I live in LA (West Hollywood) and spend much time living in Orange County, too, for various reasons, and in San Diego. Orange County, like America, often gets quality-of-life confused with "standard of living." America has been punked by the Tea Party movement. America has been in socioeconomic and political decline since the great days of Bill Clinton. Obama was a rising star tarnished by vestigial elements of racism refusing to see that he is the flowering of the American dream, in many ways. American democracy is having a tough time living up to its enlightened promises and expectations.
In Orange County, an historic bastion of conservative politics, it's founding City, Santa Ana, flirted with disaster when its urban inclinations were politically derailed by administrators seeking to emulate growing suburbs and their beige stucco successes of endless tract housing with prestige-sounding names. In the 1970's and 1980's, communities such as Santa Ana faced growing infrastructure decline, immigration, and "white flight." problems connected to urbanism down marketed expectations. In Santa Ana's case it was the arts that rescued it's I'll-fated reputation for disadvantage and despair. The creative community gave Santa Ana another voice. Everyone knows that "disadvantage is opportunity badly dressed!"
Change can be a frightening proposition, and few believed Santa Ana, of all cities, might ever approximate the once proud status it once enjoyed as the governmental, social, and socioeconomic center of Orange County, one of the wealthiest per-capita counties in the United States. But here it comes! And it's redefining Orange County's typically superficial definition of "wealth" in the process.
Santa Ana is little more than an intersection. That essentially defines what it is. Main Street and First Street, Santa Ana, actually are the center of Orange County, the proverbial "two sticks rubbed together!" Now, a public sculpture there reads, "The future Starts Here!" how's that for"recycling?"
Once Orange County's proud Downtown and Civic Center, so it is becoming again today, "Downtown Orange County!" it is also the physical address for one of the more important and unexpected developments in modern Orange County history, the ten-block, downtown "ARTISTS VILLAGE." Here, the concept for an urban, inter connective educational and creative space for Orange County was created, despite hisses, thumbs down, and moans from local press such as The Register and The Los Angeles Times Orange County Edition.
Of all things, it was Santa Ana, under Administrative Direction from City manager David Ream, that most actively resisted the formation of a non-City based arts council, the Santa Ana Council of Arts and Culture, which formed in 1987 with
fourteen Santa Ana-based arts and educational organizations including the prestigious Bowers Museum of Cultural Art and Pacific Symphony Orchestra.
The hood ornament of the arts movement was a proposed 10-block artists district in the downtown with the working title, "The Artists Village." One day the eighth (top) floor of City Hall I was confronted by the authoritarian Executive Director of Parks and Recreation. "Don," the executive director began, looking me squarely in the face, " With that Artists Village idea of yours you'll turn the downtown into nothing but homosexuals, prostitutes, and drug addicts!"
I thought for a nanosecond, eyes-to-eyes, as it was. "What's your point?" I asked. (What a huge step up that would be!)
Today Santa Ana is not only Orange County's "youth culture capital" and an
alternative to the rest of typical Orange County, but it has claimed for itself the profile as, perhaps, Orange County's leading creative community, with Laguna and, perhaps, Fullerton in the wings. From famous art schools, and artists, and culinary classes, advertising agencies, sound labs, young architects and art gallery
owners, and over three hundred artists live/work studios ... as well as a thriving "Artists Village, downtown, a booming Bowers Museum of Cultural Art, a hands on Discovery Science Center uptown, Santa Ana has become a vision of West LA meets East LA with all the benefits in between! It's great old neighborhoods are looking great again, filling with a creative class of unique individuals.
Lastly, Santa Ana was once the "Orange County" people are writing dismissively
about. It was even the home of the ultra conservative John Birch Society! Now it is everything but that! It now is home to The Center OC, the important LGBT non-profit umbrella organization (needing, already a larger building!), in the OC.There is even a
"gay parade" and a very busy gay bar across from a relatively new twenty-story Ronald Reagan Courthouse and Federal Building
Now that's progress! Welcome to the new Orange County! (I mean Santa Ana!) read more