It took a long time, but for nearly fifty years this effort has carried on, successfully I think, but hardly anyone recalls that the origins of the effort were very deliberate and came about when the nighttime downtown was the precise opposite of what it is today, and few people probably think of it as involving a conscious goal then or now. They just think "that's the way Seattle is." But Seattle wasn't.
This should remind us of yesterday's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400259) about the importance of long-term planning. The good things about today came about because people decades ago consciously made efforts to make them happen. The good things that are to come—light rail, bike lanes, reasonable rents that stem from increasing housing supply—are only going to come if people consciously make efforts to make them happen.
For those not familiar with the VTA, I'll just say that it's the kind of light rail system that passes by the airport, but the closest stop to the terminal is more than a mile's walk away.
Article is a bit old but it is sorta happening along first street. There is a significant increase in density along the first street and Tasman corridor - anchored by Samsungs huge new campus. I expect light rail usage over the next 3-5 years to greatly increase at least in North SJ.
There is bias here though. They mention that cities with good downtowns have stories histories that people come up with about the planning that went into it. That will happen with every single successful thing. Conversely, nobody wants to take credit for a failure so people are happy to say that a downtown got crappy because of a lack of planning.
Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs. There are many people that have no interest in living in an expensive downtown apartment. If you start to lose the small percentage of the population that desires and can afford the downtown lifestyle, it will either on the vine regardless of the amount of planning that goes into them.
Culture doesn't just "change", forces shape it. Culture moves towards a suburban, car oriented culture when the local governments pay (at great taxpayer expense) for an overbuilt highway system to quickly get people in and out of it.
The attraction of suburban life vs dense urban downtown would be mostly the same if public transit routes were just as available. (Although I would imagine the availability of easier transportation would certainly increase restaurant & entertainment offerings from outside commuters who don't normally have car access)
Some people prefer their peaceful cookie cut house and desire nothing much to do with the big cities. More often then not it's zoning, job availability, and affordability.
I'd wager what people actually prefer would be wide open fields where everything you see in front of you is yours but they can't afford that, hence they settle on a suburban lawn. Economics drive suburbanization, not any sort of actual human desire. If the economics skew away from the heavy subsidies for suburbs, people stop expanding them.
That's not really true, at least with many people that desire suburbia that I talk to. They want a house in a nice neighborhood with decent restaurants and shopping within a reasonable driving distance.
It's not that common to want wide open fields in front of you. On top of that, it's not that expensive to get a big chunk of land in the middle of nowhere.
Consider what you just said. People clearly aren't that interested in being downtown if all it takes is a better Highway system to let them move out.
What you are describing is a culture that already dislikes being downtown but is only there because the transit sucks. That's not a sign of a healthy downtown.
All it takes is a taxpayer subsidized highway to move out. How much do people want to live in the suburbs? Enough to pay their own way to do so? Including the highways as well as the efficiency cost of eg, electricity and plumbing?
The very presence of freeways drives people away because they are noisy eyesores and impediments to local travel. In Seattle, I-5 cuts across the street grid and separates downtown from Capital Hill and First Hill, while the Alaskan Way Viaduct cuts downtown off from the waterfront. If both of these were removed (I-5 could take a bypass route around the Seattle city center using what is now I-405), downtown Seattle would be much more livable and would have better traffic on account of being able to reconnect the street grid.
You don't put a cloverleaf interchange downtown so that comparison is dumb. An international airport takes up way more space and cities still seem to have them. See why that's stupid?
The presence of freeways does not drive away people. If that were true there would be no freeways in any populated location.
If you remove all freeways it would impede people's ability to visit and make the downtown less crowded. Perhaps that's your intention.
You're being extremely reductive here, frankly to a dishonest degree. For regional and national transportation networks, freeways are necessary. Freeways are unnecessary in the city center and do not belong there, just like international airports don't belong in the city center. New York City and San Francisco are completely bypassed by the major interstate freeways, and they are more livable and desirable for that very reason. By way of contrast, Seattle suffers from the presence of I-5 throughout the city center, or the I-5/I-90 interchange in the city center.
>Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy
this is true not just of the downtown. Cities die because the money stops. The suburbs don't keep on thriving after the industry collapses
> or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs
Not enough investment in downtown and urban spaces can be a contributing factor to this. People move to the suburbs because the suburbs are nicer than the urban core, which causes a cascading effect as the urban core empties and becomes even less desirable. If you make downtown a desirable place, you'll stem some of the shift to suburbia.
