That hurts to read. There but for the grace of God go I.
I can honestly say that I hadn't seen failure until I saw Los Angeles failure.  I again suspect it's due to the fundamental impedance of the place;  thenewgreen was in town a couple days ago and I missed him because it would have been 90 minutes and $40 in a Lyft (and I had had 3 hours of sleep and needed to be up at 5am).  Public transportation? It would have been four hours.  Biking? Two hours across turf where I have never been closer to dying.  The dude spends two hours each way in traffic for a job that pays $18 an hour.  And he's 150 lbs overweight which makes everything impossible.  I realized last year that he basically goes through life like me... If I had to carry my wife on my back everywhere I went.  At which point you're gonna do what with your free time, exactly? You're going to cocoon.