Really not surprised TBH. Last week, I traveled to L.A. for the first time in ~ 15 years and I was very shocked to see how much everything there has degraded.

Really not surprised TBH. Last week, I traveled to L.A. for the first time in ~ 15 years and I was very shocked to see how much everything there has degraded. This is of course anecdotal evidence and very likely biased by my faulty memory, but still ... The combo of the number of homeless people under West LA freeway overpasses, the quasi-perpetual gridlock even on surface roads, the dereliction of infrastructures (roads, buildings, even private single family houses in middle-class neighborhoods), the number of boarded shops in downtown Santa-Monica, and worst of all, I felt that the local where noticeably "grimmer" than I remembered them ... all of it was fairly shocking. Really not the sweet SoCal I remembered from the nineties and aughties, and old friends I met with who stuck around confirmed that my feeling was not wrong - in spite of the boiled-frog effect of living there throughout, they felt exactly the same.