For a City Adrift, Look to Community Government : Neighborhoods: A parliament of local governments would revitalize political participation and creativity in Los Angeles.

I have never seen such pain in the neighborhoods of this city. From Sylmar to San Pedro, families sit around dinner tables, talking in somber voices. They are agonizing over bills they no longer know how to pay, jobs they know they may soon lose and schools that can no longer guarantee their kids a decent education. Everything seems clouded by recession, violence and fear.

This is still Los Angeles, of course, and enough gilt remains on the dream to blind the foolish. But even before the days of rage last spring, a profound cultural metamorphosis was taking place. Working-class families see a future looted of hope. Not since the Great Depression have so many felt so powerless to control the direction of their lives.

At least there is no shortage of condescending saviors. The crush of applicants for Tom Bradley’s seemingly unenviable job forms a line around City Hall. Every grizzled pol with $2 in his pocket is now a serious contender. Each one bleats, in turn, that the city’s problems stem from a “crisis of leadership” and that he or she is the solution.

But there is no obvious bargain in the shopworn selection of good ol’ boys and carpetbaggers on offer. What arrogance, indeed, that so many senior members of our ineffectual City Council should think they have earned the mandate of heaven. If things are half as bad as most pundits say, honorable men would pass the hemlock, not the campaign-collection plate.

Nor should we be seduced by wealthy amateurs who proclaim themselves the local edition of Ross Perot. And while it would be wonderful to see a woman’s portrait--or a Latino’s or an Asian’s--greeting arrivals at LAX, this alone will not lift the current sense of siege or stop the headlong Balkanization as a community. In a profound sense, we are searching for a messiah. The “crisis of leadership” is ultimately a smoke screen that disguises a deeper malaise.

Before we debate candidates, we need to discuss community empowerment and structural political reform. It should be as plain as any departing bureaucrat’s golden parachute that Los Angeles is the most undemocratic of big American cities. We lead the league in the sprawling, unrepresentable size of council districts, and in the vast numbers of adult residents disenfranchised by reason of registration or citizenship. No other major city remains so ethnically gerrymandered or tolerates such disparities between the composition of its population and its electorate.

Where else, this side of the Elbe, do a majority of neighborhoods count for so little in the calculus of power? Smirk all you want about Chicago’s lazy snowplows and Tammany Hall’s Thanksgiving turkeys, but the political machines in Chicago and New York at least routinely acknowledge their grass roots. Here, entire neighborhoods can be forgotten for decades. Just ask folks in Boyle Heights, Wilmington or Pacoima how they fared in the halcyon years of the Bradley regime.

Los Angeles is the great exception to the wave of reform that swept most Sun Belt cities in the 1970s and early 1980s. In contrast with Houston, we failed to expand the City Council to incorporate greater diversity, and, unlike Tucson and San Diego, we disdained the “neighborhood planning revolution” that gave residents a counterweight to the political clout of developers. To internationalize the comparison: If we were a country in Eastern Europe, we would be Albania.

Meanwhile, we are still governed by a City Charter crafted in the days of Harry Chandler and Calvin Coolidge. It is a period piece with such contemporary Los Angeles institutions as the open shop, the restrictive covenant and the Ku Klux Klan--one of whose supporters was then mayor. As radical critics have been pointing out for generations, the essence of the 1925 Charter is not how it apportions power between the mayor and the City Council, but rather the ease with which it facilitates the rule of an invisible government of corporate leaders and wealthy developers.

Once upon a time, this parallel universe had a name (Committee of 25) and a “Mr. Big” (Asa Call) who gave marching orders to mayors and other underlings. There was a serendipitous fit between what was discussed in the Jonathan Club’s smoking room and what happened in City Hall. In the last decade, however, a tsunami of off-shore capital has restructured traditional power in Hollywood and Downtown. The economic elites are unable to shape city policy as coherently as they did during the 1960s. No one is sure who is king of the mountain anymore.

The City Council has exploited this confusion to increase its own prerogatives and raise the fee for its services. In particular, individual council members have brilliantly manipulated neighborhood protests against development to leverage bigger campaign contributions from developers. If, as a result, organizers became embittered, the alienation of their communities became literally incendiary.

Watching Los Angeles in flames this spring, a naive observer might have expected, at long last, some corrective shift of power back to the neighborhoods. Instead, the mayor and City Council threw themselves on the mercies of the Bush Administration and local capitalism. Peter V. Ueberroth was conscripted less to sweep debris than to restore the coherence of the invisible government.

Rebuild L.A. has only increased the turmoil at the grass roots. Myriad local groups, confused by the invisible rules of the game, have been plunged into a blind competition with each other for an unknown quanta of resources. With no democratic arena to sort out differences, rival ethnic claims have become aggravated and less reconcilable.

But real blame rests with a City Council too scared to govern and too selfish to share power--except with its corporate campaign contributors. They subcontract elected responsibilities while drawing their checks on the commonweal.

In a city on the brink, it is time to begin sawing away deadwood. There are various theoretical paths to greater community empowerment, but only one currently has the sanction of most grass-roots movements. The arithmetic is simple:

Homeowners associations and slow-growth groups have long advocated elected community planning boards. Other reformers believe that community policing, as advocated by the Christopher Commission, will only work if citizen advisory boards are independent and locally elected. Inner-city housing and job advocates won’t accept rebuilding from the top down; they want neighborhood control. Virtually everyone wants revitalization of local political participation.

Add all this up. It equals a new tier of elected community or neighborhood government with, at minimum, advisory power over local land use, environment, policing and development issues. If we were as bold as Portland, we would also include neighborhood-need assessments in the annual budget, and support grass-roots organization with a citywide Office of Neighborhood Associations.

The fundamental point is that neighborhood government would mobilize the passion and creativity of thousands of ordinary people who want to build true social justice in Los Angeles. The current system merely corrodes their idealism and deters their participation.

Moreover, a neighborhood tier would guarantee previously voiceless groups--Central American refugees, Korean merchants, inner-city youth, even the homeless--an immediate, compelling presence in city politics. All the more so if participation were expanded by a residential rather than citizen franchise. And it would teach the democratic humility of canvassing a vote and building a mandate to serve. This, in turn, might reduce the current number of bogus “community leaders,” these chiefs without tribes.

This proposal may strike some as a Trojan horse for yet more bureaucracy. But its intention is just the opposite. Neighborhood representation would begin to abolish the invisible government and rein in the City Council. One hundred-plus local boards are far more difficult for special interests to feed than 15 hungry politicians.

Finally, what of the argument that political devolution simply writes a prescription for anarchic parochialism? In fact, a parliament of neighborhoods reflecting the fine-grained texture of our diversity is more likely to encourage interethnic unity and negotiation of common interests than our current feudal council. Citizen soldiers have less interest in war and its spoils than generals. In this and other respects, neighborhood democracy could be a bridge over our troubled waters.