Idk if this would honestly be a good idea. Never having driven in NY, and not commuting to DTLA much, I can't imagine the traffic in the two are comparable.
2nd, public transit isn't up to par, I would say. Yeah DTLA has the the best transit in California probably, but that may not be enough for the different places people may need to travel from to get to downtown. Also, it's more likely that if you're low income, you may be coming from way further out of in an area with limited public transit options.
If a vote came for this though, I would probably vote yes though, just to try something new
I'm not familiar with the above distros, but I'm pretty certain there's more people on Ubuntu which helps a lot with troubleshooting and finding solutions online. One option is, when installing any Linux OS, is to create a separate partition for "home/". that way, you can reinstall any other Linux based OS, and keep most of your files installed.
Excel doesn't work on Linux, but LibreOffice and Google sheets do.