South Harvard Blvd, South Los Angeles

Just to the west of Rosedale Cemetary is Harvard Heights.

Although this is a fairly poor, run-down neighborhood, perhaps its saving grace is the older architecture in the area. You can really get a sense of what pre-World War II Los Angeles looked like from a drive through this neighborhood. S. Harvard Blvd. is by far the most aesthetically pleasing of the streets in the neighborhood. This palm-lined street has lots of well-kept older looking constructions with attractive decorative touches like Corinthian columns lining the entrance ways of some homes and interesting asymmetrical homes. There is even a home in the neighborhood that looks like the Munsters house. I don’t know what these buildings are called but they are very cool to look at. (There are also a fair number of Craftsman homes here.)

Unfortunately, this is a very dangerous neighborhood both in terms of property crimes and in terms of violent crime. Unlike other neighborhoods where gangs seem to be the central cause of the violence, here it seems evenly divided between gangs and robberies gone awry. There have been six murders in the last four years which, given the population of 18,000 makes this just as dangerous as neighboring Arlington Heights. That’s the thing about this neighborhood. No matter how impressed I am with the classic homes here, I could never bring myself to live in a place that had a crime rate like this. If I can’t feel relatively safe in my own home, I could never have piece of mind. Every time one of my kids was late getting back from somewhere I would imagine the worst.

In addition, this is a less than ideal place for schools as well. There isn’t one in the neighborhood itself and the ones that are nearby are sub par. There is a college of some kind in the neighborhood, but I am not sure of its quality—I’ve heard (I don’t know if its true) that they are not accredited in certain programs. Not a promising rumor.

That said, I have met a couple of folks from this neighborhood who say it isn’t that bad so long as you don’t go for a stroll in the middle of the night or leave stuff in your car that someone might want to steal. That doesn’t sound particularly reassuring to me.

I should acknowledge, however, that you do have fast food places, a CVS pharmacy, a Food-4-Less, and those kinds of places. The neighborhood is not wholly barren. I would, however, feel safer living in Reseda or Van Nuys that are similar kinds of neighborhoods (and which I have lived in) and that just give you less of an urban feel.