I feel a little sad when I read this "this used to be a crack house and now it's a lovely restaurant" narrative. There is a glee with the notion of cleaning something up. That's an admirable thing of course. But I wonder about the people who were living in that "crack house". Where are they now? What municipal policies led to them being there in the first place?
Was the problem really cleaned up, or was it just flushed away?
> In 2010, The Economist highlighted a case in which four Americans were arrested for importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. That violated a Honduran law which that country no longer enforces, but because it’s still on the books there its enforced here. “The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece.” When the article was published 10 years later, two of them were still behind bars.
TL;DR version: they were arrested and convicted for importing over $15 million in illegal lobster tails. The plastic versus cardboard boxes issue is a red herring--it was the means by which they concealed the undersized tails, not the primary basis for prosecution. As for the Honduran law--the Court of Appeals determined that the Honduran law was in fact valid during the relevant time period. Moreover, the Lacey Act only criminalizes importing animals harvested in violation of a foreign law when the importer knows or should know about the law. The prosecution proved that the defendants took measures to conceal the undersized tails and evade inspectors.
They also at times routed their lobster tails through Canada to avoid detection --- for lobsters sourced in the jurisdiction of Honduras and destined for Alabama.
People love to fixate on the "undersized lobster" part of this story, but that's an irrelevant detail. The important fact is that all fishermen were required to take lobsters under a specific set of rules, and report their compliance with those rules. This particular fisherman cheated the rest of the market by ignoring those rules.
Nobody bats an eyelid when "banksters" are convicted and serve sentences† for violating rules far more abstract and far less connected to real-world consequences than overfishing regulations.
† yes, this actually happens, probably more often than it does to fishermen
It is a long-term commitment to mixed used development, walkable streets, view corridors for everyone, public parks within walking distance, and mass public transit into and out of the core.
So I live in downtown Seattle, and there are not a ton of residents here. For one thing, there are no schools in downtown Seattle, and so almost no one with kids wants to live downtown. And while I wouldn't characterize it as "dead and deserted" at night, it's not particularly lively either.
In fact, most people think it's weird that I live downtown. It's definitely not a common choice around here.
It is largely true that young tech workers want to live "in the city" (as opposed to in the suburbs), but (at least in Seattle) that means one of the "cool" neighborhoods in the city, not downtown.
Even in America's largest city, 'downtown' isn't a terribly attractive area. How many people really want to live in midtown Manhattan? Most of the action is a bit further out, and you'll find a more lively nightlife somewhere like Williamsburg (I imagine Cap Hill in Seattle is similar).
Lower East Side/Chelsea had way more lively nightlife to me than Williamsburg. The burg just gets all of the hipster press and attention but it wasn't all that of a lively hotspot when I was there.
As someone who's been to Seattle a grand total of once 6 years ago, I still thought it was weird when their downtown was described as "lively".
After my trip I told people that Seattle seemed to have a "fake downtown" to me. This was mostly because of how dead it seemed to me. I stayed in a downtown hotel and walked around the city for a few days and my overwhelming feeling was nothingness (other than Pike Place market).
I also live in Seattle... yeah, I don't know that I'd characterize the Central Business District ("downtown") as interesting or active after 5, save for a few high-end restaurants. Belltown, sure. Capitol Hill, sure. Pioneer Square has a functional bar district. The big City Center area in Downtown - Westlake Park - is well known to be sketchy, and the black market is about 3 blocks north of that last I saw. Tons of tourists, but not an inhabitable place.
There are no schools downtown, there aren't affordable apartments with enough space for kids, which essentially siphons the entire kid-oriented group out of downtown for their condos/houses. The high end stuff downtown is high end, so you get an entire coterie of very rich traveling place to place in their cars from the parking garages, as near as I can tell.
Pike Place is cool, but largely a tourist trap.
So I think maybe the author of the essay should roll down the CBD about 7pm on a Tuesday night and think about his piece.... :-) might have a few corrections.
So, as a Seattle resident myself, I have a bit of an odder definition of "downtown" that the OA might be sharing. To me, downtown stretches from Belltown to Chinatown: the Space Needle marks one edge whereas Uwajimaya might mark another. On the eastern side, the WSCC might mark the boundary, making First Hill somewhat of a gray area.
