Depressing Facts About L.A. That Will Make You Want to Move Tomorrow

You never wanted to settle down there anyway.

Complex Original

Image via Complex Original

Los Angeles. For all the palm trees, giant swimming pools, disgustingly good weather, and beautiful women, there is something so terribly tenuous and downright shady about the City of Angels. First of all, its nickname is total lie. Just hit up the Rainbow Room on the Sunset Strip and see how many washed-up metal stars are still trying to pull 20-something tail. And, while the rich stay nice and cozy, the poor survive off fast food and long bus rides. The smog is like breathing a dragon's breath. Public transportation is nearly nonexistent. Traffic wastes money and is time consuming. And no one can be happy all the time. Stop lying to yourself, Angelenos; it's time to face the depressing facts. And should you be tempted to move to NYC, know the East Coast is not much better. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.

People in Los Angeles can't get off their cell phones.

Don't scroll through your Instagram feed and look at the daily #sunsetporn while driving home in bumper-to-bumber traffic? Excatly what kind of Angeleno are you? One of the crappiest parts of car culture is being stuck in your car for long periods of time and being totally bored. Cut to totally weaving through lanes while illegally hashtagging #trafficsucks on your Twitter feed. And according to a study for the California Office of Traffic Safety, the usage of cell phones while driving has increased, especially usage of cell phones with young people. Not surprisingly, 18-25 year olds can't keep their hands off their phones. The number jumped from 9 percent to 18 percent of young people on the phone. This is all after California passed a handsfree driving law in the summer of 2008, which was to no availl. No one cared about the rule, and more and more people continue to break it. The outcome? Really dumb crashes while people update their Facebook statuses about a Sunset Strip celebrity sighting.

Los Angeles was rated America's most stressful city.

For all the new age gurus, yoga studios, juice bars, and metaphysical colon cleanses that exist on every corner of Los Angeles, all that deep breathing and heavy intestine petting isn't doing shit: Los Angeles is the most stressful city in the United States. Apparently, all the good vibrations and power hikes through Runyon Canyon can't make up for the bad air, horrible traffic, crappy economy, and outrageous rent prices. An American Psychological Association study shows that Angelenos aren't just unhappy about their money situation; even when they have jobs, they are totally unsatisfied and all their hard work is taking a toll on their physical health. Driving back and forth from their horrible jobs only exacerbates the problem. The plus side of Los Angeles? The kind of amazing weather that homeless people can really thrive in all year round.

The smog in Los Angeles is the worst in the country.

In Los Angeles, you don't breathe the air, the air breathes you. Smog in Los Angeles is just a part of life. When it's really chilly out, you can pretend you live someplace quaint like, oh, San Francisco, and that it's only fog. During the summer the smog makes the sunsets look like nuclear fallout cotton candy and the whole thing is enchanting. But there is danger lurking in the ozone and the smog in Los Angeles just seems to get worse. A 2010 report says that Riverside-San Bernadino is the absolute smoggiest city in the United States. In other states, they have blizzard or hurricane warnings. In Los Angeles, there are "purple-alert days" which basically means: breathe the air and you become instant cancer. OK, that's extreme, but the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside area had 85 smog days in the summer of 2011 alone, with seven of those being purple-alert. LOL. Breathing.

Gas prices are steadily increasing.

If you feel like you're being stripped of all your hard-earned cash at the pump, your probably right. In the summer of 2013, a gas tax passed that increases gas prices by 3.5 cents per gallon. That might not seem like a lot, but it really adds up. The extra money does go towards cool things like public transportation and other useful things, but that doesn't mean it's not totally painful to be price gouged at the pump by gas in Los Angeles. Especially when we're such a hardcore driving culture.

Los Angeles teachers are giving up on Los Angeles students.

Fair wages and education? Who needs it? Even the most beneficent of human beings i.e. teachers, have been quitting their jobs at a disturbing rate under the weight of economic pressures in Southern California. According to a UC Berkley study conducted in 2011, inner-city Los Angeles teachers are three times more likely to give up on the teaching life than teachers in other districts. According to the study, it's less about the fact that teachers are direly underpaid than just really awful teaching conditions. It's a sad downward spiral because the kids that need those teachers the most are the ones that live in those areas with the crappy teaching conditions.

Hollywood has a major earthquake fault running through it.

