Welcome Reagans to a Sadder City
Dear Ex-President Reagan:
Welcome back to Los Angeles, to be sure from a design and development point of view, a very different Los Angeles than the one in which you and Nancy once lived.
In your waning days as president, one of your more popular lines was to ask people whether they were better off now than they were 8 years ago. No doubt a select portion of L.A.’s population is, judging from the over subscription of the pricey-per-plate testimonials honoring you; the sizes and costs of the custom designed houses rising here like souffles; and array of gilded autos being turned over to the parking attendants at the doors of overpriced eateries.
But as a returning resident, I think you should know about another Los Angeles existing beyond the privately guarded residential islands, such as Bel Air where you will be living, the scattered upscale retail enclaves and restaurants-of-the moment, and the glittering new museums, art galleries and performance centers.
From my perspective, this other Los Angeles which many of us see and experience is a much less livable city today than it was 8 years ago, due, frankly, in part to your tenure as President.
Take, for example, housing. In 1980, in Los Angeles, the need for affordable units was estimated at 50,000. In 1988, the estimate was 250,000, following repeated deep cuts in federal aid for low and moderate income housing, consistent with your policy of disinvestment in urban America. To feed a bloated defense budget, you starved domestic programs.
The private sector did not come to the rescue as you promised. Generally ignoring affordable housing, it instead indulged in questionable land deals and built speculative projects, such as mini malls, consuming tens of billions of dollars strewn about by a deregulated thrift industry. (And now we have to bail them out at no little damage to the federal budget.)
To be sure, not speculative was the purchase by an unidentified consortium of a multi-million dollar house in Bel Air, and its lease to you and Nancy, with an option to buy. I presume some sort of preferred subsidy is involved, probably of the form that was to aid low income families to buy their project apartments under one of the housing assistance programs scuttled by your administrative.
The private sector did for a while undertake an encouraging wealth of historic rehabilitation projects that benefited the city. However, that trailed off considerably after you signed the Tax Reform Act of 1986, which eliminated many of the incentives for such efforts, as well as for housing development.
Meanwhile, there has been in Los Angeles a depressing increase in the number of people living in unsafe and unsanitary garages, raw sheds, and recreational vehicles. And what decent housing is available is costing more and more; one study estimated that 150,000 families here spend at least 50% of their income on rent.
Then there are those who cannot even find shelter, however makeshift, and are homeless. The latest estimate put their number in Los Angeles at 50,000, including at least 10,000 children. They are scattered in street scenes as depressing as any Third World City slum. And just saying “no” to the problem won’t make it go away.
You probably will never visit these areas, if only because contending with our increasingly congested roadways to get there would be too difficult. At times, it also will be hard for you to get to your office in Century City, or your ranch above Santa Barbara. As an ex-president, you no longer can take a helicopter wherever you want to go, or have the roads in front of you cleared by a police escort.
This seems fair, for it was your administration that emasculated a variety of transit programs that could have helped relieve the mess. For the record, we note that your last budget called for a whopping $100 million cut in funds for our frail Metro Rail project. Instead, billions were squandered on plans for a railroad line in the desert to carry MX missiles nowhere. At least if located in L.A., it also could have carried people.
Not helping our freeways, and lungs, either was your easing of auto emissions standards, which, in effect, has encouraged the production of gas guzzlers, and our increased dependence on foreign oil.
And then there were your vetoes of the clean water acts, your smudging of the Clean Air Act, the super fund, the national forests, off-shore oil rights, and your appointment of such stewards of the environment as James Watt. Consequently, I don’t think you and Nancy will find Santa Monica Bay, or the Santa Monica Mountains, as attractive as you might remember them.
I therefore expect you will be spending more and more time at home. When looking out at the Los Angeles skyline from your living room, bear in mind that many of the glittering high-rise towers you will be seeing are foreign owned. They have been snapped up by the Japanese and others at bargain prices as the unprecedented budget deficits incurred by you turned the United States in just 8 years from the world’s largest creditor nation into the world’s largest debitor nation.
This means that for the next 50 years, or however long it takes our children to mend the damage you did to our economy, it is going to be a little tougher in L.A. repairing infrastructure and improving city services, as well as buying a house and getting a mortgage.
As for design, during the last eight years, there seems to me to have been an emphasis on how things look, rather than how things work. Playing to this, I feel, was the penchant of Post Modernist styling for self-indulgent and self-promoting pastiches.
The result was an architecture viewed less as a social art aesthetically serving a human need--a traditional definition of the craft--and more as a photo opportunity. In this respect I feel it reflected the values of your administration.
Your city which you referred to in your farewell address a few weeks ago might be “shining,” “more prosperous, more secure and happier than 8 years ago,” especially if seen through the smoked glass windows of a stretch limo in which you and Nancy probably will travel.
But the city of most of the residents here at present when compared to 8 years ago is more inequitable, more threatening, uglier and sadder.