That's a much, much larger area than the central/financial/business district and it might be what the author actually means: especially with how Belltown has changed.
I've lived in downtown Seattle for the past six years and I agree with everything you've said, but it's also slowly changing. There are tons of apartments and condos going up right now in downtown, not the neighborhoods. But as you mentioned, there are still no schools, and these condos are intended primarily for 20-something Amazon employees who will get married and move to the neighborhoods (or farther) when they have kids.
Since we've moved from no one living in downtown to lots of 20-somethings living in downtown, I hope eventually that will eventually turn into people living and staying in downtown.
> In fact, most people think it's weird that I live downtown. It's definitely not a common choice around here.
That's a good thing, it keeps prices down.
I live on 1st & Union.
Everything is next door:
- the market, Target, Kress, dry cleaners, all downtown stores
- all the bus lines stop on 3rd, 4th or 5th
- the light rail station is 2 blocks away
- numerous bars and restaurants in a 3 blocks radius
- Belltown is 5 min away
- Capitol Hill is 15 min away
- Pioneer Square is 10 min away
- the waterfront is 2 min away
I have a room, with view on the Puget Sound, with my own bathroom in a 2 bedrooms apartment (1200+ sqft) with a parking spot.
The building has a doorman and all utilities, even internet are included. I pay $1,250 / month.
As someone who has lived in the UK, France and Spain - the whole concept of it being normal that "downtown" is grim is really strange. Over here the city centre is typically the nicest (and most expensive) part of the city to live in.
I guess it stems from the relative ages of cities in North America vs Europe. A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Whereas in NA, cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.
Union Square is the heart of NYC. Almost all lines intersect there, (the L from Brooklyn as well), and it is next to (within 10mins walk) of East Village, West Village, Lower East Side, Chelsea, FlatIron, Kips Bay, etc, which are the most interesting parts of NYC and have both commercial and residential buildings
It used to be a dangerous dump 20 years ago, and now it is awesome.
It's interesting that this idea seems to be somewhat pervasive though. The north shore / North Sydney for example is often seen as pompous and never wanting to 'head across the bridge' to attend events etc. Again with the same separation that you need to be on trains/tunnels/bridges to cross the harbour.
Toronto downtown is nice but it is the only exciting, interesting party of the city. I wish some of the surrounding areas had their own centres that didn't revolve around a mall or a Wal-Mart (Scarborough, Etobicoke, Mississauga, Vaughan)
Yes, but they mostly live in the suburbs of cities like Paris, while the inner city remains affluent and white. Do Europeans just do a more effective job of keeping poor people and ethnic minorities from moving into the inner cities in the first place?
A lot of continental inner-cities (Paris, most Italian towns) were already too expensive way before "immigration waves" were even possible. In that sense, newcomers never got a chance. Any town that has existed since Roman times has had two thousand years in which to solidify the link between location and social status, to a point that will likely survive anything bar catastrophic events.
It might still happen for a variety of reasons. I live in London, and not all boroughs/districts are equal. Compare posh Kensington on the western edge of the London Underground Zone 1 with Whitechapel and Hackney at the eastern edge and you'll see a massive difference. Interestingly both areas are seeing a huge increase in ethnic diversity, but in Kensington it's the ultra-wealthy.
Many Western European countries like the Netherlands we have seen the same pattern of the white middle classes fleeing to new suburbs whilst the old city neighborhoods got taken over by newcomers.
And it is still how things are in many cities. Whilst the city center may have been revived and gentrified and looking all lovely and touristy, the surrounding neighborhoods are often dominated by poor immigrants, whilst the original lower middle class and working class lives in the suburbs.
The only options in the city for the ordinary "white" families are neighborhoods they can't afford and neighborhoods they don't want to live in. Sounds familiar?
> A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located.
Well, the same is true in NA in lots of places, but I think the difference is something else: historic buildings imply that you can't just tear them down and build something nicer, and the oldest buildings in cities I've lived in, here in the US, are not the nicest ones; rather the reverse.