Eventually, even the glamorous timeworn facade of Hollywood will crack and fade. Or just completely be demolished due to an earthquake. Comparable to New York's Times Square, Hollywood Boulevard is where the tourists come to shuffle their feet over their favorite stars and pay a dude dressed as a budget Batman to pose with them and their overly-priced cupcakes. Everyone knows that California is littered with earthquake fault lines, but a recent development project uncovered one in Hollywood that could actually screw up the whole tourist culture in Los Angeles. The fault line, discovered by the California Geographical Society, actually runs underneath iconic buildings like Capital Records. This means that at any moment, an earthquake could demolish Hollywood and probably take out some tourists. That's not depressing at all.

Los Angeles is the 6th most toxic city in the country.

Clean air, clean water. That's the image that's projected onto the silver screen, but actually Los Angeles is a cesspool of toxins. The good news is that Los Angeles rates at #6 on the list (under New York's #4), but that still doesn't make it a very healthy place to live. The air quality is the worst, with smog creating a thick layer of poison over the city, and the water quality is literally poisonous containing elements like nitrate, arsenic, and methane.

Most people DGAF about retirement.

Angelenos aren't getting jobs (and when they do they aren't happy at their jobs) and they aren't buying houses. Most of them are young, aimless stoners, so it makes sense that Los Angeles is last in the country in terms of retirement readiness. Not shockingly, uber-normaloid Minneapolis/St. Paul comes in at #1 while Los Angeles trails way behind and comes in dead last with 40% of people responded saying that they haven't saved at all for retirement. One-third of people aren't even remotely thinking about it. What does that mean for our future? A lot of collective poverty and probably an economic epidemic. Watch out, Los Angeles. Reality is coming for you.

L.A. rents went up 10% this year.

Pay up, or peel out. That's the new feeling behind Los Angeles ever-increasing rent. With the most amount of renters in the country, of course landlords are hiking up the prices; Los Angeles rent when up by 10% this year. Across the country, it's only been about 3 percent. A company called Radpad analyzed the rental metrics and found that renting a 1-bedroom in Malibu might actually be cheaper than one in Silverlake. Same goes for Beverly Hills versus Venice. It seems like the dirty hippies are actually the ones paying the most money for their rent. Who wins now hippies et hipsters?

Extreme hot days will increase five-fold in the next 50 years.

While everyone is suffering from the Polar Vortex, it's the middle of January and the weather next week in Los Angeles will be in the mid-80s. This time of year, that might seem like a dream, but when summer rolls around, Los Angeles is sweating. Literally. According to a UCLA study, long hot summer days are expected to become the norm starting between 2041 and 2060. Los Angeles county will begin to have extremely hot days that are over 95 degrees way more often. In the San Fernando Valley and San Gabriel Valley, those long hot days will almost quadruple in frequency. At that point, we'll probably all be wishing for that tsunami to cool us down.

Los Angeles has the highest percentage of renters in the U.S.

Looking for a place to lay your weary head in Los Angeles? Well, you probably can't afford a house, and if you're looking for an apartment, you better start six months before your current lease is up. Places to rent are sparse in Los Angeles because L.A. has the highest amount of renters in the country at 52 percent, which means more than half of the city doesn't own property. That's reflective of the whole country (which is only at 35 percent total) as more people have been renting in the last 50 years than ever, but Los Angeles is especially fraught with young people trying to "realize their dreams."

Rich people in Malibu could be submerged into the ocean in 90 years.

Goodbye rich people and one-percenters that get to live at the very expensive lap of luxury along the Malibu shores. The rising sea levels don't give a damn about the price of real estate, and by 2100, they'll totally submerge most Malibu beach homes. 2100 might seem a long time away, but in the grand scope of things, 86 years is nothing. 86 years ago, flappers were living it up, the stock market was about to crash, and Hollywood was about to become the biggest thing that ever rocked the world. Beyond technology, not much has changed in the grand scope of humanity, but 86 years from now, those Hollywood starlets will have to find another over-priced place to come home. Let's all do some long-term planning and try to predict the Malibu of the future before it becomes a perverse version of the lost city of Atlantis.

Sitting in traffic costs $1,300 a year.

Let's think. What are some things you could do with $1,300? You could buy a new Macbook. You could put a down-payment on a car. You could buy a round-trip plane ticket to London. Hell, you could blow it all on bottle service at Hyde so you can impress that snotty Santa Monica socialite you've been crushing on. Or, you can spend it all while idling away in traffic for mind-numbing, fuel-wasting hours of your life. A Texas A&M study says that not only is Los Angeles one of the most congested cities in the country, but that traffic eats up $1,300 a year for the average Angeleno in fuel prices and time wasted alone. That doesn't even count all the other incidentals like that super necessary Flaming Hot Cheetos and Mountain Dew pitstop between point A and point B. What do most other Americans spend? Only about $818.

