What if? A Week in North Hollywood During the Long Nightmare of a Socialist Near-Future
Monday begins early, at 7:15 a.m., when the line curls out of Red Line Roasters, a worker-owned café in the old Pacific Electric train station across from the Metro. Workers grab coffees and snacks on their way to the morning shift at the new state-owned electric motor factory off Lankershim.
The espresso machine hisses and inside, Marisol checks the co-op dashboard between orders. The shop’s profits this quarter are up, but instead of disappearing upward into some distant corporate skyline, they’re already earmarked for wages, reserves, and the neighborhood fund.
A flyer near the register advertises a Thursday night community investment meeting where people actually decide how the surplus gets used. Across the street, the public childcare center opens, and parents drop off kids without doing the quiet math of whether the day’s work is even worth the cost.
On Tuesday, the old bank on Magnolia now feels more like a library than a financial institution. Sammy sits with a planner, pitching a cooperative music studio, and the questions focus on jobs, partnerships, and sustainability rather than extraction. The loan terms from the public bank are clear and uneventful, almost boring, with no trapdoors or predatory edges.
Capital has stopped being a hunter and become something closer to irrigation. Money flows where it is needed and stays long enough to matter. The difference is decisive.
By Wednesday evening, 60 or so neighborhood council reps gather at the Maurice Sendak school auditorium for the monthly housing assembly. North Hollywood now mixes rent-controlled units, newer public housing, and cooperative buildings, and decisions about development happen in the open. Arguments unfold over timelines, design, density, and even the types of shade trees. The process is slow and imperfect. Input is collected and sent upstream to LA Housing Works, the massive countywide public builder.
But no one is waiting on a distant landlord, a long Sacramento legislative hike, or a hedge fund’s quarterly calculation. The decisions are local, contested, and binding. The friction is real, but so is the reality of democracy.
Thursday night returns to the café, where $48,000 in surplus sits on the table. The options range from expansion to raises to community investment, and the discussion circles around balance rather than maximization. In the end, the vote splits the difference, modestly increasing compensation while contributing to neighborhood energy retrofits for solar batteries.
Outside, the streetlights hum on, powered by a cleaner, regionally coordinated grid. It isn’t perfect, but it holds, and you can feel the difference in the summer air.
On Friday, a fabrication co-op loses a contract, but no one is fired. The workers draw on reserves, adjust hours, and rely on a regional employment program if needed. Risk is still present, but it no longer translates instantly into catastrophe. Maybe somewhere this too changes but now it mostly works.
At lunch, someone jokes that a bad quarter used to mean existential dread, and now it just means longer meetings. Everyone groans, because some things, apparently, are permanent.
Saturday brings a festival to North Hollywood Park, where people drift in on cheap or free transit. Food co-ops, local artists, and planning tables fill the space, and infrastructure proposals are explained in plain English. Nearby, a booth answers questions about the federal social dividend, which arrives monthly and softens the edges of everyday life.
It isn’t dramatic, but it’s reliable, and that reliability changes how people move through the week. The system feels less like a gamble and more just like the weather.
Sunday is quieter, a day of checking accounts and taking stock. Pay is decent and compressed, bills are manageable, and healthcare no longer sits like a threat in the background. Manny and Rose, the oldest of couples, sit on a balcony and try to name the feeling.
It isn’t prosperity exactly. It’s the sense that everything is no longer hanging by a thread, that the floor is solid even when you trip.
The neighborhood isn’t a utopia, and disagreements, inefficiencies, and ambitions persist. Markets still exist even if mixed in with planning, and some projects succeed while others lag. But the center of gravity has shifted, and the basics of life no longer depend on winning a constant series of small bets.
No one designed it all in advance. It grew piece by piece, assembled while people were already fighting for it and living inside the shell of the old order. If you walk down Lankershim at dusk, you don’t see a finished future, just a place still being made in real time by real people.
This is just one imagining of what a transitional period of a society, our society, that’s gone down the democratic road to socialism might look like. You may have your own. What would be different? If a new future could be won, what would it feel like?
Further Reading:
The Economics of Feasible Socialism, Alec Nove
Nordic Socialism: the Path Toward a Democratic Economy, Pelle Dragsted
Reclaiming Public Ownership, Andrew Cumbers
A Planet to Win: Why We Need a Green New Deal, Kate Aronoff et al