As someone who spent most of my formative years in the southern US, my expectation is that the nicest part of town is the one that was just built, and older streets and buildings are literally the ones where people have to be if they don't have the money to scrub that away and build shiny new things, or just move to newer places. This is quite a difference even from the northeastern US, so I can only imagine how stark the difference must be from the US to Europe. Oddly, while I spent a few days in Dublin a few years back for an interview, I don't remember noticing everything looking old and run down there.
Interesting, here in London for example, the older the house the more money it's worth generally. Actually, it's kind of a reverse bell curve, with the lowest point falling for buildings built during the 50s/60s.
The most desirable houses are typically Georgian / Victorian town houses.
cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.
Melbourne, in Australia, is a counter example. It started in 1835, it was the centre of the fastest land grab in history, then the population doubled in ten years during the 1850s gold rush. And today the city centre is world famous.
The local wisdom tends to support the conclusion of the article. The Premier in the early 1990s (who would be called the Governor in the US) committed to making the city a place for people to live, and started changing the laws about planning, business hours and so on that were preventing that. He quickly lost office, because the rural parts of the state viewed him as "the Premier of Melbourne", but the city kept improving.
This is most definitely not a counter example. Melbourne is almost 200 years old, it is very young compared to the European cities being cited. You also point out how the city was rough until someone decided to do something about it 20 years ago.
The OP I assume would refer to NYC as a 'fast growing city' (around 400 years old) compared to somewhere like London or Madrid which have both been there for over 2,000 years.
NA cities actually did grow much faster. Melbourne's "doubling in ten years" during the 1850's doesn't even come close. Chicago, for example, grew 6x in the 1840s, almost 4x in the 1850s, and 2.5x in the 1860s.
Except that that is not entirely true. Although not as abandoned as many American city centers, the downtown areas of many a European city was pretty awful during the 80s.
I personally live in a nice picturesque gentrified part of the center of Amsterdam. The building I live in still has the front they added to the original porch to keep out the junkies and homeless in the 80s...
Taking back the city center is a process of the last few decades. The main difference is that there was something worth taking back.
I'm surprised he didn't mention Santa Monica's downtown. In the 80s it was generally considered seedy & filled with blight. The now-famous Santa Monica Pier was in disrepair. 3rd Street wasn't really a thing, nor was Santa Monica Place, Casa del Mar and so on.
Today the area is hot enough that it commands rents comparable to SF & Manhattan. The median rent for the area is $3,200 and one bedrooms in newer construction (w/o an ocean view!) can go for $5k.
i've lived in sm for 6 years now. it's changed dramatically even in that short period of time.
i like to think of santa monica as an improved version of san francisco, with the rest of los angeles attached as a bonus. if you live and work (i.e. no commute) in santa monica, it's easily the highest quality of life in urban california, and i've lived in pacific heights, downtown san diego, and central LA proper.
San Fransisco has a more more diverse set of options for nightlife and culture compared to downtown Santa Monica.
If you bicycle around Santa Monica/Venice there's not much going on compared to SF. Sure you could hop in your car and drive to Hollywood, DTLA, or other parts of the city but that's not really the same as the work/live urban core ideal.
The only thing that killed happy dense urbanism in the USA is 50 years of weird mortgage and highway subsidies that encouraged suburban growth even when it makes almost no sense whatsoever, combined with a lingering Anglo anti-urbanist set of cultural assumptions. However, worldwide, the USA is the weird place, and mostly the core parts of cities are better than the rest.
I'm sorry, but where are the people who think that nice downtowns aren't the result of long-term planning and hard work by city officials? I'm genuinely curious, as this is not something I am accustomed to hearing. Whenever the conversation of a nice downtown comes up, it's almost always accompanied by conversation about the planning and execution that must have happened to make it that way.
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[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 145 ms ] threadIt took a long time, but for nearly fifty years this effort has carried on, successfully I think, but hardly anyone recalls that the origins of the effort were very deliberate and came about when the nighttime downtown was the precise opposite of what it is today, and few people probably think of it as involving a conscious goal then or now. They just think "that's the way Seattle is." But Seattle wasn't.
This should remind us of yesterday's post (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9400259) about the importance of long-term planning. The good things about today came about because people decades ago consciously made efforts to make them happen. The good things that are to come—light rail, bike lanes, reasonable rents that stem from increasing housing supply—are only going to come if people consciously make efforts to make them happen.
