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Alec Baldwin Assaults New York Daily News
Photographer Marcus Santos
Credit: www.hollywoodreporter.com
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CONNECTING CALIFORNIA-Dear Alec Baldwin … Let me be the first to welcome you to the great state of California.
I know you haven’t arrived yet. But, in a piece published in New York Magazine that made headlines across the country, you made it plain that after years of being terrorized by Manhattan’s media and increasingly nosy public, you’re done with living and working in New York City, where you were once so popular that you toyed with running for mayor. Your next destination: Los Angeles, where you believe you can be free to be yourself.
“I just can’t live in New York anymore,” you wrote. “Everything I hated about LA I’m beginning to crave. LA is a place where you live behind a gate, you get in a car, your interaction with the public is minimal. I used to hate that. But New York has changed.”
Your moving to Los Angeles would certainly be good for us. All Californians would benefit from another rich person out here paying those higher Proposition 30 temporary rates on income taxes.
And, given your political ambitions, your presence in Los Angeles would also be welcome, if only because it might light a fire under our overly understated new mayor, Eric Garcetti.
But I’m concerned that, as much as we’d love to have you, LA might not be the best fit for you.
You’ve lived in New York since 1979, so it makes sense that you don’t know that this is no longer Annie Hall’s Los Angeles. In fact, LA in 2014 is a lot more like New York than we would care to admit.
If you are truly looking to retreat from public life, as you say in your piece, LA may not be the best place to do it. The city is becoming considerably more dense (particularly on the Westside, where you Hollywood types hang out) and more connected (via new rail and subway lines). LA’s economy is less about going off by yourself to write or invent something and much more about constant collaboration and exchange: design and international trade are crucial industries here.
And your notion of LA as a place where people stay inside their homes? It’s outdated. The homeownership rate in the county is now just 47 percent, compared to 56 percent for the state of California and 65 percent nationally. More people in the city of LA (54 percent) are living in multi-unit buildings than in houses.
Read the full story: www.citywatchla.com
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