The tawny, golden-eyed, sharp-nosed wild dog of the American deserts is now our backyard predator, everywhere from Miami to Toronto and San Diego to Seattle.

The stories are already piling up. During a heat wave, in broad daylight, a coyote strolls into a Quiznos sandwich shop in Chicago and hops up on a freezer to cool off. Customers and staff flee for the street, where a shocked crowd gathers to peer through the windows as the coyote commandeers the store.

On the other side of the country, a California couple driving at freeway speeds plows through a pack of coyotes near Las Vegas. Hundreds of miles later, while unpacking the car near Nevada City, they discover a full-grown coyote snagged like a bug in the grill of the car. Their flying coyote ornament is fully alert, has one cut on a paw and another on its muzzle. Having hitchhiked to California, it is otherwise unhurt.

Such is the life of the American continent’s native small wolf in the 21st century. Our task, because there is really no other option, is to understand them well enough to enjoy them as neighbors.

Exactly a century ago, Joseph Grinnell of the Society of American Mammalogists proposed we allow coyotes and wolves to live unmolested in the parks of the country’s new National Park Service. By the time the Park Service accepted that idea in the 1930s, wolves were already gone. But America’s parks became effective refuges for coyotes. Nonetheless, rural coyotes outside the parks are still shot and trapped—and even hunted from planes—in staggering numbers. And so coyotes came up with an even better refuge than the national parks: Cities.

Coyotes thus began an ongoing, unplanned predatory experiment. Los Angeles and Chicago are now home to thousands of coyotes, and Denver has at least a thousand in more than 125 packs. And city-dwelling coyotes, not unlike human urbanites, are living richer lives than their rural counterparts.

Coyotes have demonstrated amazing resiliency and adaptability in the presence of humans.

History is on the side of the urban coyote. For one thing, the species has a lot of experience as wild town dogs. Coyotes were living in Indian cities like the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan and the ceremonial Southwestern city now called Chaco Canyon a thousand years ago. They’ve been practicing in contemporary U.S. cities like Los Angeles for at least a century.

So to a coyote slipping along a rail line to enter a modern city, existing with humans in close proximity, is not a huge hurdle. Habitat for hunting and denning might be scattered because of asphalt, concrete, and structures, and coyotes must learn how to navigate around a massive number of cars. Those are challenges, to be sure, but coyote intelligence seems fully up to the task. Coyotes that are calm enough to tolerate noise, traffic, city lights, and the torrent of human sensory output tend to be the most successful at urban living. Some biologists argue that city life may be selecting for particular canid genetic strains—novelty-seeking, “super-genius” coyotes that can solve the riddles of being a predator in a modern metropolis.

Compared to rural America, where the average lifespan of a coyote is just 2.5 years, in cities the living is easy. Leash laws and municipal programs that curbed feral dog populations made city living even better for coyotes. Mice and rats, a coyote’s most dependable prey, are numerous around our houses, as are flocks of geese and ducks and exotic fruiting plants of all kinds. In the city, nobody is shooting at you, trapping you, poisoning you, or flying you down with an airplane. So town coyotes are living to 11, 12, or even 13 years old. Because urban coyote territories are also resource-rich, metropolitan coyotes often get more than 60 percent of their pups to adulthood. In the countryside that figure is commonly less than 15 percent.

The most dangerous element of modern urban life for coyotes is crossing highways teeming with cars. No Aztec coyote had to master 70 mph traffic, but modern coyotes are figuring it out. Biologists have watched them in Chicago rush hour crossing half a multi-lane interstate highway boiling with traffic, then sitting in the median until traffic thins enough for them to cross the other lanes. More than 60 percent of coyote deaths still come under the wheels of cars in Chicago. But with more generations of city experience in car-mageddon Los Angeles, coyotes have lowered that figure to about 40 percent. Angeleno coyote culture has even designated a highway they recognize as an absolute obstacle: U.S. Highway 101, running north-south through the state, is a barrier only the most intrepid California coyotes ever attempt.

The other half of the equation for city coyotes is human neighbors. When we began living in cities 5,000 years ago, we thought we’d escaped the world of predators. For us North Americans, these small wolves have changed that metric. A media out of its depth has tended to portray coyotes as invaders, as unnatural in cities, often describing them in language associated with criminals or gangs. But once we get over our shock at seeing them lope through our suburbs and accept their presence in town as normal, there are far more reasons to celebrate coyotes than to fear them.

While coyotes will guard their pups against our dogs in the spring/summer denning season, careful studies indicate the vast majority of city coyotes are upstanding citizens. Some of them see our dogs and cats as competitors in their territories, which requires some altered behavior on our parts. But fewer roaming cats also means more birdsong in town. Coyotes are not foraging from dumpsters behind fast food restaurants, though they can carry rabies. The prescription to co-existence is to keep them wild and wary of us, or at least thinking we’re too weird to trust, and never habituating them to associating humans with handouts. Then we’ll get to enjoy them as a wholly remarkable flourish of the wild and the ancient, smack in the middle of modern life.

