Summary Of The City Of Angels By Mark Davis

Subsidized Los Angeles

Los Angeles is often referred to as The City of Angels. Ironically, in Mark Davis’ writing “Fortress Los Angeles,” it seems Los Angeles is anything but a city of angels. The essay makes the reader understand that homelessness and crime rates are a serious and growing epidemic in Los Angeles, so much so that whole buildings have been relocated and designed to isolate the homeless from middle to upper class citizens. Davis starts off his writing with a quick remembrance of how Los Angeles used to be, which provided a vibrant picture of how the city once was, right before tearing the image down and providing a more accurate, but harsh, reality of the city as it now is. Davis’ context is clear, consistent, and gives

The way homeless people are depicted Davis makes agreeing with the management and standards of living, which are seemingly assigned to the homeless by the city, effortless. The homeless have no choice but to accept the only options made available to them, one malicious way the city conjured up to keep away the homeless is by “on the advice of the Los Angeles Police…bulldozed the few remaining public toilets on Skid Row,” which was later confirmed to be “a policy decision and not a design decision.”(580) Maltreatment of the homeless is made to sound like a norm throughout the essay, for instance Davis casually mentions, “no one in Los Angeles has yet proposed adding cyanide to the garbage, as suggested in Phoenix,” and a cultivating judgment stating that, “few third-world countries are so pitiless.” (580/582) Passive aggressive actions, such as overhead sprinklers that come on at random times throughout the night and ground spikes to keep homeless from sleeping in public areas, that are being used have been so well illustrated in the mind of the reader, there is no denying these people will have no safe haven within the fortress of this city. Davis suggest that with the strategies being used against the homeless that the city has declared war upon them, and with the descriptions of the tactics being utilized the reader can hardly