If I were a panhandler in Los Angeles, most days I’d hop on the subway and exit at the station that’s the closest to Wilshire Boulevard and Rodeo Drive.
The wealthier people in Beverly Hills, as well as the tourists who visit there, would be my best targets, I’d figure. After all, there’s a reason they call it the Golden Triangle.
I wouldn’t be alone. There’d be hundreds, maybe thousands, like me. And it wouldn’t take us long to figure that at the end of the day, we may as well sleep in a nice doorway or a park nearby and save the commute time.
Of course, all of that’s assuming that a subway stop is built at the Golden Triangle. So it’s little surprise that some business owners in that area met recently and decided to start pushing back on the prospect that a subway stop will be located near them. They don’t object to the planned subway, they just don’t want the station. They don’t want the Subway to the Sea to send them a gusher of folks from Skid Row.
They have other concerns as well. The merchants don’t want three years of construction. And they worry that shops near any subway station inevitably will cater to subway riders instead of the limo passengers who now frequent their pricey neighborhood.
You can call them elitist, and maybe they are, and say I’m being politically incorrect, which I am, but the business owners there have a point. Many of them have spent good time, effort and money building up equity in their shops and businesses. They’ve created an exclusive district with a special reputation that, granted, is elitist, but it also draws tourists from around the world. It wouldn’t take long for panhandlers and street people to destroy that delicate reputation.
On the other hand, if the proposed subway does not have a stop near the Golden Triangle, then the entire subway would have far less utility for many of the rest of us in Los Angeles. Business people who work downtown, the Miracle Mile or Westwood, for example, would love to take a subway to Beverly Hills to meet for a nice lunch at the Montage or Spago.
You can almost hear it now. “No stop anywhere near the Golden Triangle? Don’t even bother to build the subway, then.”
This is a conflict that’s likely to roll on for a while.