Indiana Ave, Oakwood Pentagon

What Berkeley and Haight-Ashbury are to Northern California and the Village is to New York, Venice is to So Cal. This is where Jim Morrison lived in the early sixties just as he was forming the doors for example. It is THE bohemian neighborhood in Los Angeles—though of course, whenever something comes to be known by the world for being something, it also becomes a cliché.

Venice Beach is the most famous area with the body builders at Muscle Beach and the scantily clad rollerbladers along the snaking sidewalks, it is a perennial gawker favorite. It certainly does not lack characters of every variety.

The remaining canals—Venice was built to replicate its Italian namesake—make the bungalow style homes in the area irresistible to those with an aesthetic sensibility, but the narrow streets and alleyways that make this unusual residential area possible are a nightmare in terms of traffic.

This is definitely a playground for young adults who like to live on the wild side. The majority of the population is single and between the ages of 18 and 50, with only about one in eight being under the age of 20. About half of residents have college degrees and about 2/3 are renters.

Venice High School is a moderately diverse High School but slightly below average. There is a better though smaller charter school in the area as well, but this is generally speaking not a family friendly environment.

Unfortunately despite having less the half the number of residents as its next door neighbor Santa Monica, Venice has the same number of murders and violent crimes. So you are twice as likely to be killed in Venice as in Santa Monica. The roughly dozen murders that took place in Venice are a catalogue of the dangers of this eclectic area. About half of the murders were gangland style shootings of the drive-by or walk-up variety. A pair involved homeless people (one being of a homeless man who was beaten to death and buried with his dog) and the other pair were bar brawls that went too far. The most heinous of the Venice murders in the last three year was of a thirty eight year old pregnant woman, Eun Kang, who was raped and stabbed to death in her own apartment by a mentally ill assailant with a history of break-ins and violence.

The point of this gruesome roll-call is to put a spotlight on the dangers of this eclectic neighborhood. Along with the free-spirits and artists, the area also a attracts its more than fair share of drug-addicts and mentally ill. The first producing crimes of opportunity and the second producing random acts of cruelty. Put simply, though this is an exciting area to live, it is also an area where you have to be constantly vigilant and lucky. Although many of the individuals murdered were involved in high risk activities, others, like Kang simply ran out of luck. I don’t know if this is a necessary cost of such neighborhoods, but it is certainly a risk of living in Venice.