Los Angeles has no football team. And, worst yet, might get one from KISS.

This is probably the second most depressing fact of all: Los Angeles doesn't have an NFL football team. The first most depressing fact? Campy veteran rockers, KISS, just bought a football team that they will dub the L.A. Kiss. While they probably won't play things like the "Big Game," if L.A. Kiss becomes any more than a rock star pipe dream, they might becomes Los Angeles' newest football team.

Average L.A. families can only afford 24% of houses on Los Angeles market.

TV-land Los Angeles: Middle class families living in sprawling houses in suburban Los Angeles neighborhoods resplendent with green trees and parks not littered with condoms and gangster pedophiles. Actual Los Angeles: well, not that. All the working class and middle class families can't afford the exorbitant housing prices making it so that the average Los Angeles family can only afford 24% of the houses on the Los Angeles market. And most of those houses are in less desirable neighborhoods, like Central Los Angeles. According to Trulia, most people make about $53k a year, giving a single person only $271,000 to spend on a house. That will buy you a single apartment in a mediocre area in Los Angeles, 20 houses in Detroit, or you can just waste your down payment on beer and tacos like other 30-somethings in Los Angeles.

Tsunamis could wipe out Los Angeles any day now.

Earthquakes are old news. The new natural disaster power player in Los Angeles is the exotically-named tsunami that we all think are relegated to Asian countries and sci-fi flicks despite there being signs everywhere on the Los Angeles coasts that warn against them. But a U.S. Geological Survey says that if Alaska had a 9.1 quake off their shores, the quake could ostensibly create a tsunami large enough to wipe out Long Beach and parts of Orange County, creating devastation big enough to make 750,000 to flee. That's not the worst of it; sewage would flood the cities and toxic debris would ruin everything around the beaches. It would be a bitch to clean up and totally not gnarly, dude. That is one wave we wouldn't want to ride.

Los Angeles daters are total flakes.

With so many women looking like they stepped out of a Victoria's Secret catalog and so many men bragging about their Entourage-ish lifestyle, rest assured that most of Los Angeles is full of liars and plastic surgery billboard nymphettes. Accordingly, the Los Angeles dating market isn't just full of fakers; it's full of flakers. According to a ranking and survey system on an app called Let's Date, Angelenos are twice as likely as the national average to flake on their dates. 10 percent of the time to be exact. We can imagine that the excuses range from dudes power Skyping in their Range Rovers to the chicks having Pilates classes that run late, but let's all just be honest: everyone is at home watching House Hunters International marathons and eating boxed mac and cheese instead.

The parking fines are ludicrous.

We're talking about a revolution. Except it's not over some antique drama in Egypt or even some hippie-dippy concept to just "let go." Nope. It's over Los Angeles' ridiculous parking ticket fees. Parking on a street cleaning day can rack you up as much as $62. That's why it's totally possible for the city to make $300 million dollars a year in car-related revenue, with $150 million dollars of that coming from parking tickets alone. With so many cars on the road, it's no wonder they try to fleece us for all we've got.

Los Angeles is the stoner capital of the country

Slackers rejoice! Or not? According to a study, Los Angeles is the most stoned city in the country. While this may seem like something awesome, it's actually not considering Angelenos current obsession is not doing anything with their lives. There are over 1,000 pot shops in Los Angeles and Movato--a real estate blog--says "more people in Los Angeles have medical pot cards than in any other city in our top 100 - 56,111 people in all. Six of the 10 winners were California cities, at least. But Colorado, which this month celebrated its first legal recreational sales, killed it, with Denver coming in first place."

Being a pedestrian or a cyclist in Los Angeles could kill you.

Part of the Midnight Ryderzzz or some sort of fixie nerd? You're safer popping wheelies in your backyard or investing in some heavy-duty safety gear because bike-riding in Los Angeles is for the both the daring and the dumb. But, so is walking in Los Angeles. Which is probably why, according to that Missing Persons song, nobody walks in L.A. While the national average for pedestrian fatalities from being hit by a car is about 11.4 percent, Los Angeles' total is triple that amount. Bicyclists are a little less screwed, but not by much.

The national average for bike riding fatalities is 1.7 percent, but the total in Los Angeles is double that. All that talk about "walking" and "biking" for green living is kind of a moot point when so many people are being plowed over by behemoth mounds of burning steel in the form of douchebags driving Range Rovers doing the "California roll" (just rolling lackadaisically through a stop sign) in a school zone. It sucks to say, but we are safer in our gas-guzzlers.