To me, it felt like waking up from the Matrix. The more I learned, the more I saw it everywhere. LA, I realized, is full of contradictions. We have density, but more often than not, it’s placed right along loud, dangerous, car-dominated corridors like Venice, La Brea, and Pico. We build apartments facing six-lane boulevards with no trees, no safe crossings, and nowhere to walk to. Meanwhile, the quiet, leafy streets just behind those corridors are protected, reserved almost exclusively for single-family homes and mansions. In LA, comfort and quiet are privatized. Everyone else gets noise and fumes.

I grew angry. Not just at the noise and fumes. But the systems that allowed this to be normalized. At a government that underfunds transit but widens highways. At a culture that treats cars as a birthright and housing as a commodity. At the way we’ve built a society that quietly inflicts violence on the most vulnerable people. Kids growing up with asthma, unhoused neighbors driven mad by all the traffic noise, families forced to trade safety and health for an affordable place to live.

I started to see the street not just as a place, but as a symptom. Of deeper choices. Of political cowardice. Of whose comfort we protect, and whose we sacrifice. And I can never unsee it. I didn’t just want to complain, I wanted to understand how we got here, and how we could get out of this.