The coastal California community banding together to try and solve a tragic mystery
The Venice Canals have been rocked by a spate of dog illnesses and deaths this summer
By Paula Mejía, Contributing LA Culture Editor
Not long after Ramón J. Goñi moved to Los Angeles seven years ago, he went on a date. The pair strolled around the serene Venice Canals, a small Westside enclave with homes separated by shallow waterways. “What is this place?” Goñi remembers thinking. “And also, how many millions of dollars do you need to make to live in this place?” The area’s natural beauty stuck with Goñi, who originally hails from Madrid. “I was really attracted to that, but I thought it was never going to be possible to live here.”
But when the pandemic surged through Southern California a few years ago, rents dropped all across Los Angeles County. Suddenly, Goñi had some wiggle room to negotiate on monthly rental rates, and he nabbed a one-bedroom apartment in the back of a house along one of the canals. He soon realized he was far from the only renter in this idyllic slice of Venice, with homes that sell for $1.8 million on average, and found himself more connected to his neighbors given their proximity to one another in the car-free canals. “It’s really hard to be a complete isolationist living here,” he says. “The connections are going to happen, whether you want it or not.”