I find it impossible not to join the chorus on this one.

If you're reading this there's a good chance you've had a chance to see Kevin Roderick's rave review of Dave Zahniser's LA Weekly story "Welcome to Gentrification City." Dave's is a remarkable story -- not just for its geographic scope, which is beyond what weekly newspapers typically attempt. But for its moral scope, too. It shows how the forces that cause a city to change are unstoppable (like the weather). And it also shows how policy can shield us somewhat from some of the housing market's most unfortunate outcomes (read: ordinances that preserve rental units; creation of rent control, for starters).

Yay, Dave! And, yes, Mr. Zahniser is an Echo Park resident.

Here are two brief sketches of housing turnover on my block:

Next door to my house is a house that has been owned by a Salvadoran-American family for about two decades. The sons who were raised there served in the Marines and the Army. The first time I met their mother, Benita, she told me she had breast cancer that had metastasized, basically hello, I will be dying soon. We became friends in a way that was limited by age, socio-cultural backgrounds, life-expectancy. But we were neighbors, and we liked each other and I visited her a number of times at her home. She never came to mine.

During this time, she evicted a young artist who lived in the front house and wasn't paying his rent. Benita's brother cleaned the apartment, painted it, and they advertised it for rent. One day, Benita stopped to talk to me. She said she'd had a lot of calls about the apartment. She looked at me and said, "They are all white. Why are they all white?" I suppose she thought I might be able to answer the question because I am white. My response as I recall was, "yes, the neighborhood has become very popular with white people."

This was in 2000. She rented the apartment, one of two in the front house, to a young couple who were part of a well-known band called The Tyde. Ann and Darin moved in quietly and lived there quietly for about three years. They planted fancy plants in a sophisticated arrangement in front of their unit. They told me Benita's son did not like them. He was the same age as the tenants I would guess. Benita died about a year after Anna and Darin moved in. Her sons inherited the property. They are both young.

The younger son told us he planned to sell the property. He told The Tyde they had to move out. And then he moved into the apartment with his two small children and his partner. Shortly after moving in, he took a shovel and ripped out the plants Ann had planted. He went at them with a fury, as if they were some kind of enemy. A family member looked at the bare dirt where the plants had been and said to me, "[He] doesn't know what he's doing." But I think he did.

As for horsetail:

I have seen horsetail on my street, though I didn't know what it was called until today. Since 1999, when my husband and I bought our house, the horsetail house has been occupied by 1) a low-income family that was forced out when the landlord put the nearly derelict property up for sale. There is no question it was a tragedy for a family that was barely hanging on financially and could not hope to find a single family house for anywhere the same amount of rent. The house was empty for a while. Then the owner sold the house to 2) a man who hired some of the gangbangers in the neighborhood to raze the fruit trees that the previous family planted; the new property owner was in prison for most of the time that he owned the house.

While he was in prison he rented the place to a European rock band who wore insanely ridiculous and wonderful clothes and threw large parties; we were never sure who exactly lived there. Then the owner whom we never met flipped the place. 3) The most recent owners are a young couple (she is a musician of some repute) who have renovated the place -- planting horsetail being one of their very first improvements. They appear to be planning to stay for the longterm.