing (“A Gleaming New Long Beach Sheds Its Cornfed Iowa Image.” “Once Moribund Long Beach Is Booming.”). But it never lasts. Long Beach remains Long Beach.
During one of its boom periods in the late 1990s, writer Alan Rifkin got the L.A.-L.B. dynamic just right: “L.A. gets the superiority, Long Beach the deaf ear.” Or put another way, he wrote, Los Angeles feels like a place where “anything can happen,” while Long Beach is a place where it probably won’t happen.
Olympics and ‘Long Beach erasure’
Max Cota and Charlie May reset their lines as the Marjorie C nears its dock in the Port of Long Beach.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
And this brings me to the roars of anger that echoed through the city and beyond Sunday afternoon during the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics.
France handed off the Games to Los Angeles, which will host in 2028. Cut to the beach, where Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Billie Eilish performed a mini concert. The spot was widely misidentified as being in Venice … 28 miles and about a million vibes away from the actual location … Long Beach.
Residents were not going to let this slight stand. So they took to social media, correcting the record, sending love to the city and letting loose some long-simmering grievances.
“This is Long Beach erasure,” one loyalist fumed.
An aerial view of the Port of Long Beach at dusk.
(Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
I watched clips of the concert on my phone and felt my own civic pride. I grew up in one of the most filmed places on the planet. But this felt different. This is my chosen home. That beach is where I took my first beach ride after buying my electric bike early in the pandemic and feeling for the first time like things were going to be OK. It was not far from where I perfected my spare rib recipe during a beach barbecue for a friend’s birthday, beginning my love of grilling.
It’s where I stepped out of L.A.’s shadow and became my own person.
And it’s where I had this epiphany: There is much more to life than watching Johnny Depp sample overpriced Pad Thai or eating pancakes a few booths away from Quentin Tarantino.
The week’s biggest stories
(Myung J. Chun/Los Angeles Times)
The state Legislature has been busy
Arrests were made in connection to Matthew Perry’s overdose death
Monday’s earthquake was a reminder of California’s vulnerabilities
There’s interesting new polling on Californian voters
More big stories
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Column One
Column One is The Times’ home for narrative and longform journalism. Here’s a great piece from this week:
(Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times)
Fast, wet and furious: How the North American monsoon floods the California desert. The North American monsoon plays an important role in the climate of the Four Corners states, bringing crucial moisture to areas that would otherwise be dry.
More great reads
How can we make this newsletter more useful? Send comments to essentialcalifornia@latimes.com.
For your weekend
Wendy (Shelley Duvall) watches television in the Overlook Lobby in Stanley Kubrick’s “The Shining.”
(Lee Unkrich/Warner Bros. Pictures)
Going out
Staying in
How well did you follow the news this week? Take our quiz.
(Times staff and wire photos)
At the recently wrapped Paris Olympics, the U.S. tied with which other country for the most gold medals at 40 each? Plus nine other questions from our weekly news quiz.
Have a great weekend, from the Essential California team
Shelby Grad, deputy managing editor
Karim Doumar, head of newsletters
Check our top stories, topics and the latest articles on latimes.com.
The California Highway Patrol is warning the public to beware of fraudsters posing as “AMBER Alert representatives” offering to “register” children.
“They ask for confidential info and to meet at your home,” the CHP said Saturday on social media. “This is not how the AMBER Alert system works.”
No registration is ever required, the CHP said.
AMBER — which stands for America’s Missing: Broadcast Emergency Response — is only activated by law enforcement agencies investigating reports of an abducted or missing child.
The alerts are intended to provide the public with immediate information about a child abduction.
The CHP said it is the only agency authorized to activate AMBER Alerts.
“Never provide personal information or answer calls from unknown or ‘possible scam’ numbers,” the highway patrol said.
If contacted by a scammer, the CHP said, report it to your local law enforcement agency immediately.
California
Opinion: California utilities have lofty climate goals. Too bad their customers are in the dark
Regardless of the presidential election results, the clean energy transition is still a major priority for the nation’s electric utilities. Perhaps nowhere in the world is the pressure more intense than in Southern California, where the demands on the power grid are high and many residents are well acquainted with the consequences of aging, unsuitable infrastructure.
Many electric utilities now consider sustainability crucial to their overall strategy. However, as evidenced by countless examples of conservatives being elected on anti-environmental platforms, the majority of consumers just aren’t thinking that much about clean energy.
For the past four years, my team at J.D. Power and I have been analyzing customer awareness of and support for utilities’ climate programs and goals in an annual Sustainability Index. Without fail, we found that very few customers have any awareness of their utilities’ clean energy goals. This year’s index found that just 22% of customers knew their utilities had such goals, a figure that was even lower in previous years.
I experienced one aspect of this phenomenon as a consumer when I went through the grueling process of learning about and applying for California and federal rebates for an energy-efficient heat pump system I installed in my home last year. Even though I wrote about that ordeal for The Times and heard from consumers who had similar experiences, I have yet to get any response from my utility. Heat pumps have been a cornerstone of clean energy transition efforts, but when it comes to installing and using them and understanding their benefits, utilities are leaving consumers on their own.
A deep dive into my combined electric and gas bills showed that my total expenses dropped 3% in 2024 compared with the same period in 2022, before I began installing the system. And because average unit electricity prices increased by more than 20% in the interim, my adjusted heating costs are down more than 23%. In addition, I now have the benefit of air conditioning during summer heat waves, which I did not have prior to the conversion.
But before I could even begin to understand the extent of these benefits, I had to download reams of data from Pacific Gas & Electric Co.’s data hub, build a spreadsheet to organize and chart my energy use and utility billing trends, and cross-reference everything with federal greenhouse gas equivalency calculations. Does anyone think an average consumer would go through all this?
The experience illustrated the chasm between the way utilities communicate about environmental responsibility and the way consumers live it. The fact is, if any utilities are ever going to meet their sustainability targets — many of which call for reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 — they are going to need their customers to change their behavior. But given that few customers are even aware of these priorities, and that most are far more concerned about affordability than they are about sustainability, there is a complete disconnect between utility and customer goals.
But these goals can be aligned if the companies explain and promote them clearly and convincingly. We’re living through a historic transformation that has the potential to reinvent heating and cooling, travel and more. Smart-grid technologies can put individual homeowners at the center of the energy storage and transmission system. None of that will happen without massive consumer buy-in.
Utilities should be launching bold outreach strategies, investing in customer education on how to save money (and pollution) by adopting new technologies, and making it easy for consumers to help them reach their environmental goals. But most utilities are instead wasting their time talking about lofty sustainability targets that lack the substance and support they need to become reality.
Electric utilities have a huge opportunity to help customers save money and improve their experience, increase their own revenue and meet their clean energy goals. To do so, they need to start understanding and communicating effectively with their customers.
Andrew Heath is the vice president of utilities intelligence at J.D. Power.
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