Renting used to be a source of shame to this apartment manager’s daughter. Now it’s a knowing comfort

This story is part of Image’s May issue, Homemaking, about home and the many ways we choose to make it. “There comes a moment for the immigrant’s child when you realize that you and your parents are assimilating at the same time,” writes Hua Hsu in his memoir, “Stay True.” While I attended preschool at Plummer Park, my mother went to community college and my father painted houses for $5 an hour. On the contrary, it is, and has been since 1888, a commodity; something to be advertised and sold to the people of the United States like automobiles, cigarettes, and mouthwash,” writes Mike Davis in “City of Quartz.” The commodification of Los Angeles and Hollywood, and the rising population, has made the city an expensive place to live. “If there is a predominant feeling in the city-state, it is not loneliness or daze, but an uneasy temporariness, a sense of life’s impermanence: the tension of anticipation while so much quivers on the line,” writes Rosecrans Baldwin in “Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles.” Los Angeles is a city always on the edge of disaster: gentrification, housing shortages, unlawful evictions, homelessness, greed, wildfire, earthquakes, floods, landslides, the imminent death of the legendary palm trees, the intangible but plausible possibility of breaking off from the continental United States and slipping into the Pacific Ocean. “Our dwellings were designed for transience,” writes Kate Braverman about the midcentury West Los Angeles of her childhood in “ Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir.” “Apartments without dining rooms, as if anticipating a future where families disintegrated, compulsively dieted, or ate alone, in front of televisions.” In Westwood, our living room was our dining room and our office.