See also Zero to One (http://jakeseliger.com/2014/09/24/zero-to-one-peter-thiel-an...).
For those not familiar with the VTA, I'll just say that it's the kind of light rail system that passes by the airport, but the closest stop to the terminal is more than a mile's walk away.
Downtowns die because money flows out of the city due to the economy or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs. There are many people that have no interest in living in an expensive downtown apartment. If you start to lose the small percentage of the population that desires and can afford the downtown lifestyle, it will either on the vine regardless of the amount of planning that goes into them.
Some people prefer their peaceful cookie cut house and desire nothing much to do with the big cities. More often then not it's zoning, job availability, and affordability.
It's not that common to want wide open fields in front of you. On top of that, it's not that expensive to get a big chunk of land in the middle of nowhere.
What you are describing is a culture that already dislikes being downtown but is only there because the transit sucks. That's not a sign of a healthy downtown.
The very presence of freeways drives people away because they are noisy eyesores and impediments to local travel. In Seattle, I-5 cuts across the street grid and separates downtown from Capital Hill and First Hill, while the Alaskan Way Viaduct cuts downtown off from the waterfront. If both of these were removed (I-5 could take a bypass route around the Seattle city center using what is now I-405), downtown Seattle would be much more livable and would have better traffic on account of being able to reconnect the street grid.
The presence of freeways does not drive away people. If that were true there would be no freeways in any populated location.
If you remove all freeways it would impede people's ability to visit and make the downtown less crowded. Perhaps that's your intention.
this is true not just of the downtown. Cities die because the money stops. The suburbs don't keep on thriving after the industry collapses
> or because the culture transitions to one based on suburbs
Not enough investment in downtown and urban spaces can be a contributing factor to this. People move to the suburbs because the suburbs are nicer than the urban core, which causes a cascading effect as the urban core empties and becomes even less desirable. If you make downtown a desirable place, you'll stem some of the shift to suburbia.
Was the problem really cleaned up, or was it just flushed away?
By and large, we made it illegal to be poor in the city.
> In 2010, The Economist highlighted a case in which four Americans were arrested for importing lobster tails in plastic bags rather than in cardboard boxes. That violated a Honduran law which that country no longer enforces, but because it’s still on the books there its enforced here. “The lobstermen had no idea they were breaking the law. Yet three of them got eight years apiece.” When the article was published 10 years later, two of them were still behind bars.
Yeah, that's a pile of shit: http://www.eenews.net/stories/1059964426.
TL;DR version: they were arrested and convicted for importing over $15 million in illegal lobster tails. The plastic versus cardboard boxes issue is a red herring--it was the means by which they concealed the undersized tails, not the primary basis for prosecution. As for the Honduran law--the Court of Appeals determined that the Honduran law was in fact valid during the relevant time period. Moreover, the Lacey Act only criminalizes importing animals harvested in violation of a foreign law when the importer knows or should know about the law. The prosecution proved that the defendants took measures to conceal the undersized tails and evade inspectors.
People love to fixate on the "undersized lobster" part of this story, but that's an irrelevant detail. The important fact is that all fishermen were required to take lobsters under a specific set of rules, and report their compliance with those rules. This particular fisherman cheated the rest of the market by ignoring those rules.
Nobody bats an eyelid when "banksters" are convicted and serve sentences† for violating rules far more abstract and far less connected to real-world consequences than overfishing regulations.
† yes, this actually happens, probably more often than it does to fishermen
It is a long-term commitment to mixed used development, walkable streets, view corridors for everyone, public parks within walking distance, and mass public transit into and out of the core.
In fact, most people think it's weird that I live downtown. It's definitely not a common choice around here.
It is largely true that young tech workers want to live "in the city" (as opposed to in the suburbs), but (at least in Seattle) that means one of the "cool" neighborhoods in the city, not downtown.
We call them infills here. Watch for residential development popping up around you. Seattle is ripe.
> 'downtown' isn't a terribly attractive area.
> midtown
Midtown is not downtown: Hence the name midtown - it's about midway between downtown and uptown.
Most people would consider the villages as the start of downtown.
After my trip I told people that Seattle seemed to have a "fake downtown" to me. This was mostly because of how dead it seemed to me. I stayed in a downtown hotel and walked around the city for a few days and my overwhelming feeling was nothingness (other than Pike Place market).
