Can This Future Be Saved?

TWENTY-FIVE years from now, Los Angeles might well be an amazing place to live--a technological utopia, an economic giant, a true world city, a harmonious melding of cultures and races. But that will happen only if we develop strategies to solve a host of problems ranging from crime to pollution to overcrowding.

Population is the primary consideration. Currently 12.6 million, it’s expected to reach 18.3 million in the Los Angeles area by 2010. And as the population grows, its ethnic makeup is changing as well, experts say, becoming less Anglo and more Latino and Asian.

The white population is expected to drop from 60% in 1980 to about 40% by 2010, according to recent projections made by the Southern California Assn. of Governments (SCAG). SCAG also reports that blacks will compose about 10% of the population--up 1% from 1980--while Asians will move from 6.2% to 9.3% by 2010, adding about 1 million. Latinos will increase from 24% in 1980 to about 40% in 2010, adding more than 4 million people. These shifts will profoundly affect many aspects of our lives:

JOBS: There is little question that the Los Angeles area’s economy will continue to expand rapidly over the coming decades. In fact, SCAG predicts that the number of jobs in its six-county region--Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino, Ventura, Imperial and Riverside--will increase from 6 million in 1984 to 9 million by 2010. But the character of the work is changing.

Manufacturing will become a diminishing percentage of the economy, says Mark Pisano, SCAG’s executive director. SCAG projects that by 2010, only 16.9% of the labor force will work in jobs related to manufacturing, down from 20.5% in 1984. Meanwhile, most new jobs will be connected to service industries, such businesses as banking, real estate, insurance, law and communications. In fact, 29.3% of the labor force will be employed in services by the year 2010, according to SCAG’s projections, up from 22.2% in 1984. These industries require a highly educated, white-collar work force, so satisfying this white-collar demand will depend on training Latino and black labor groups--which have been historically under-represented in the white-collar work force.

Thus, one major challenge facing Los Angeles is to somehow match the job skills of the expected population with the needs of the business community. If programs can’t be set up to train the local labor force, experts warn, workers will inevitably come in from out of state.

SCHOOLS: This ever-increasing and diversifying population will further tax the already-overburdened Los Angeles Unified School District. As of March, 548,987 students were enrolled in the district from kindergarten through high school. Of those, 27% were not fluent in English, district officials say. Another 25%, while proficient in English, spoke a second language at home. Altogether, the district’s students speak some 81 different languages, says Miyeko Heishi, a coordinator in the district’s research-evaluation branch. Pressures on the school system are expected to intensify by 2010, when there will be more than 3 million school-age children, according to SCAG. To accommodate this growth, the district will need to build 580 new elementary and junior high schools and 95 new high schools, and hire 31,000 new teachers as well, SCAG statistics show.

HOUSING: By 2010, the six-county region will need to add another 2.8 million housing units to today’s 4.6 million, SCAG projects. And making affordable housing available to 18 million people will require some creative solutions, planners say.

USC futurist Selwyn Enzer, for one, disagrees with the currently popular slow-growth movement. He believes the region will have to allow high-density housing in some neighborhoods in order to preserve the area’s one-family housing areas. Otherwise, he says, density will creep up throughout the city. “We can’t control the growth,” Enzer says. “High-density areas should get very dense so we can handle the population and keep other areas low-density.”

For starters, space and buildings will have to be used more efficiently than they are today, experts say. For example, larger single-family homes could be divided into several sections, allowing more than one family to share the space, or several families might live in one house, sharing kitchen, dining and recreational facilities, says USC architecture professor John Mutlow. There will also be more apartments over commercial spaces, he adds, while multi-generational families might share the same unit with separate living quarters. Mutlow also predicts that home owners will build and rent out secondary houses behind their first houses, which will help them “maintain their life style.”

And because many newcomers to Los Angeles will be poor, planners will have to work to prevent some areas from becoming “blighted ghettos,” Enzer warns in “L.A. 2000+20: Some Alternative Futures for Los Angeles 2001,” published in 1982.

In the coming decades, much of the new housing will be built in outlying areas where land is less expensive but jobs fewer. Therefore, most regional planners believe it is vital to encourage decentralized growth, which would ensure a much better balance of work, housing and shopping in all areas of the region. This will involve urging businesses and immigrants to locate outside Los Angeles’ central core, in regional centers--or urban villages--dotting the metropolis.

“Our goal is that they’re balanced so people can live, work and play within a reasonable commute distance,” SCAG’s Pisano explains. Experts hope this will also cut down on freeway congestion and air pollution.

POLLUTION: Los Angeles currently has the most polluted air in the country, and given Caltrans’ traffic projections for 2010, “the air quality will be worse than it is now,” predicts John H. Seinfeld, professor of chemical engineering at Caltech, whose specialty is air pollution. “Not only will it get worse here, but it will spread more substantially to Orange County and San Bernardino,” Seinfeld adds.

The region has to develop solutions to the solid- and hazardous-waste problems, says SCAG’s Pisano, and the pollution of Santa Monica Bay as well.

CRIME: Finally, the spread of crime is also expected to continue here in coming decades. Last year, Los Angeles had the third highest crime rate in the nation, just behind Dallas and Detroit. In 1986, there were 7,406 “index” crimes (murder, rape, robbery, assault, burglary, larceny, motor-vehicle theft and arson) per 100,000 inhabitants here, according to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report.

There are, however, reasons for optimism. Violent crimes are most often committed by young people between 14 and 25, and they will compose a smaller percentage of the population in the next century. By 2015, for example, 12.8% of the people in the region will be between 15 and 19, down from 15% now. USC criminologist Marcus Felson believes the crime rate will also decrease as more people telecommute--working from home part or all of the day--or work closer to home, making their residences less likely targets. And, as the baby boom ages, there will be more retired folks at home, which could deter daytime intruders. Perhaps we’ll even have begun to cut away at the causes of crime. The Los Angeles Police Department believes its drug education programs will pay off by decreasing “society’s appetite” for narcotics, thus reducing drug trafficking.

“Twenty-five years from now, I see less violence, and that goes hand in glove with getting a handle on narcotics and the gang problem, which I think we’ll do well before then,” says LAPD spokesman Commander Bill Booth, a 34-year department veteran.

But Pisano has a more philosophical view. He blames the crime rate on the loss of a sense of community here in Los Angeles. “If we have that kind of community feeling--local and regional--then we’ll be able to deal with the coming together of different racial, ethnic and economic groups,” he says. “If we don’t develop a sense of community, all the police in the world won’t help.”

The key to Los Angeles’ future, say the experts, is farsighted regional planning, strong political leadership that involves all segments of the population, and broader coalitions of people working together to solve these issues.

“The future of Los Angeles was not written by the stars,” says Enzer, who is also director of the Pacific Rim Data Base for USC’s International Business Education and Research Program. “It’s not destined to be anything, and even if it were, we could always screw it up.”