Can Los Angeles Be Saved?
Last March, a makeshift drug factory exploded next to Los Angeles resident Juan Galicia’s craftsman-style home, built in 1910. The flames spread to his gas line, setting off a fire that destroyed the house and killed his three dogs — he tearfully shows me their picture. Had the accident happened an hour earlier, it would have killed one of his sons, as well. “I lived here 18 years and now it’s gone,” the 55-year-old father, an immigrant from El Salvador, tells me. The empty lot next door, he says, was occupied by homeless squatters who cooked methamphetamine there. “People occupy a place and the city does nothing,” he says.
Galicia owns a small construction business and is also a minister at a primarily Latino Pentecostal church downtown. He tries not to fume against his misfortunes, but he has a beef with the city, which to this day can’t even identify the owner of the lot. Repeated calls to his city councilman, radical DSA member Hugo Soto Martinez, have proved fruitless.
“There are millions for the homeless, but nothing for those who work hard,” Galicia notes. “The sidewalks are never fixed and the police are slow to come. It would be easier if the government would not make everything so miserable.”
LA is currently hosting the World Cup, and two years from now, it will host the Olympics. The city should be ready for its closeup — but it isn’t.
This is a painful change for anyone who, like me, came to the City of Angels 50 years ago and embraced its eclectic mix of cultures and businesses. In the 1980s, LA was what the conservative historian Fred Siegel called “the entrepreneurial dynamo.” Unlike New York or the Bay Area, where academic pedigree and family ties were the keys to success, LA was an everyman city, a place where you could afford to start a business and live in a house like Galicia’s, all within the perimeter of a great metropolis.
“The City of Angels today hardly resembles the brash upstart that held a successful Olympics in 1932.”
Aesthetes long preferred New York or San Francisco, but the masses headed to LA. Between 1900 and 1940, the city’s population surged to 1.5 million from barely 100,000. After the war, LA expanded again, enriched by its huge oil and defense sectors, and by 2020, hit its peak population of 3.8 million, with another 6 million living in surrounding Los Angeles County. These areas once domiciled 13 Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Northrop Grumman, Security Pacific Bank, First Interstate, Union Oil, Getty Oil, and Arco, and a long list of successful growing businesses, as well.
Since then, the Fortune 500 locals have dwindled to seven, with just one, Farmers Insurance, inside city limits, and that just barely, on the furthest fringes of the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, once a critical part of the city establishment, has abandoned Downtown for El Segundo, amid severe financial strains and a paid circulation that’s a fraction of its once vast readership.
Most critically, Los Angeles County now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. As you drive the streets of South Los Angeles and along the historic main street of black LA, Central Avenue, now predominantly Hispanic, the ambiance is increasingly reminiscent of the colonias of Mexico: broken pavements, battered buildings, outdoor swap meets, and fly-by-night food stalls.
Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com, follow him on Substack and Twitter @joelkotkin.
Homepage photo: Alek Leckszas, via Wikimedia, CC 4.0 License.
