Letter to the Editor:
Los Angeles and San Francisco are internationally-recognized USA economic rot-spots affecting the “barrel” that is the State of California. The decline of Silicon Valley directly impacted SF, while the decline of Hollywood puts all Burbank assets at immediate risk.
Adjacent to Hollywood, Burbankers must face the reality of watching their long inert city rapidly become a “media fossil” just like parts of Silicon Valley.
Hollywood-Burbank is forming a region-wide zone of stranded assets (not only buildings, but workers, even the pensioned) unprepared to endure the economic decline likely to come during the post-COVID era. Since people identify with places and work practices, the increasing lock-in of economic shrinkage will greatly affect bank account balances as well as human psychology.
Real-estate speculators focused on dwellings may soon back-off from pursuing advantages in Hollywood-Burbank because of obvious decay that sets in once people accept that “media fossilization” is a real-world fact of life. All buildings have some limit on their utility and the fact that past, present and most probably future Burbank City Councils will not properly address to curtail the most egregious and rapacious corporate intrusions from doing further damage, bodes ill for Burbankers, both homeowners and Mom & Pop residential rental property operators.
It is shameful, of course, but I wonder if Hollywood-Burbank infrastructure eventually might become like those piled Atari video games that were buried in an Alamogordo, New Mexico landfill during 1983, recovered and discovered to be playable by resurrected old electronics.
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
Richard B. Cathcart
Burbank