There are no schools downtown, there aren't affordable apartments with enough space for kids, which essentially siphons the entire kid-oriented group out of downtown for their condos/houses. The high end stuff downtown is high end, so you get an entire coterie of very rich traveling place to place in their cars from the parking garages, as near as I can tell.
Pike Place is cool, but largely a tourist trap.
So I think maybe the author of the essay should roll down the CBD about 7pm on a Tuesday night and think about his piece.... :-) might have a few corrections.
That's a much, much larger area than the central/financial/business district and it might be what the author actually means: especially with how Belltown has changed.
Since we've moved from no one living in downtown to lots of 20-somethings living in downtown, I hope eventually that will eventually turn into people living and staying in downtown.
That's a good thing, it keeps prices down.
I live on 1st & Union.
Everything is next door:
I have a room, with view on the Puget Sound, with my own bathroom in a 2 bedrooms apartment (1200+ sqft) with a parking spot. The building has a doorman and all utilities, even internet are included. I pay $1,250 / month.It is a bargain compared to other neighborhoods.
I guess it stems from the relative ages of cities in North America vs Europe. A typical city centre in Europe would have been the entirety of the city at some point and is therefore where the most historic buildings, oldest businesses etc. are located. Whereas in NA, cities are a lot younger and grew much faster meaning that is not so much the case.
It used to be a dangerous dump 20 years ago, and now it is awesome.
The Union Squarea?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridge_and_tunnel
I'm perpetually amazed at what people can be condescending about.
Liveable downtowns are definitely a matter of policy, not history.
Many Western European countries like the Netherlands we have seen the same pattern of the white middle classes fleeing to new suburbs whilst the old city neighborhoods got taken over by newcomers.
And it is still how things are in many cities. Whilst the city center may have been revived and gentrified and looking all lovely and touristy, the surrounding neighborhoods are often dominated by poor immigrants, whilst the original lower middle class and working class lives in the suburbs.
The only options in the city for the ordinary "white" families are neighborhoods they can't afford and neighborhoods they don't want to live in. Sounds familiar?
Well, the same is true in NA in lots of places, but I think the difference is something else: historic buildings imply that you can't just tear them down and build something nicer, and the oldest buildings in cities I've lived in, here in the US, are not the nicest ones; rather the reverse.
As someone who spent most of my formative years in the southern US, my expectation is that the nicest part of town is the one that was just built, and older streets and buildings are literally the ones where people have to be if they don't have the money to scrub that away and build shiny new things, or just move to newer places. This is quite a difference even from the northeastern US, so I can only imagine how stark the difference must be from the US to Europe. Oddly, while I spent a few days in Dublin a few years back for an interview, I don't remember noticing everything looking old and run down there.
The most desirable houses are typically Georgian / Victorian town houses.
Melbourne, in Australia, is a counter example. It started in 1835, it was the centre of the fastest land grab in history, then the population doubled in ten years during the 1850s gold rush. And today the city centre is world famous.
The local wisdom tends to support the conclusion of the article. The Premier in the early 1990s (who would be called the Governor in the US) committed to making the city a place for people to live, and started changing the laws about planning, business hours and so on that were preventing that. He quickly lost office, because the rural parts of the state viewed him as "the Premier of Melbourne", but the city kept improving.
The OP I assume would refer to NYC as a 'fast growing city' (around 400 years old) compared to somewhere like London or Madrid which have both been there for over 2,000 years.
I personally live in a nice picturesque gentrified part of the center of Amsterdam. The building I live in still has the front they added to the original porch to keep out the junkies and homeless in the 80s...
Taking back the city center is a process of the last few decades. The main difference is that there was something worth taking back.
Today the area is hot enough that it commands rents comparable to SF & Manhattan. The median rent for the area is $3,200 and one bedrooms in newer construction (w/o an ocean view!) can go for $5k.
i like to think of santa monica as an improved version of san francisco, with the rest of los angeles attached as a bonus. if you live and work (i.e. no commute) in santa monica, it's easily the highest quality of life in urban california, and i've lived in pacific heights, downtown san diego, and central LA proper.
If you bicycle around Santa Monica/Venice there's not much going on compared to SF. Sure you could hop in your car and drive to Hollywood, DTLA, or other parts of the city but that's not really the same as the work/live urban core ideal.