West Hollywood

The smallest district in Los Angeles and the only one that answers the question "who's in charge here" with a name and an office.

West Hollywood was its own city long before Los Angeles stopped being one. It incorporated in 1984, out of a coalition of gay and lesbian residents, elderly renters and tenant organisers who wanted rent control and no more towers, and who won the vote and then won the council. The rent boards that came out of that have been running continuously ever since. So when California threw the sprawl away in 2057 and every other district discovered it had no government, this one had a council, a budget, a rent ordinance, an elections office and seventy years of institutional memory about how to run a small city that nobody else wanted to run.

It is also why the district came through the plague years better than neighbourhoods ten times its size. The mutual aid here is old. It was built for an epidemic in the twentieth century, kept up through the decades after, and when VITAS arrived the buddy systems, the volunteer clinics and the phone trees already existed and simply switched targets.

The result, in 2060, is a place that is unglamorous in the specific way that functioning places are unglamorous. Trash gets collected. The clinic is open. There are seniors in rent-controlled apartments who have lived in them for fifty years, families, contractors, nurses, restaurant staff, council employees, and a lot of people who commute out to jobs in worse districts and come home to a street where the lights work.

Sunset is the exception and everybody knows it. The Strip is corporate nightlife — hotels, towers, membership clubs, out-of-town money, and security that belongs to the venues rather than to the city. Two blocks south of it, it's apartment buildings.

What the crew knows

• The security contract is hired by residents and can be fired by them. That's rare enough to matter. Officers here can be complained about, and the complaint goes somewhere.
• Metahuman tenant protections went in here first, years ahead of anywhere else, because the district already had the machinery for writing that kind of law. A lot of orks and trolls moved in for the housing rather than the nightlife, and stayed.
• Rent is punishing and the waiting lists are years long. The protections are real, which is exactly why nothing is available.
• The council is a machine. Incumbents win. Getting anything done here means knowing which of five people to talk to, and they all know each other.
• The Strip's rooms will take your money and check your weapons — the Whisky and the Roxy for volume, the Troubadour just south for anyone who matters, the Chateau Marmont and the Sunset Tower for people who don't want to be seen paying. The people who run them are not the people who run the district.
• The district's edges are policed against the rest of the city in ways nobody says out loud. If you're sleeping rough you'll be moved along politely and continuously.

Getting in

No border, no permit. Walk in off Fairfax or down from the hills. The friction is social and administrative: dense streets, neighbours who know each other, patrol that actually responds, and a district small enough that a strange vehicle parked for six hours gets noticed by a person rather than a camera.

The Strip's venues are the opposite — anonymous, transactional, and expensive.