The Potential for Greatness Remains : Los Angeles: The utter pessimism of today is as off-kilter as the boom-town optimism was in 1988.

In 1988, a blue-ribbon group of citizen planners delivered its final report, “LA 2000: A City for the Future.”

Los Angeles had, then, a sense of being the right place at the right time. Culturally it had come of age. Gone permanently were the old jibes about “Double Dubuque.” It was clear to everyone, even to the city’s fiercest critics, even to New Yorkers, that the place dismissed as “the Coast” had outgrown its provincialism and become in every sense a world city, a major contributor in the global exchange of ideas, capital, innovation and style; a place where trends started; a place where young people came--not just from all over the United States, but from all over the world--to try themselves against the best.

Our study proudly checked off what the Los Angeles area had in its favor: excellent transportation connections, outstanding colleges and universities, the world’s largest concentration of high-tech industry and a highly trained, highly motivated work force, “drawing on the energy and ingenuity of one of the most diverse populations in the world.” Property values were growing, fueling the optimism.

But Los Angeles had problems in 1988. Our study was in fact an effort to identify the ones most likely to interfere with the city’s further development and to recommend steps to solve them. We singled out public safety, transportation, affordable housing, education, the widening of the gap between rich and poor, environmental protection and other areas where improvements were crucial. We made our recommendations, some of which have since been instituted, at a time when our economy was booming, in an atmosphere in which everything seemed possible.

Now, five years after our report was published, the psychological climate is so different that the aspirations of that time seem almost dreamlike. Magazines, newspapers and broadcasters carry a procession of obituaries for California, and for Los Angeles in particular. Any bad news is seen as a portent of doom.

Crime, for example, is a grave problem in Los Angeles, as it is in every major city in the United States; but the impact on crime of the economic downturn here has actually been less than might have been predicted from the drop in jobs, notwithstanding the horror stories on the nightly news.

The same pattern is apparent across the board. Yes, our schools still desperately need help and new ideas. Yes, our freeways are still congested. Yes, we must build community in a society that is diverse and fragmented. