I drove into my old neighborhood during the pandemic, months after not seeing my best friend; Drew lives up the street from the house my parents sold in 2014 after their divorce. The neighborhood’s different now. There are more houses with gentrification gray paint, including my parents’ old house. And more people are walking around the neighborhood with micro dogs and neck tattoos, residents with a different profile than my old neighbors who were postal workers, fishermen, and teachers.
These days, a house in the neighborhood sells for $1 million, and my old home is appraising at $1.1 million. San Pedro’s gentrifying, but the question is whether it will change inexorably or whether the town’s beautiful wrinkles will be able to withstand the Botox of gentrification.
San Pedro, Myth and Reality
San Pedro is raw.
It’s both a port and beach town with menace; a town referred to as a “ghetto by the sea,” where housing projects overlook one of the world’s busiest ports in Los Angeles that move gobs of goods for the country to consume. ‘Dro City’s a town that embraces the small-town, blue-collar ethos of a classic Bruce Springsteen song while owning its iconoclastic DIY aesthetic that gave rise to legends like the Minutemen and Toys That Kill of punk-rock fame. A member of the latter band recently opened a bonafide DIY punk venue called The Sardine. And, of course, the town has the grit that late-in-life poet Charles Bukowski adored.