Lomita

Lomita is one of the most densely packed neighborhoods in this area of Los Angeles. In less than two miles you have about 20,000 people. How do they fit them all in? In the usual ways that you would expect. There are, of course, a number of the boxy apartment complexes that you come to expect in this kind of a neighborhood. In the northeastern part of Lomita you will also find a couple of immense walled-in trailer parks.

This, of course, does not make Lomita very inviting. There are some nice residential neighborhoods on the northern end of the Lomita however. The modest ranch homes here are on flat surface streets with sidewalks—perfect for walking and biking—and front lawns are generally tidy and well kept.

Right around the middle of Lomita, the neighborhood feels a bit run down. The homes here mostly date back to the Fifties and are largely showing their age. Mostly things just feel overcrowded in this section.

On the southern end of Lomita, things pick up again a bit with more nicely kept ranch homes and lots of trees as come to the southern border and the uninhabited area to the south of Lomita.

You can definitely find some nice places to live here. Unfortunately, the schools around here are not great either. Narbonne High is a pretty lousy school by most standards. SAT scores at Narbonne average a good 200 points below the state average. STAR tests are even worse. Only one in ten Narbonne students test proficient in math and only one in three pass the English portion. On the bright side, Narbonne does have a magnet section which fairs a little better with 2 of 5 testing proficient in math while 2/3 do so in the English portion. (Unfortunately, this still puts them below average in Math which is supposed to be the focus of the magnet.) Students from the school also complain of racial tensions and fighting on campus and a general environment of complacency from the teaching staff (though this is subjective of course). Narbonne does have a substantial number of AP classes which suggests things may not be completely bleak for those students who are motivated to succeed.

As to that other humbug of crowded areas, crime, Lomita is actually not that bad. Generally speaking, crime is relatively low in Lomita. In the past four years, five murders have happened here. That is a ratio of roughly one in ten thousand per year, which is an okay ratio compared to some of Lomita’s more gang ridden neighbors. If you look even farther into the numbers you find that only 3 of the these recent murders are attributable to gang violence (one incident involved two deaths, so really we are talking about one incident per year roughly). The others fall into different categories—one was an abused 2 year old accidentally killed, another a was an older woman murdered by her son because, it seems, he thought his mother had had his father killed. These ghastly events mostly do not fit into the usual gang and property related violence we find most concerning. Another odd fact about these events is that all the gang violence type events occurred on the same street—Narbonne. Put simply this is not that violent an area overall.

Also, around the Pacific Coast Highway there are few good places to eat.

Overall, however, I would not really want to live here.