Last weekend, as I was walking back to my house with my coffee and a copy of the newspaper, I had the distinct feeling that I was being followed. As it turned out, I was being followed, by a very young man driving a very expensive car.
It was a Tesla – those electric luxury sedans that are popping up everywhere – and the driver looked barely old enough to shave. He pulled the car alongside me – it glided with that unnerving hum that electric vehicles emit – lowered the window and said: “Sir? Can I ask you a question? Are you selling your house?”
“No,” I said, in an annoyed tone of voice. But then I thought for a moment. “I mean, I don’t think I am. But I guess there’s always a number, right?”
He nodded confidently and handed me his business card. It identified him as an employee of a very hot new media company involved with something called “business development”, which is something I would have thought described every job. I mean, when you get right down to it, isn’t every employee involved with developing the business?
Before I could ask, he glided arrogantly away.
“Was that one of the Snapchat guys?” a neighbour asked. I shook my head. Recently, several large tech and media companies have moved into the neighbourhood, bringing with them newly-minted billionaires, Teslas and an overheated housing market.
“Was it one of the Google guys? Or the Facebook crew?”
I showed him the card. “Oh,” he said. “Those guys. They just moved into that warehouse over on Venice Way. I hate those guys. You’re not going to sell, are you? We don’t need more of them on the street.”
I told him that I wasn’t going to sell my house, which was true. Though the idea of a couple of Snapchat billionaires competing for the right to buy it did warm my greedy heart. But that kind of cold, dispassionate economic analysis is lost on my more artsy and free-spirited neighbours.
If you could somehow pick up the eastern edge of Hollywood, shake all of the loose and unmoored things down to the western edge, they’d end up collected in a chaotic mess along the shore.
That, in a nutshell, is Venice Beach, where I live.
Venice has long been a garish and over-the-top circus for oddballs and derelicts of every stripe. Depending on your willingness to euphemise unemployed layabouts – and in Venice Beach, we’ve been calling them “artists” and “free spirits” for decades – the narrow strip of beach and the palm tree-lined streets in the surrounding neighbourhoods are a colourful and eccentric redoubt.
Venice Beach is now, according to influential opinion-makers such as The New York Times and GQ magazine, the "coolest" neighbourhood in Los Angeles, which makes it, by extension, the coolest neighbourhood in the United States, and raises this important question: if that's so, what am I doing there?
Full disclosure: I am not cool. I have worn essentially the same hairstyle and essentially the same wardrobe since grammar school, and I am old enough for both of those styles to have oscillated in and out of fashion at least twice since then. When I bought my house in Venice, in 1997, it was during a distinctly “down” phase of the neighbourhood. Police helicopters circled noisily overhead at least twice nightly, and if you listened carefully you could hear the dull, flat report of automatic weapon fire emanating from the gang-infested public housing projects nearby.
Venice, in those days, was bohemian and artsy but more important, it was a very good buy. Even I, who bluffed my way through some low-level economics classes at university knew that, eventually, depressed beachfront real estate wouldn’t stay depressed for long.
And it hasn’t. Venice Beach is now, officially, in the middle of a real estate craze. House prices are zooming up. Fancy shops are opening along the main boulevard. Businesses are moving in. The scruffy, downscale vibe of the place is swiftly transforming into a chic and moneyed atmosphere.
I couldn’t be happier. My neighbours, though – mostly holdouts from the radical 1960s or threadbare would-be artists barely eking out a living – are furious. All along they thought the gentrifying enemy, when it came, would come in the form of a banker or lawyer or some establishment yuppie type. Instead, it came in the form of a young man in his early twenties, wearing a T-shirt and sneakers, driving a Tesla, with $1billion in the bank.
“I don’t even know what Snapchat is,” my neighbour complained to me one recent afternoon.
“Here,” I said, “I’ll show you.”
So I took out my phone and showed him how fun and addictive the video app can be. He downloaded it and immediately began Snapchatting away, adding photos and videos to his Snapchat “story” and connecting with friends from all over.
“This is fun,” he said. “I mean, I can see how it’s gotten so big. I mean, I still hate them, but I guess I can live with them. I mean, I learnt to live with all of those horrible Hollywood people who moved here in the late 1990s, right?”
What could I do but agree?
Rob Long is a writer and producer in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl