Growth
As your recent series of articles indicated, Los Angeles is slowly becoming a less satisfactory place to live. Your poll tallied many of the symptoms--crime, traffic, the price of housing, rudeness--but did not bring out the root causes. I suggest Los Angeles is suffering from a creeping, debilitating disease: growth in an already big city.
Think back how it was when you first came here 5, 10 or 50 years ago. Was it not a saner, more humane, safer and more pleasant place to live? While many of these characteristics have been eroded in both towns and cities throughout the United States, they are infinitely worsened by city size and crowding.
How shall we save this still-wonderful city? Let us become a mature city, stable in size without the fever and delirium created by growth. Let our building and housing regulations focus on rebuilding, presumably improving our physical structure, rather than having those very regulations enhance development. We should also use water and sewage as controls: no new water to Southern California and no new sewage hookups. We must come to realize that more people are the greatest threat to our environment.
CHARLES H. MARKHAM
Los Angeles
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