City of Quartz. Mike Davis
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there was ever a time for fire in the belly and a radical politics of hope, it is now. Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worst crisis period since the early Depression. Los Angeles, of course, will not fall into the ocean, but it could resume the arc of decline that began in the early 1990s: slowly bleeding high-wage jobs, skilled workers, and fiscal resources. No great American city – the recent case of New Orleans aside – is so susceptible to downward mobility over the next generation.
Why do I continue to be so pessimistic? Taking 1990 as a baseline, consider some of the most important structural trends and social changes of the generation that has followed the original ‘conjuncture’ of City of Quartz.
1. REGIONAL (IM)MOBILITY
In 1990 the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s ambitious program of subway and light-rail construction held the promise of increased mobility and reduced pollution. But in 2006, the imminent future is massive immobility and staggering congestion. Right now locals pay a ‘congestion tax’ – ninety-three hours per commuter per year lost in traffic delays – that is the highest in the United States, and twice as high as it was in 1982. In the worst scenario, it could double again in another decade.
In the late Bradley years – it should now be clear – Los Angeles wrote the textbook on bad transport planning and even worse project management. The big-ticket projects of this era turned out to be costly fiascos: a Wilshire subway that didn’t actually go down Wilshire Boulevard, or to the Eastside, for that matter; a light rail to the airport that didn’t actually go to LAX; and a Alameda corridor that was designed to take truck-hauled containers off the Long Beach Freeway, but has failed to do so. Everyone loves to ride the subway, but few appreciate that it is underwritten by huge operating subsidies – almost $27 per passenger – that have been financed out of the pockets of bus riders. Between 1991 and 1997, as fares increased, the bus system lost 17 per cent of its passenger volume or 71 million trips: hardly a victory for mass transit. Overall, mass transit accounts for only one out of every fifty trips within the region.
Likewise, both city and county have allowed politically powerful developers – like Maguire Thomas at Playa Vista or Newhall Ranch in the Santa Clara River Valley – to dump huge new volumes of traffic into the most congested nodes without any real mitigation. The projected 70,000-resident Tejon Ranch near Gorman (property formerly owned by the Chandler dynasty of the Los Angeles Times) will be even worse: the beginning of gridlock that someday may extend to Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley. Regionally, we are no closer to real planning or coordination of housing, jobs and transportation than we were fifty years ago. There is much talk about ‘smart growth’ and ‘new urbanism,’ but, with few exceptions, the regional norms are still dumb sprawl and senile suburbanism. Some politicians still invoke magic bullets and sci-fi fixes, like 200 mph maglev trains, but Sacramento – which has recently siphoned off $2.5 billion in transportation funds to cover the budget deficit – is unable even to fill the potholes in our aging freeways. Southern California, as a result, is quickly turning into one huge angry parking lot. Congestion will inevitably drive away more jobs and business, while also fueling an ugly neo-Malthusian politics – already audible on the AM dial – of blaming immigrants (whose environmental footprint is actually the smallest) for declining physical and social mobility.
2. BRANCHVILLE
In the late 1980s, boosters of the now forgotten ‘L.A. 2000’ scheme were claiming that L.A. would soon become the new command center of the California and Pacific Rim economies, the ‘headquarters of the 21st century’. The more incautious – perhaps they had smoked too much jimson weed – even foresaw Downtown as a second Manhattan, thanks to the Archimedean lever of Japanese investment. What a delirious vision.
In fact, Japanese capital – suffering huge losses – couldn’t bail out of Downtown fast enough during the recession of the early 1990s. Financial consolidations, in the wake of the savings and loan meltdown and bank deregulation, left Los Angeles for the first time in its history without a single major locally headquartered bank. Indeed, apart from the odd oil company and some of the entertainment giants, Los Angeles is hardly a headquarters city at all. The final insult, of course, was Otis Chandler’s decision – forced by the scandals and bloodbaths on Spring Street – to put a silver stake through his grandfather’s heart and sell the Times, the flagship of local capitalism, to the Chicago Tribune empire.
Thus Los Angeles has entered the twenty-first century, as it did the twentieth, largely as an economic colony of corporations and investors headquartered elsewhere: San Francisco, Charlotte, New York, Chicago and Tokyo. A dozen or so billionaires, including Sumner Redstone, Kirk Kerkorian, Marvin Davis and David Geffen, still receive mail at L.A. zip codes but, with the exception of Eli Broad (the new uber-patron of Downtown culture), their commitment to the region is unclear, even inscrutable. Rupert Murdoch is currently the biggest fish in the pond, but is he a local player? Hardly anyone knows. An ‘elite’ – in the aggressive, almost militarized sense of Harry Chandler and his friends in the 1920s – hardly exists in Los Angeles anymore. Power and wealth, of course, remain massively concentrated, but there is a real sense of transience. Too many of the nouveaux riches keep their bags packed, ready to bolt the city if it again catches fire or erupts in mayhem.
3. MANUFACTURING DECLINE
By 1990, the Los Angeles region had lost most of the ‘Fordist’ industries that once made it the nation’s second-largest center of auto and tire manufacture. Of its fourteen largest non-defense plants, twelve, including Kaiser in Fontana and GM in Southgate, had been shut down and their machinery exported to China. Yet, unlike anywhere else, the region actually gained manufacturing jobs in the 1980s through expanding aerospace payrolls and a light manufacturing boom – apparel, toys, furniture – centered around Downtown. For a decade, Los Angeles surpassed Chicago, with the largest manufacturing workforce in the country.
But in the 1990s, Los Angeles County lost one-third of that compensatory industrial job base, as defense jobs were transferred to other regions, and light manufacturing was exported to border maquiladoras or to China. In an era of national Republican hegemony, the heavily Democratic Los Angeles region has lost its former competitive advantage in Washington: witness the blatant partisan politics in the early 1990s behind the transfer of thousands of Lockheed jobs from Burbank to Newt Gingrich’s congressional district in Marrietta, Georgia. The recent announcement that Boeing will be terminating the assembly of 717s in the former McDonnell Douglas plant in Long Beach marks the end of a historical era.
For fifty years, Southern California’s military–industrial economy was irrigated by an aqueduct of tax dollars from Washington: in some years, the net gain – via the inter-regional transfer of tax resources – was as much as $6 to $8 billion. Now the fiscal differential flows the other way: Los Angeles County – like Michigan or Ohio in the 1950s – now pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal expenditures. Between 1983 and 1996 real per capita federal spending in Southern California fell by a whopping 14 per cent.
The decline of manufacturing jobs in the regional core (Los Angeles and Orange counties), moreover, has not been compensated for by small increases in the Inland Empire and San Diego counties. In addition, over the next few years Los Angeles may lose half of its apparel employment to China. The burden of deindustrialization, of course, is most heavily felt in Los Angeles’ new-immigrant neighborhoods, where the garment industry has been a major employer. As manufacturing employment shrinks, an already precarious low-wage workforce is further compressed into a limited spectrum of service-sector jobs in restaurants, hotels, offices, theme parks, and private homes.
This service-heavy economy, based upon a myriad of poorly-capitalized small businesses, is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in economic weather. Indeed both the rate of business formation, and the rate of business failure, remain higher than in most other metropolitan regions. This generates plenty of heartwarming stories about successful ethnic enterprise, but it also ensures an equally high rate of broken dreams and bankruptcy. Too many ethnic donut stores, nail