By M. Snarky

The following is not from an imagined, fictionalized, dystopian viewpoint of Los Angeles; every bit of it is true. Being that I was born in Los Angeles at L.A. County General Hospital, and I’ve lived and worked in and around L.A. city and L.A. county for most of my life, I’m writing this from a very personal L.A. native experience.

The San Fernando Valley, a.k.a., “The Valley,” where I’ve lived the majority of my life has sadly become an extension of Los Angeles proper. The Valley used to be a nice suburb that people moved to in order to escape the crime, traffic, noise, trash, pollution, and urban decay of the city of L.A.

The encroaching urban sprawl into the Valley over the last few decades eventually morphed into an abusive, extractive relationship. You see, the problem is that the money that flows in from the Valley to L.A. City (roughly 33% of annual tax revenue) does not come back in the same proportion. The Valley is, and I believe this is by design, getting perpetually screwed by the city…and it shows.

For my part, I’ve invested significant sums of money and sweat equity into scores of home improvement projects to my old 1952 tract house near Roscoe and Balboa boulevards not only to make it  more habitable—like installing central air, for instance—but also to improve the overall neighborhood and add value when we were ready to sell it.

My wife and I raised our three children there. I ran my IT consulting business from there. I paid the city of L.A. buku bucks in the forms of business taxes, inflated sales taxes, sewer taxes, water taxes (including a recent dubious rainwater tax that was made up out of thin air), utility user taxes, telecommunications and cable network access taxes, solid waste taxes, and trash collection taxes. I’m sure I missed a few, but it just never ends. I’ve also paid the county tax assessor tens of thousands of dollars over the years in property taxes. What did I get in return, exactly? Not much.

Officially, some of those tax dollars are supposed to be earmarked to pay for maintenance and repairs for sidewalks, roads, street lighting, and city property like medians and parks which are now mostly overgrown with weeds. The problem is that exactly zero improvements were made to my poor, old, decaying neighborhood. The city and county certainly got my money, but then it reneged on providing said services. It was like getting mugged over and over again by the same bully as the streetlights progressively went dark up and down the streets and boulevards of Van Nuys. The potholes grew in size and quantity to the point that driving to the market around the corner felt like a Baja 500 off-road racing adventure.

One day while driving in the rain eastward down Victory Boulevard between Roscoe Boulevard to the west and Woodley Avenue to the east, there was a large puddle forming on the asphalt surface in my lane. What I thought was just a larger than usual rain puddle was hiding a massive pothole that almost tore the front wheel off of my Tacoma. I did not intend to deluge the people at the bus stop with a tsunami of dirty rainwater, but there was nothing that I could do to avoid it. With my steering wheel now vibrating from a misaligned, out of balance front wheel, I became enraged with the prospect of having to take the time to get the truck to the shop for repairs and pay the subsequent repair bill.

L.A. has also allowed the tweaker zombies to run rampant in the city and pull out as much copper wiring from the infrastructure as possible. In the meantime, now I need to walk around my neighborhood with a flashlight at night so that I don’t trip over the expansive broken and uneven sidewalks. The flashlight also doubles as a billy club in case I need to fend off a tweaker or two caught in the act of stealing copper wiring from the city. Yeah, I’m the guy that would yell, “HEY YOU!” while shining my million-lumen flashlight in their eyes. I’m also the guy that can sprint away pretty fast for someone my age.

I’ve yet to see a report on the number of tweaker zombie electrocution deaths that have occurred during the great copper theft of the century, but I’d argue that the thieves had it coming.

In the Sepulveda Basin Recreation Area (locally known as Balboa Park) there were over 250 brush fires in 2025 alone, but these were not caused by climate change, or lightning strikes, or spontaneous combustion; they were all caused from the dozens of homeless encampments scattered throughout the park, or as the local KNBC news station put it, “…largely driven by dry conditions and unhoused encampments.” Unhoused encampments? Seriously? Journalistic euphemisms like this make me crazy and should be illegal. Whatever happened to enforcing laws like illegal camping within city limits, or loitering, or vagrancy, or parole violations? There were so many homeless people living in the park that nobody wanted to walk alone, especially after dark. The city’s response was not that of outreach, or law enforcement; it was to dispatch men with booms and chainsaws to cut down the trees to reduce the fuel supply.

Oh, and there was that one time that a burning body was found in a shopping cart underneath a bridge along the Los Angeles River that runs through the park. Nothing to see here, folks—move along. Seems to me the collective IQ of the dysfunctional, scheming, greedy, corrupt L.A. city council is somewhere in the low single digits. I kid. I believe that it’s probably to the right side of the decimal point.

