The Fortunes of Living in Beverly Hills

This blog post is about how fortunate I feel to be living in Beverly Hills. Bear with me, as I recount a recent experience that put a lot of things into perspective.

I just got back from a business trip to Europe. Before leaving, I had the pleasure of hosting 18 Danish journalists who were in town for inspirational sessions with people from the LA Times, NBC and online mavericks such as mommy blogger Jessica Gottlieb. They were studying how the transition from traditional media to new media is coming along here in the U.S.

Their travel agency first suggested a stay at the Sheraton in Downtown Los Angeles. Not only would this not have given the first-time visitors in the group a wrong impression of what L.A. is about, it would also have been pretty impractical. When I asked for something a little closer to Hollywood or Beverly Hills, the travel agent suggested the Renaissance in Hollywood. SURE! Let’s put them up at the most touristy of places, where they would have to fight their way through superhero impersonators and pickpockets just to get something to eat.

Instead, I booked rooms for them at on Canon and Olympic. It’s such a cute boutique hotel, and even though not everything went according to plan, the place looks great…if you can find it behind the dense vegetation in front of the entrance. The journalists loved Beverly Hills and the fact that they could walk to places, and excursions down Beverly Drive for an afternoon snack was a hit with the group.

Later on in the week, we went up to the Bay Area to get some more inspiration. Here, we visited a small, communal workspace in Oakland which is home to Oakland Local, one of the hyperlocal sites which is outside of the Patch.com network.

What a difference six hours of driving makes.

In Oakland, as you can imagine, they deal with poverty, gang violence, racism and a community trying to bring crime down, while developing the city into something with a more positive image than it’s had in recent times. On their site, they don’t have typical local categories such as “Around Town” or links to great information about nearby stores and restaurants. Instead, the categories have names such as “Development,” “Justice” and “Identity.” One of the stories on the site as I’m writing this is about a man who drowned on Alameda Beach while people just stood passively by and watched. Oakland has one of the top five highest crime rates in the nation, so maybe it’s no wonder that people wouldn’t take note of a drowning man.

Upon returning home to Beverly Hills, I came across the police blotter story here on Beverly Hills Patch about a and squeezed it during a heated discussion over cheating at a card game. This was deemed an assault.

For the people involved, it probably seemed like a serious matter. But after visiting Oakland Local, this kind of incident seems a little silly to even waste police resources on.

But, as silly as it may seem, it did give me a whole new appreciation for the "boring" placidity and safety of our little city in the middle of everything. 

We truly are fortunate.