Story LAX · Los Angeles

Why I left Los Angeles after 13 years

I had built a journalism career in the city where I once slept in my car, and I still wanted to leave the United States.

Written by Ethan Ward
Lived there: 13 years

Photo of Ethan Ward smiling in a plaid coat, leaning against a white sedan in a Los Angeles dealership lot at dusk. — Los Angeles, February 2023. The man buying my car took this before I got into my Lyft.COURTESY OF ETHAN WARD

In February 2023, I had one last photograph taken with my car at a Los Angeles dealership before selling it. I was leaving for Paris.

I had spent 13 years in Los Angeles. It was the first place I’d lived that felt like home, and there had been a time when I would do almost anything to stay.

The place I loved most was Runyon Canyon. There was this huge hike in the middle of the city, and you didn’t need a multimillion-dollar house to have that view. You could go up whenever you wanted. I saw the same faces depending on what time of day I went, and the occasional celebrity. Once, it was Gerard Butler. From the top, I could see everything from the Pacific to downtown L.A. and take it all in at once. The city could be overwhelming. Being up there helped put things in perspective.

In 2016, I was 34, broke, and exhausted. I’d moved there from D.C. at 28 to pursue acting. I was still auditioning and taking classes, still doing background and stand-in work. I had spent years close to the industry without building a life I could sustain.

I considered moving back to Washington, D.C. But D.C. had never felt like home. Los Angeles did. I decided to stay and go back to school.

Photo of Ethan Ward taking a mirror selfie while sitting on a stool in a sparsely furnished apartment, wearing jeans and sneakers. — My apartment in 2016, when I was deciding whether to move back to D.C.ETHAN WARD

I enrolled at Los Angeles City College. I was living in North Hollywood, and Los Angeles Valley College would have been a much quicker drive. But LACC was down the street from USC, where I hoped to transfer, and it was in the middle of the city. Something about its history drew me to it, too.

By the summer of 2017, I was living in my car.

For a year, I rotated between parking spots in North Hollywood while finishing community college and trying to get into USC. I used a YMCA membership for showers. I learned which baristas would let me sit for hours over one cup of coffee and how early to wake up before security came around.

I learned the knock. Three firm taps. I know you’re in there.

For a while, I told myself it wasn’t really homelessness. I had a car and a gym membership. I was enrolled in school. But I was sleeping in parking lots and on side streets.

In the summer of 2018, I moved into a shared house across the street from USC’s main campus. That fall, I started there as a transfer student. I earned a journalism degree and later a master’s in public diplomacy. Some of my first reporting was about homelessness. Eventually, I had a job at LAist.

I interviewed people in Echo Park, Skid Row, and Venice who were sleeping in tents, cars, and on sidewalks. Someone would describe the patrols or the search for a safe place to park, and I would recognize what they were telling me. I recorded audio and asked questions. I kept my own experience out of the interview. I had worked hard to become the journalist.

People knew my story by then. Articles had been written about the formerly unhoused student who now covered housing and homelessness. That experience helped me ask better questions. It also meant that what I’d survived had become part of how people understood my work.

I won awards. I interviewed Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. I was held up as an example of what education and persistence could accomplish. I understood why people saw a success story. I also knew how precarious I still felt.

I had done the work. I still worried about ending up back in a car.

Reporting meant returning to circumstances I knew, listening to people describe them, and then trying to do my job. I was tired of pretending neutrality was possible. I was tired of being treated as proof that the system eventually rewards people who endure enough.

The question I kept asking was the same one I’d asked before leaving D.C. years earlier. Is this it?

Los Angeles had given me a sense of home. I’d built a career there. Neither had made me feel safe enough to stop asking that question.

In early 2023, I left the United States. I didn’t make a big announcement. I went to Paris.

While I was there, University College Dublin offered me admission and a partial scholarship. I hesitated over another degree. I wasn’t sure I wanted to keep proving myself through credentials. I went anyway. In Dublin, I studied responsible AI and user research, and I could be another international student without my history being the first thing people knew about me.

Los Angeles was the place I’d chosen when I wanted a different life. I had loved it enough to stay through circumstances I wouldn’t wish on anyone.

I had worked hard to stay. I could also decide to go.