Rise & Fall of LA Firms: Did Company Greed Kill Our Jobs?

[Andrew Garulay, RLA]

There is no reason why anyone in any business should not be allowed to enjoy aesthetics within their work place. Greed has nothing to do with that, as far as I am concerned. Excessive vanity is not a trait that I appreciate, but it still is not the same as greed.

 

Greed is when you exploit others for any reason, when you replace other values to get more, and things of that nature. That is out there in any profession or any community. I think we most see it in this profession with the exploiting interns that I’m just learning about. If they buy art, they are providing artists with money – a good thing. If they re-decorate, they are buying goods and services. How is that bad?

 

Making hay while the sun shines is practical. Cutting back when you have to is also practical. Enjoying life when the opportunity presents itself is not a bad thing. It is better to have loved and lost than to not have loved at all, as they say. No one is going to keep an employee that has no work employed whether they bought a chandelier or not. If you have work, you have employees. It is not simply because you still have money in the bank that you’ll continue to pay someone to not work.

 

The success that the profession enjoyed last decade inspired a lot of people to join it. Were they greedy? Is some of the problem that too many people tried to get into a profession that was overloading itself in a time of unsustainable growth? Let’s not forget that a lot of people went into this profession because they thought they could make a lot of money doing something fun. Was that greedy? I don’t think so.

 

Most of the time our role is to improve aesthetics and without that human need to make things nicer through the use of money, all of it would be done by engineers and architects. We live by selling aesthetics, why would we want to entertain the idea that spending money on aesthetics is a negative human quality? That would be hipocracy at its best.

 

There is way too much brainwashing going on out there to get people to hate those that are successful. We used to be encouraged to strive for prosperity. Now it is like a crime to be successful. Unfortunately, I can’t find any poor folks that want to hire me, so I’m stuck working for people with at least a moderate income. They are also the only ones keeping the contractors busy which keeps the unskilled and semi-skilled laborers employed as well. I can’t wish them to go away. I definitely don’t want them to stop spending money either. I wish more of them were landscape architects (I wish more LAs were getting rich).

 

 

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