Alexander Grigoryan, a 17-year-old rising senior in La Cañada Flintridge, looks at Los Angeles’ housing and mobility crises through the lens of transit. He’s used LA Metro only once and contrasts it unfavorably with Eurasian systems he’s seen while traveling. In his view, LA’s “reluctant” car culture overlays an underperforming Metro/Metrolink network, and that combination helps fuel high rents, RV encampments, long commutes, and steady out-migration from the city and state. As gas prices rise and car ownership strains household budgets, he argues the problem is outpacing piecemeal solutions.
Alexander Grigoryan, 2025
Grigoryan’s core claim is that the city’s political class talks incessantly about affordable housing but underinvests in the mobility that could make housing truly affordable at scale. Downtown LA still isn’t a dominant cultural or commercial hub; public life is overshadowed by Skid Row’s notoriety. Rather than treat transit as a side issue, he proposes a catalytic project: a true high-speed rail line that would initially link Los Angeles and Las Vegas and, crucially, create a new affordability valve centered on Barstow.
Under a Cambridge professor’s mentorship, he completed and submitted a research paper to the International Journal of High School Research and presented at a conference at UC Santa Barbara. His model is Barstow as the hinge. With genuine high-speed service, Barstow–LA would be roughly 45 minutes and Barstow–Las Vegas around 65 minutes. That changes the math: families could live in newly built, lower-cost subdivisions around a Barstow station while accessing higher-wage labor markets in LA or Vegas. He predicts a “cycle of generative income”—influxes of residents, entertainment spending, investment, and construction—benefiting local, state, and federal coffers. If enough demand shifts outward, LA’s “artificial” price pressure could ease, nudging home prices downward.
Grigoryan cautiously considers the necessity of private equity. One model on the table, Brightline West, exposes the tradeoffs. The current plan connects Las Vegas not to Los Angeles proper but to Rancho Cucamonga via the I-15 corridor, with intermediate stops at Victor Valley and Hesperia. Reports project top speeds up to 218 mph and a Phase 1 completion in December 2028, with riders transferring to Metrolink for the final 45 or so miles into LA. To Grigoryan, that misses the mark twice: it still requires a mode change and it takes an expensive, politically constrained alignment through mountain terrain and the I-15 median—an alignment he says invites federal restrictions, delays, and higher costs. Fares are already drifting upward, he notes, citing premium prices in the $119–$133 range for a roughly 2-hour-10-minute end-to-end trip—numbers that spook investors worried about ridership and payback.
His alternative is not just a different line on a map but a different financing and land-use strategy. He points to Japan and China, where operators co-develop station areas—housing, retail, entertainment—to cross-subsidize rail and stabilize fares. Done right in Barstow, that transit-oriented development could let low- and moderate-income residents live near jobs or fast connections to them, compressing commute times while expanding job search radii. Over time, he argues, that integrated approach would lower per-rider costs, raise quality of life, and even improve “the optics” of LA by reducing visible homelessness and economic precarity.
The underlying diagnosis is a basic supply-demand mismatch: LA builds too little (he characterizes its construction rate as the worst among U.S. metros) and maintains very low vacancy while shouldering the nation’s second-highest homelessness burden. Rail can’t build houses, but it can open new, desirable places to live and make them effectively “close” through time rather than distance. He acknowledges that some cheaper exurban markets already exist—Bakersfield, Lancaster—but the drive times, winter closures, and traffic undermine their promise. High-speed rail would turn that equation, making the door-to-door experience faster and more reliable than the current “four-hour” sleight of hand of flying (drive to LAX, security, one hour aloft, ground transport on arrival).
