It’s Never Exactly The Thing You Want

So, I passed 1,000 subscribers on my YouTube channel. Of course, it’s not the channel that I have been trying to grow for the past four years. It’s the channel that I started as a lark, as a joke, as a place to express my peeves about the city of Simi Valley – the town I live in… grudgingly.

Living Through A Demographic Shift

Simi Valley is a backward little suburb of Los Angeles that thinks it’s something that it’s not. Many of the people who live here have been here their whole lives. They still remember what it was like growing up here in the 1960s and 70s. I get that because I grew up in the adjacent city of Thousand Oaks in the 80s and 90s. The thing is, though, both cities have changed into unrecognizable versions of their former selves, but folks in Simi don’t want to accept that.

The whole area has changed. Both cities are located just outside the Los Angeles County line and were both rural through the 1960s. Less than a decade before I was born, sheep were still grazing in the hills across from my parent’s house. Just 15 years before I was born, my current house in Simi Valley was an orange grove. That’s the landscape most of the Genxers and Boomers in the area remember growing up in.

From Rural to Suburban

As Los Angeles grew, though – due in no small part to the aerospace industry that called Los Angeles home – the population spilled over the county line. The white-collars moved their families out of crowded and expensive Los Angeles and The San Fernando Valley to The Conejo Valley, while the blue-collars moved to Simi Valley. That socioeconomic divide would have a rippling effect through the area over the next half-century.

Thousand Oaks saw what was coming and planned for its growth. They created a master plan that reserved certain parts of the valley as open space. They restricted the height that buildings could be built to, and they imposed city-wide rules governing the appearance of the houses and neighborhoods in town, much the same way HOAs do in new developments.

Simi Valley, on the other hand, took a slightly different approach to the inevitable growth they were facing. They opposed it like a petulant child.

Don’t Let Simi Become The Valley

The community’s biggest fear is that Simi Valley will turn into “The Valley,” The San Fernando Valley, that is. To prevent such an awful fate, the city of Simi Valley enacted such measures as bitching whenever anyone wanted to build anything within the city limits and whining whenever they succeeded. The town viewed any growth as a one-way ticket to becoming The Valley. So, they opposed it all without acknowledging the reality that people needed a place to live, and Simi Valley had lots of cheap land in close proximity to Los Angeles.

The growth was going to happen whether they wanted it or not. Thousand Oaks knew that and made a plan. Simi Valley missed the writing on the wall, and while they were blindly opposing growth to avert a mini Valley from growing up around them, a mini Valley grew up around them. By just saying no, without offering up a better vision for the future of the city, the citizens of Simi Valley forfeited the opportunity to help direct the inevitable change. Without input from the people who live here, the developers changed the fabric of the city to suit their own best interests.

Simi Valley: Suburban Hell

What we’re left with is a car-centric, suburban nightmare. A mini, but inferior Valley. Simi Valley isn’t as crowded as The San Fernando Valley is yet, but it’s also not the idealized memory of what Simi’s residents think it used to be. It’s 41 square miles of poorly constructed tract housing and strip malls. The people who live in the ticky-tacky single-family homes all over town can’t afford them. As a consequence, maintenance is deferred indefinitely at best, perpetually at worst, giving the whole town a rundown, stagnate feel. Many in the city are delusional about what the city has become.

Meanwhile, our public schools continue to close, our public agencies continue to sell off their assets to private developers, and public transit in town is almost non-existent. What we have doesn’t go where you need it to or when, so owning a car is not optional. Bonnie and I tried going car-free for two years. It was difficult, but we made it work. The trick is to never be in a hurry to be anywhere and try not to leave town. Even before going car-free, we spent more time traversing Simi Valley outside of a car than most of Simi Valley’s residents. That experience has shown me that Simi Valley drivers are openly hostile to anyone and anything not inside their vehicle.

25 to Life in Simi Valley

I started 25 to Life in Simi Valley to vent my frustration with this city through editorial-style videos. I was busy trying to grow my other YouTube channels, though, so I put this one on the back burner. Then, one day, I was scrolling through Photos, looking for a video. I discovered that whenever I’m at a railroad crossing when a train passes by, I record it. I was aware that I had done this before, but I hadn’t realized that I did it every time. There were dozens of train videos on my phone, and they were all from Simi Valley. So, I decided I might as well upload them to my Simi Valley-themed YouTube channel.

September 12, 2024

And that’s pretty much all that was on the channel for almost two years. Then, a traffic light at a major intersection went out, and it took nearly three weeks for the city to repair it. I knew it was out from day one, but I didn’t pay much attention to it because I hadn’t been through the intersection that week. It wasn’t until I saw murmurings about it online and a notice from the city that it would be fixed that weekend, that I paid it any attention.

September 20, 2024

On day 8, I went out to the intersection to see how the trains were navigating the crossing and to get some video. My assumption was that with the light being out for so long, the crossing guard was out, too. One of the most viewed videos on my channel is of a train crossing Sycamore Drive while the crossing guard is malfunctioning. The conductor had to get out and stop traffic. The video has nearly 30,000 views, and I shot it from across the street. I thought if I could get a video of the conductor stopping traffic from a few feet away, I could make a video that would do even better.

