West Carson

Stretching out on the western end of the Harbor Freeway, West Carson is a long stretch of a city that is home to some 21,000 residents. You can roughly divide the city into 7 areas:

At the far northeastern end is the Alpine Shopping Center.

Surrounding the shopping center from the west to the south are residential neighborhoods characterized largely by 1950’s style Ranch homes.

Just to south of this area there are more neighborhoods of the same kind except that on the western end of the city, you find factories and planned communities with model homes plopped down just a pair of feet from one another so as to maximize spatial use.

Busy West Carson Blvd. marks the border of the next area. West Carson Blvd. also has a number of establishments like a Pizza Hut and an Ihop, that give it a distinctly 1970’s feel to it.

This next section is focused around the medical facilities that operate here, including a satellite of the UCLA Medical Center. This generally means strong medicine though I have no first hand experience of this specific facility.

South of these, gated communities take over and you find a series of seemingly identical condominiums and tract homes all stacked together. These are most likely the buildings that this generation will be remembered for in the way that those boxy apartment buildings mark the 1970’s.

To the south of this is a nursing home with 1950’s style ranch homes hemming it in.

At the very south of the city is a gigantic trailer park.

Put simply West Carson runs the gamut. You can find everything from trailer parks to condos and Ranch homes. The neighborhood also runs the gamut in terms of races and ethnicities with no single group forming the majority.

Overall, this is a pretty average neighborhood. Unfortunately, it is not really all that family friendly for two main reasons. First, the schools here are simply terrible. Carson High, for example, has consistently terrible scores (despite only missing 6 of its No Child Left Behind standards). On the STAR test, less than 10% of the Carson’s students test proficient on the math, while a meager 1 of 3 pass the English portion. In addition, SAT scores average a good 200 beneath the California average.

The other problem is crime. There is simply put a bit of gang problem here. Now, I don’t want to exaggerate this. There are not that many murders in West Carson, for example. But violence is still more on the negative side than the positive.

I wouldn’t feel comfortable moving my family here.