Grigoryan situates his idea alongside LA’s latest housing push. On September 5, the city launched its largest-ever affordable housing funding round—$387 million sourced mostly from Measure ULA’s “mansion tax”—shifting awards from per-unit formulas to percentage-of-cost financing so projects can receive 30%–100% of expenses. That could accelerate construction. But even if production rises, prices remain punishing: as of mid-2025, LA’s median home was around $1.1 million (city) and $884,050 (statewide), while typical one-bedroom rents hovered around $2,000–$2,500. Comfortable incomes, depending on methodology, often land well above $150,000 for individuals and roughly $276,000 for a family of four. Las Vegas looks cheaper—mid-$430,000s for median homes; $1,000–$1,865 typical rents—but a 2025 Zillow estimate still pegs “comfortable” renter income above $72,000. In both markets, he argues, rail-enabled option value—live farther out, keep the job—would relieve pressure.
He also reads broader national lessons. California, the world’s fifth-largest economy, is a bellwether. People leaving for political and financial reasons is a “red flag,” and he asks whether dispersion without connectivity will balkanize the country. He calls it “a colossal waste” that the United States has no true high-speed line despite having the industrial capacity and energy base to run one—“the power to power these trains,” as he quips, alluding to nuclear generation widespread among major economies.
For whom is this most useful? He’s explicit: low-to-median earners who need to reallocate income without abandoning access to big-city job markets. He cites ancillary benefits—less air pollution from fewer cars and planes, fewer accidents—and notes that remote-worker relocation programs (e.g., from California to Texas for tax incentives) show how income can transform smaller cities’ tax bases. He argues a rail-anchored Barstow/Victor Valley/Hesperia/Rancho Cucamonga corridor could achieve similar gains locally while tackling the root cause: housing scarcity near jobs.
None of this, he stresses, absolves government. Private capital is essential, but only the public sector can marshal land, permitting, and risk-backstopped financing at sufficient scale—and reap broad fiscal gains once the network is operating. He sketches a bottom-up path: community pressure to local representatives, then state and federal action.
Grigoryan’s interests have always included reasoning, math and crunching numbers. He began playing chess when he was four, and went on to win numerous school, local and state tournaments—notably the California State Championship for his age bracket in 2018. He is also an astute observer and unassuming diplomat, which he credits to his extensive travels throughout Europe, Asia, Central America and the Middle East, including Spain, France, Portugal, Germany, Italy, Russia, Armenia, the UAE, Japan, Morocco, Ecuador, and the Dominican Republic. He’s also visited thirteen states: Utah, Nevada, New York, New Jersey, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. The genesis for the high speed rail line began when Grigoryan took the Chunnel from England to France, and crystallized during his time in Japan last summer.
Grigoryan is also dedicated to helping others in need. In 2023, at the age of 15, he traveled with his mother Dr. Lusine Simonyants on a medical mission to Ecuador. The following year, he accompanied her on a medical mission to the Dominican Republic. In both missions trips, he was responsible for triage, as well as for translating between the doctors and patients. (Grigoryan is fluent in Armenian, English and Spanish, and is studying Russian and Mandarin.)
The high-speed rail line merges his intense math acumen with his commitment to public service and discourse. He is also a keen student of history and international relations, and plans on pursuing undergraduate and graduate work in International Business, International Relations, and Business Administration that would eventually lend itself to brokering partnerships.
He’s currently submitting college applications to 22 universities in California and across the country. “I always enjoyed learning about the history of the world and how civilizations were built. Not just by military conquests, but rather diplomacy and preventing wars,” says Grigoryan. “Now in this era of technology, the entire world is connected and the stakes are higher than ever.” He also emphasizes the importance of cultural nuances in brokering successful international initiatives.
Meanwhile, he’s doing his part: he plans to circulate his research paper to local governments to seed a grassroots movement. Although he could be spending the next several years away for his studies, he considers Los Angeles to be home and a critical example of how his research could become a beneficial reality across the United States. His bottom line is pragmatic rather than utopian. A Los Angeles–Las Vegas high-speed line with Barstow as a true residential hub wouldn’t solve homelessness or affordability overnight. But by converting distance into minutes, pairing rail with station-area housing, and creating credible alternatives to car-bound living, it’s the “only tenable and scalable” path he sees to deflating demand pressures in Southern California and beyond—and a model the rest of the country could copy if it works here first.
© Copyright 2025 Armenian News Network/Groong and the author.
