L.A.’s Middle Class Captures City Hall

Los Angeles’ middle class, deeply shaken by last year’s riots, worried about personal safety and anxious about the city’s economic future, has seized control of City Hall. For Mayor-elect Richard Riordan, the beneficiary of last Tuesday’s uprising, dealing with an upsurge of middle-class anger--perhaps even more than coping with the crisis in South-Central--may prove his most critical challenge.

Middle-class Angelenos have felt increasingly alienated from the political and media elites governing the city. Many of them, especially among Jews and Latinos, deserted their traditional Democratic loyalties to embrace Republican Riordan largely out of a sense of abandonment.

This feeling of political alienation is most pronounced in portions of the San Fernando Valley and in certain communities on the Westside. In the Valley, Riordan won by more than 2 to 1. On the Westside, communities--Beverlywood, for example--that had not voted Republican since before Franklin D. Roosevelt went for Riordan.

Many Valley residents, explains Robert Scott, president of the United Chambers of Commerce, “feel like they’re in rapids and the raft has overturned. They feel they are carried by waves and have no control over what is happening to them.”

A key challenge for Mayor-elect Riordan will be to address the concerns of these and other middle-class voters. As a Catholic with a strong sense of noblesse oblige, he may be tempted to opt for the role of broker between his natural habitat in the higher financial circles and the largely poorer communities to which he has contributed millions in charity. Ironically, Riordan has had the least experience dealing with his core supporters--households earning between $30,000 and $60,000.

Perhaps most important, the new mayor must use his electoral mandate to recreate the conditions that will keep middle-class Angelenos in town. Nearly 30% of Valley residents, for example, now plan to move in the near future. Most won’t be going far: At least three-quarters of Los Angeles’ out-migration has been to the surrounding regions of Ventura and Orange counties, and the Inland Empire.

This exodus cannot simply be written off as the kind of “white flight” that followed the Watts riots. The largest percentage growth in new migrants has not occurred among Anglos. During the past decade, for example, more than 120,000 African-Americans moved to suburban counties, while nearly 90% of the net population growth in Orange County came from minorities, mostly Asian and Latino.

If not ameliorated, the long-term consequences of this multiracial middle-class exodus could be devastating, most particularly for Angelenos left behind. As the middle class moves both families and businesses to outlying areas, Los Angeles faces the prospect of becoming an ever more bifurcated society, with a small core of wealthy, often childless professionals living amid a growing preponderance of poor, minority residents, many chronically unemployed or underemployed.

The outlines of this reality have been deepening since the late 1970s, when the ill-fated busing plans of the Los Angeles Unified School District drove tens of thousands of middle-class Angelenos, particularly from the San Fernando Valley, to better--and safer--schools on the periphery. Thousands of others clustered in expensive private schools; nearly half the estimated 500,000 private-school students in California live in Los Angeles County, with thousands more on waiting lists.

Last spring’s riots, rising violent-crime rates and a weak economy, contends Dennis Macheski, real-estate analyst for Price Waterhouse, may be accelerating middle-class out-migration. Last month, sales of existing homes in Ventura County soared 12.8%, while those in Los Angeles dropped by nearly 10%, and much of the buying took place in relatively pricey neighborhoods. Home builders in Ventura continue to enjoy brisk sales, often selling homes even before they are completed to Angelenos looking to get out.

Many of these migrants, says Edward Zinke, sales director for Braemar Homes in Agoura, are business owners also seeking to escape crime and overregulation by transferring their businesses. For example, Lyn Perry moved his family to Ventura’s Conejo Valley to escape court-ordered busing, but continued to operate his Wilshire TV and Video on Western Avenue in Los Angeles. But after rioters gutted his store last spring, he simply pulled up stakes and moved his company to Thousand Oaks.

“Our customer base was moving away, anyway,” explains Perry. “So we sat there (in Los Angeles) doing less business. Finally . . . we followed our customers to the new area.”

The appeal of moving to such places as Ventura has also not been lost upon major companies, many of which have traditionally located in Los Angeles. In recent months, Dole Food Corp., Time-Warner, Bugle Boy Industries and Blue Cross of California have either moved operations to Ventura or announced their intention to acquire tens of thousands of additional square feet of office or industrial space there.

Equally important, a similar inclination to avoid L.A. locations can be seen among the fastest-growing companies in Southern California on the Inc. 500 list. Promising high-tech and industrial firms--those with the greatest job-producing potential--are choosing to cluster in such areas as Orange County, where unemployment rates are now below the national average and half again less than those in Los Angeles.

This exodus of jobs and people can only be slowed--and reversed--by a mayor and civic leadership determined to preserve Los Angeles as a place hospitable to middle-class families. Among the critical steps Riordan must take:

* Follow through on his central campaign pledge to reallocate city resources to improve security, the most often cited concern of middle-class residents and business owners. Although the city budget has nearly doubled every eight years under Tom Bradley, violent crime skyrocketed and law enforcement’s share of total spending has dropped to 29%.

* Aggressively cut the red tape and bureaucratic tangle at City Hall. Excessive regulation has made Los Angeles an economic Chernobyl for both existing and start-up businesses. Glendale and Burbank are now major competitors.

* Follow one of the better suggestions from Michael Woo’s playbook and seek ways to shift the city’s development emphasis from big downtown offices to more industrially oriented projects in the neighborhoods, including South-Central and the Eastside as well as the San Fernando Valley.

* Preserve the single-family character of large parts of urban Los Angeles. As Price Waterhouse’s Macheski points out, middle-class families of all races usually want tree-lined streets, yards and detached homes. If such neighborhoods are mindlessly bulldozed, driving up the price of the remaining single-family housing stock, middle-class flight will accelerate.

Short of taking these steps, Mayor Riordan, no matter how great his management skills or fervent his commitment, may end up doing little more than preside over the continuing economic and social decay of the city. As important as it is to deal forcefully with the underlying causes of the inner-city riots, no solution is possible that does not also address the revolt that put him in office.