Pushing My Luck Back to Los Angeles

by Tony Chavira

It bothers me sometimes when people ask “Where are you from?” and when I reply “Los Angeles,” they look back at me in shock. “No one is from Los Angeles.”

I am actually from Los Angeles. Well, I’m from Monterey Park, which is a 50/50 sort of East Los Angeles/San Gabriel hybrid community. Monterey Park is both an area that a lot of well-to-do Chinese Diaspora has moved into and an area that a lot of former East L.A. residents moved into rather than hang out for the rest of their lives in their little East L.A. neighborhoods. In fact, my dad grew up in East L.A., right in City Terrace across from Cal State University Los Angeles. He went to all of the neighborhood schools, went to architecture school at Cal Poly Pomona in the late ’60s and got a masters degree in art from Cal State L.A. My mom grew up in Huntington Park, went to school at Cal State L.A. also, and ended up getting two masters degrees in education from Azusa Pacific. Combined, my parents have two associates degrees, two bachelors, and three masters.

I am their oldest son, and combined I have two bachelors degrees from a small New England liberal arts school and two masters degrees in, essentially, research methodology. When I found out that I’d have the opportunity for two masters without getting wildly in debt, I teased my parents with the fact that I’d have an equal number of bachelors and masters degrees as both of them combined. It was just my luck that my mom ended up getting her second masters exactly a week before I got mine, thereby defeating my goal to best both of my parents. There’re no hard feelings though ... they always do better when they work together.

Because of scholarships, teaching positions, and lots of letter writing, I’ve been fortunate enough to live in places that are not Los Angeles and get this far with my education. Though some things come more easily than others, money is definitely not one of those things. When I decided not to stay at USC and attempt to get a Ph.D. or teach, I had no real choice but to focus on research and consulting for the corporate world, the way I had prepared myself. I took freelance jobs analyzing statistics and summarizing data for a clandestine market research company, put together freelance change management proposals for a large human resources company (which strung me along for way too long without hiring me full time), and grasped for as much freelance market writing work as I possibly could. Although the money was decent (and it was 2006, technically the height of the artificial financial boom), I felt like all of my time was being sapped. I wasn’t sure if it had to do with the fact that I was still living at home or if it had to do with the fact that all of the stuff I had trained myself to do was really just “interesting,” rather than “compelling.”

So at the end of 2006, I decided to help my father start his new architecture firm in downtown L.A., relocate from Pasadena, and start fresh under his own name on his own company. Exciting as that may have seemed, it also meant taking a huge pay cut, and the only way I could justify it was to take three drastic steps:

1. Save as much money as I could in case disaster struck and the company crashed.
2. Skimp at every corner while continuing to whore myself out as a freelance researcher and statistician.
3. Live with my parents for an indefinite period of time and push the thought of moving out of my head entirely.

So in January of 2007, our company was conceived and I resigned myself to a vague and uncertain future. Despite all of the personal anguish that year held for me, I found that two things really mattered to me. First, that my dad felt that he was really making it on his own and would be able to accomplish some great things as an architect at his new firm. Second, that I’ve always really enjoyed writing. Writing came easily to me, and I knew that I had a little ability, though also had the inclination to get tangential. Also, writing on the Internet gives you the bad tendency to equate “writing a lot” with “writing well,” and when the opportunity to write for FourStory came along (which, of course, I took right away) I quickly realized that I had fallen for this misconception as well.

Three years later, our architecture firm in downtown L.A. has grown from three employees to seven, though the recession had really changed the industry. To give a really telling example, this time last year, I went on a walkthrough for the renovation of the city hall in a Southern Californian coastal city. Of course, the city didn’t want to spend any more than $1 million for the renovation of an entire 3-story building, and they also wanted the best services their $1 million could buy. Knowing this, I figured that the gigantic L.A. architecture firms would back away and there’d be plenty of room for smaller design firms like us to compete (as we’d be able to better keep our overhead under control). When I arrived, I was shocked to see over 100 firms at all levels of size and organization crazily trying to put together an idea for how much things would cost and what kinds of services they could offer. In the end, the city cut a deal with an architect/contractor who “threw in architecture for free” as part of their services. That company simply needed the incoming work, and in the end, none of us could compete with their price.

Obviously, a lot has changed over the course of the three years since FourStory started. We have a black president now, for one. He’s also a tax-and-spend-ocrat, which is hard when a lot of America perceives that they’re being overtaxed while at the same time there’s no money left to spend (as G.W. Bush spent it on all of his friends and their wars). And that was before he even came into office. Unsurprisingly, there’s no money left anywhere for public housing at a time of record foreclosures. Los Angeles has laid off a ton of their public sector workers, and the construction industry was put on a general hiatus for about a year and a half. And surely enough, both of those things have directly affected my parents.

But more than either of those things, I have directly affected my parents, because I am still forced by circumstances to live at home. I consider myself generally responsible and I’m not necessarily living beyond my means (though I am luckier than most in that I’ve had a lot of opportunity to really travel the world), but I constantly find myself in a position of paying back money loaned to me when I was younger, dumber, more idealistic, or possibly just more optimistic about having a structured future. If we got right down to it, I probably could find a terribly boring consulting job I would hate going to every day, but I could also live in just about any area of Los Angeles I chose. But if this is really America, then the hard-as-hell work I’m putting into my firm, my personal writing projects, and FourStory have got to fucking payoff at some point, either in the form of economic sustainability or in an overall improvement in the conditions of everything around me. And maybe something I write’s going to cause someone to finally open up and think, “Hey, affordable housing’s a damn good idea!”

But that may just be my tangential idealistic ranting coming back to me. It’s easy to be fatalistic when 1/3 of my friends are still living with their parents (and another 1/3 have one foot in their parents’ home and one foot out). When prices are deliberately inflated to prepare for a miraculous rebound, how am I supposed to be able to both rent and save to buy a home? Most recently, I’ve even been wondering what the point would be to own a home at all. Or a car for that matter. While I’ve been trying to embrace the world to its fullest, it has sunken its claws into me deeply. And now that I’ve realized that I’m bleeding, I have to pull them out one at a time, slowly, with all of my effort.

I’ve been told all of my life that I was smart, thoughtful, whatever. In direct relation to that—at this point—any failure would be a direct reflection of my ability to manage myself. Generations have gone though things like this before me and generations will do it after me as well. All I can do is fight—hard—for myself and for those who depend on me for their own paychecks and peace of mind. I cannot let them fail, because—above all—it means failing myself.

Three years later and the stakes aren’t higher; I’m just three years older. The stakes were always this high.

Comments

No comments.

Comments closed.