I'd say it is the size of the population, far far too many people try to make it in Los Angeles without any specialized educations, so the car washers have 40 people that dry your windows, and the wait staff jobs are exponentially Orwellian. When I finally moved away, I was living over an hour away from Santa Monica, paying $4K a month for rent, and the entire neighborhood lights up every night like a gangsters' paradise. Street racing, graffiti everywhere, sidewalk food vendors everywhere, the local high school kids are covered in tattoos, including their faces. No thank you.
Over an hour away and paying $4k for that? I'm guessing you were renting an entire house. If we were talking 1br apartments you could be in santa monica for about half that today.
You're pretty propagandized. It's an international city that is the playground for the world's wealthy, no it is not the "Mexicans", it is the stupid dirty wealth. What I describe is an international event every night; you do not hear much English nor Mexican/Spanish, you hear every language on the planet.
