How Governable is Los Angeles?
Los Angeles is being investigated, pilloried and derided over the horrific loss of life and property in the 2025 fires. Certainly, Mayor Karen Bass, the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, and many of their recent predecessors, have not convinced the world that L.A. is a governable city.
Fire preparedness isn’t the only problem. In recent years, Los Angeles has been losing residents right and left. Census data show that its poverty rate is among the highest in the state, and that it’s in the top 10 nationwide. South L.A., roughly the area between the 10 Freeway south to the city boundary, locale of two of the worst riots in U.S. history, is now poorer in relation to the rest of Los Angeles than it was before those upheavals — the Watts riots, in 1965, and the Rodney King unrest in 1992. The city and county of Los Angeles has the second-highest unhoused population in the U.S., behind New York, and yet L.A. builds far less new housing than almost every other large “metro.” It has a deepening budget hole.
The news is far better if you look at smaller cities in the county: Downey, Lakewood, South Gate, Cerritos, Bellflower and Paramount. As you drive through downtown neighborhoods toward these southeastern suburbs, you’re likely to encounter broken pavement, battered buildings, empty storefronts and sidewalks crowded with vendors and food stalls reminiscent of the developing world. But just past the city limits, the reality changes.
In South Gate, for example, the main streets are well-maintained and landscaped, and there’s a dearth of the graffiti and homeless camps that scar so much of Los Angeles. A study by Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahlobo — to be published later this year — found that these cities generally outperform the city in many important economic, social and educational markers.
The overall office vacancy rate in downtown L.A., 31.5% in mid-2024, is more than three times higher than in the smaller cities to the south. Mahlobo’s comparisons show that the unemployment rate and poverty rate are lower in Bellflower, Cerritos, South Gate, Paramount, Lakewood and Downey than in adjacent parts of Los Angeles. All have violent crime rates below Los Angeles as a whole, and less than half of that endured in adjacent city neighborhoods.
These suburbs’ livability has been hard-won. Two decades ago, Paramount was written off as among the worst suburbs in the country. Rand described it as an “urban disaster area.” Many were “devastated” by factory layoffs and plant shutdowns in the 1970s, recalls Hector De La Torre, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, a joint-powers authority of 27 cities and several unincorporated areas. “Their economic base was torn from them,” he added, “but these places figured how to adjust.”
Read the rest of this piece at Los Angeles Times.
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 and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
Photo: Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times.