As the Aztecs discovered long ago, coyotes are a fact of urban existence. Resistance is futile. Best to do what those Americans of a thousand years ago did: Adapt your behavior and take pleasure in coyote success, survivability, and in the wonders of having these small native wolves trotting down our sidewalks and through our yards.

 
*An earlier version incorrectly stated that coyotes do not carry rabies.

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The discussion before at a standing-room-only crowd at MOCA Grand Avenue produced a lot of knowing nods and sighs from audience members. An audible gasp arose when panelist Keith McNutt, the western region director for The Actors Fund, talked about 3,000 people waiting in a lottery for 55 affordable units.

KCRW News Producer Saul Gonzalez, the moderator of “Is Gentrification L.A.’s Next Defining Issue?”, started the lively conversation by asking urban planner Gilda Haas for a 30-second definition of gentrification.

Haas started with a disclaimer: “First of all, gentrification isn’t about hipsters and I’m sorry if there are some hipsters out here. It’s not about you.”

“It’s not being for or against change—it’s about being for or against involuntary displacement,” she said. “It’s about the bigger question: Who has the right to the city?”

UCLA cityLAB director Dana Cuff noted that there are two issues with gentrification: housing affordability and neighborhood character. People who own property in a neighborhood that’s gentrifying always think the change is fantastic, while those who are renting or looking for new housing think that it’s terrible.

“The only part of me that’s optimistic about our city and all of its changes is it’s inevitable and that we have continuing engagement of public processes,” Cuff said.

“If we don’t engage with the planning and political process, it will happen in spite of us,” she added.

Former City Planning Commissioner and UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs alumna Maria Cabildo echoed the point that there’s a need for long-time residents of gentrifying neighborhoods to join in the planning process.

Cabildo, who previously led the East L.A. Community Corporation, said the organization discovered that “gentrification is happening in a person-to-person transaction with single family homes. You can’t really intervene in that transaction. Can you really shame an African-American family who is selling their house in your neighborhood, making a huge profit and then they’re going to retire on that?”

Cabildo suggested asking instead: What kind land does the government control? And what kind of power does the government have over property in a jurisdiction?

For instance, she said, “If they allow industrial conversion, require that they have a high level of affordable housing.” She applauded a recent California Supreme Court decision that allows cities to make developers sell some housing at below-market rates.

Cities can also change zoning laws to encourage denser development in different neighborhoods. “There’s no increased density in Westwood—what a lost opportunity,” Cabildo said.

McNutt noted that the larger pressures brought on by a lack of affordable housing can cause unintended consequences. For example, The Actors Fund—some of whose members make $25,000 or less per year—has been trying to build affordable housing in East Hollywood and improve a neighborhood with a 36 percent poverty rate.

“But what happens when we try to deliver those services?” he said. “Antennas start perking up … In 20 years, none of those families will live there anymore.”

He noted that stronger rent control and rent stabilization laws could protect low-income people from being pushed out in a challenging housing marketplace.

“I don’t think the answer is to put up bars and keep people out as much as it is a workforce issue,” he said. If “hipsters” or well-paid app developers are moving into a neighborhood and driving up prices, he said, “How come we’re not training kids who grow up here? … How come we’re not teaching them to participate in those great jobs?”

Gonzalez noted the antipathy towards some of the wealthier people moving into these neighborhoods and asked, “What are the missteps they make?”

Cabildo had a quick answer: “Columbus-ing—It’s like they discover our neighborhoods,” she said. Cabildo says she overhears people saying of a place like Boyle Heights with its rich history, “I discovered this neighborhood. The people are so nice.”

After the audience laughter died down, she added, “Don’t do that.”

But Cabildo also noted later that while arrogant hipsters are the most visible characters in the gentrification saga, people of all income levels are being affected.

Cabildo said she recognizes that when she moved to Eagle Rock 12 years ago and converted a triplex into a single-family home, she displaced Occidental College students. “Middle-class Latinos are not going to Whittier Hills like they used to,” she said. “They think, ‘Maybe I’ll move to El Sereno.’”

During the question-and-answer session, a woman who was on the land use committee of her neighborhood council asked what laws could be changed to bring more fairness to the process of gentrification.

Haas suggested the Ellis Act, a state law that allows landlords to evict tenants under certain circumstances, should be repealed—or at least be more stringently enforced so that landlords actually follow through and take units off the market as promised. She added that she would also ask the city to stop giving out any more permits for luxury housing until the affordable housing needs were met.

“That will keep you busy,” she said.

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