Blogging Social Difference Week 6: Palos Verdes Peninsula

This week I went to the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I chose this location partly out of convenience, since it is where my parents live, but also because it exhibits a concept discussed in class: restricting access. Palos Verdes is a collection of four cities (Rancho Palos Verdes, Palos Verdes Estates, Rolling HIlls and Rolling Hills Estates) on a peninsula in south Los Angeles county (approximately 25 miles from UCLA). The peninsula is also a hill which makes it an ideal location for an exclusive, and restricted, community. The four cities have combined median income of $156,517.50 (data from Mapping LA), which is extraordinarily high. Entry into Palos Verdes is limited to only 8 points, with approximately only two bus routes running throughout the area.

Crest Dr. gate entrance to Rolling Hills 

I traveled to locations around Palos Verdes that I knew reflected this restriction of access. My first stop was at the gate of Rolling Hills. The gates here block off the public, even within Palos Verdes to an entire city. There are only three points of entry, and I stopped at the Crest Drive entrance. Entry is only granted to residents and their visitors. This is the extreme side of restricting access, where an entire city denies entry to anyone who does not need to be there. This is an active way of restricting access, requiring security.

Border between Palos Verdes Estates and Redondo Beach

I then drove to another aspect of the restriction of access in Palos Verdes, on the border between Palos Verdes Estates and Redondo Beach. Here, the streets of Redondo Beach and Palos Verdes Estates are cut off from one another by a walking trail. The streets show evidence of once being continuous and part of the same grid, but they end at the trail. One can see the other side easily but cannot drive across to another city; instead one would have to drive around to another point of access in order to reach it by car. This also makes shortcuts through the neighborhood on the Palos Verdes side unusable, thus restricting traffic to the main streets and points of entry. Exclusivity is reinforced.

Palos Verdes Drive North, a major street through Palos Verdes that does not have sidewalks or street lights.
Navigating through here is made even more difficult by small, hidden street signs.

This neighborhood also shows other signs of maintaining exclusivity, which can be seen in areas throughout the Palos Verdes Peninsula. Many streets have no sidewalks, no crosswalks and no street lights. The lack of sidewalks and crosswalks make walking through here difficult. The lack of streetlights make it inhospitable at night to anyone without a car. All of these aspects of this area reinforce the notion that anyone who doesn’t have to be there, shouldn’t. These are passive and subversive methods for maintaining exclusivity and restricting access, which stand in contrast to the more active tactic of a gated community.

The exclusivity of the Palos Verdes Peninsula can be seen in a few different manifestations, but the point is clear. This is an affluent and upper class neighborhood isolated, largely by choice, from the surrounding cities. The urban planners who designed the various neighborhoods wanted to create a suburb that is safer and quieter than surrounding cities and they succeeded, with crime rates being lower than neighboring Lomita and Torrance and traffic being fairly light. In regards to our class, the exclusivity represents the limited access to an undifferentiated public. What reinforces exclusivity ultimately reinforces social difference.