So, I rode out to the intersection and waited for a train to come. While I waited, I pointed my camera at the intersection. I didn’t know what I would do with all of the footage. What I was really hoping for was to capture a car accident. It took about half an hour for a train to pass by, and I discovered that the crossing guard was absolutely unaffected by the malfunctioning traffic light. The train crossed the street as if there was nothing out of the ordinary going on at that intersection. I recorded one more train, and then I rode back home, deflated.

September 24, 2024

I didn’t give the traffic light any thought until the following Tuesday. That morning, a post on the city’s Instagram account basically said, Update: the light is still out. It was so on-brand for someone from the city of Simi Valley to have bothered to make that post. On Thursday, I rode through the intersection on my way home from running an errand. I sat on the northwest corner, recording the intersection, for over an hour. Then, I moved to the southwest corner for a while before moving to the southeast corner. I now had footage of the debacle at the intersection from all four corners. But what would I do with it all? I started thinking about making a video flaming the city for taking so long to fix this traffic light.

Now You Have My Attention, Simi Valley

Then, on Saturday, the 28th, I saw a small notice in the Simi Valley Acorn saying the light would be fixed that weekend. I rode out to the street to see if anyone was working out there, but there was no one.

I spent the weekend working on the video, and by Sunday night, I had the whole thing done. All I needed was an ending, and I wanted to record it at the intersection. I thought about going out that night, but I thought it would be better during the daytime when cars would actually be going through. (Simi Valley rolls up its sidewalks at 8 p.m.) So, I waited until the next morning.

A Surprise Twist

On Monday morning, I rode out to the intersection to record the ending of the video, and I was shocked to see crews working to fix the signal. I recorded the ending that I had written, anyway, and I ended up using most of it in the final edit. Then, I sat on the block wall on the southeast corner, setup my camera, and pointed it at the intersection.

My attention was divided between the intersection and the crew working in the signal controller cabinet. I guess I was freaking them out, so one of them came over to see what I was up to. I told him I was making a video for my YouTube channel. He asked me the name of it and I told him. He understood immediately that I was no threat. I asked him when he thought they would have the signal restored, but all he would say was that he hoped it would be fixed by the time he went home at 3:30 p.m. Then, they went to lunch.

And Now We Wait

When I saw them return from Presto Pasta with their lunches, I realized that I should have gone home when they left to get batteries, water, and something to eat, but I wanted to make sure I was there when the signal came back on. I had no idea how long it would take them, and I didn’t want to miss anything, so I just sat there. I didn’t get up, even to stretch or anything, for four and a half hours. As the late September sun slowly moved past Simi’s only skyscraper, I felt like Claudia at the end of Interview With The Vampire, but I didn’t move.

As 3 p.m. approached, I was down to my last battery and starting to get nervous that I might miss the moment the signal came back on. I could tell that the crew was getting close, though, so I conserved the last of my juice. My camera was rolling when the signal came back on. I recorded the new ending to my video to the bemusement of the crew, and then I rode home to finish and upload the video.

A Race Against Irrelevance

My plan was to have it published by 5 p.m. An unrealistic goal, to be sure. Even if I had simply gone home and added in the ending without doing anything else, I don’t think I could have finished by 5 p.m.That was unfortunate because I didn’t see any point in uploading it any later than that. I wanted to publish the video before the light was fixed while people were still complaining about it online and in person. Now that the signal was restored, no one would be talking about it. Morning commuters would pass through the intersection, oblivious that the signal was ever out.

I sat down to finish the video anyway. Having spent an additional four hours recording the intersection, I had gigabytes of video footage to go through. I couldn’t scrub through the footage either because the cars moved so fast that I couldn’t tell what any of them were doing. So, I had to watch the footage in real-time. All of it. It was a worthwhile endeavor, though, because there were some great clips. The two cars who blew through the light from the south, both came from my time on the corner that day. The shot of the car half-filled with balloons also came from that last day.

I Wasn’t Even Going To Publish It!

About eleven hours after they fixed the signal, I finished the video. It was 3 a.m. on October 1st. What was the point of publishing the video now? Folks will be up in just a few hours, and the out-of-order traffic light will already have faded into a distant memory. The video was done, though, so I scheduled it to publish at 8 a.m., and I went to bed. I didn’t expect anyone to see it, and hardly anyone did—for almost two weeks.

It Resonated With The People of Simi Valley

Then, on Saturday, October 12, I started getting lots of notifications from YouTube alerting me that people were leaving comments on the video. I logged into my channel to see what was going on, and I was stunned to see that the video had been seen over 1,000 times in just the past hour. I couldn’t understand why. Was YouTube pushing it?

Then, it occurred to me that someone must have shared it somewhere. Nextdoor seemed like the most obvious place because it’s hyper-local, but I didn’t find anything, so I tried Facebook. I did a search for the name of the video: 18 Days of Chaos and Inconvenience in Simi Valley. I didn’t have to scroll far before I saw my face looking back at me in the video’s thumbnail. Someone had shared it to a local group called Simi360, and the video took off.

Life Resumes In Simi Valley

Two months after the City of Simi Valley restored the traffic signal, my video about it was still going strong. Because of it, my little YouTube side project now has over 1,000 subscribers. I don’t know if the lesson here is that I have no idea what people want or that the universe never gives you the thing you think you want. Either way, I won’t worry about it. I’ll keep making content that interests me, and maybe it will resonate with others from time to time. If you’re one of the thousand-plus people that has subscribed so far, I thank you for your support. Stay tuned!

#1kcreator