One Saturday afternoon at the intersection of Roscoe and Louise Avenue, my wife and I were held captive in my truck while a couple of idiots in a Dodge Demon performed donuts in the middle of the intersection. I suppose you could have classified it as a one-car street takeover. The driver had his hands waving in the air in a, “Look ma; no hands!” moment; and the passenger was hanging out of the window with his phone in hand, probably live-feeding their takeover to five people as they spun around in circles in a cloud of white smoke.

I had the green light and started to nose my Tacoma into the intersection to make it a little bit harder for them to continue their antics when Kim grabbed my arm and said, “Don’t do it!” She was right, of course, so I relented. However, other drivers took my cue and started moving into the intersection too, making it increasingly difficult for the Demon bros to continue without t-boning someone. They finally fishtailed out of the smoke-filled intersection, and barely missed jumping the curb into a fire hydrant which would have been a spectacular, slow-clap-worthy end to the most useless car to come out of Detroit since the 1982 Cadillac Cimarron.

Indeed, short of a car built for track racing, nobody needs to drive around the city with 800+ horsepower under the hood, particularly moronic, immature, thrill-seeking young men (boys, really) endangering everyone around them while channeling Fast & Furious, or GTA, or whatever the car-centric crime spree pop culture du-jour is, which, by the way, are all fiction, boys! Grow up!

Oh, and if you want to take L.A. Metro public transportation to get around the city to save the planet (or perhaps you have to use public transportation after your driver’s license was revoked because you make terrible decisions after drinking too much tequila), you’ll need to arm yourself or you’re likely to be robbed or assaulted or killed by either a drug crazed homeless psycho, or a group of gutter rat gangbangers working on their street thug cred, or just an ordinary flash mob of social media connected criminal youth stealing all of the things from all of the passengers.

I used to take the L.A. Metro Red Line from the Valley to Crypto center to catch an L.A. Kings hockey game or a concert every now and then, but the last time I used it, the underground platform area was overpopulated by homeless people that were either actively using drugs, panhandling, or semi-conscious and frozen in a fentanyl fold, or just pissing in a corner while smoking a cigarette. I got a contact high walking through the haze of cannabis smoke. Stepping into the railcar smelled like walking into a hot portable toilet along the L.A. Marathon route. If you know, you know. Disgusting is one way to describe it. Inhuman is another.

Fed up with the endless disorder and lawlessness going on in L.A. (amongst a laundry list of other things that I wrote about in October 2025, titled, “Future Former L.A. Resident”), we fled like third-world refugees out of L.A. County, and are now happily residing somewhere in the 805. What a difference an area code makes! We’re still adjusting to the quiet, and the nice people, and the good vibes from the Gold Coast locals. In retrospect, we should have given up on L.A. and moved here years ago. Unfortunately, it turned out that our foolish hope for an L.A. turnaround was, to put it bluntly, foolishly hopeless.

I’m not a gambling man, but I’ll bet that the L.A. City council is scheming for a hefty exit tax. Maybe they’ll hire the Latino gangbangers to enforce collections as part of a civic outreach employment program. I can see it now:

KNOCK-KNOCK-KNOCK!

“Hell-o? Why do you guys have a gas can?”

“We’re here to collect for the city of L.A. Nice place you have here. It would be a shame if something happened to it.”

“What do you mean by that? Show me your ID!”

The flash of sunlight off the chrome .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol barrel was blinding.

“Ohhh…okay, n-n-now I get it. So, who do I make the check out to, The City of Los Angeles?”

“Check? JA-JA-JA-JA-JA! We don’t take no stinkin’ checks, güero; cash only!”

“Then I’ll need to go to the bank.”

“No problemo. We’ll follow you there.”

“I don’t have a car. I use L.A. Metro public transportation to get around to reduce my carbon footprint.”

“¿Qué? Are you loco? L.A. Metro is way too dangerous! We’ll drive you to the bank in our Dodge Demon. We just put new tires on it!”

I used to believe that Los Angeles was the best city in the country—a shining city on a hill. But now it is nothing more than a dumpster fire, governed by a bunch of self-interested, corrupt, brain-dead hacks—somewhere on the evolutionary scale just barely north of a chimpanzee—all of whom are at the beck and call of the various labor unions, political action committees, and special interest groups that own them.

Adios, Gotham City West, and vaya con Dios.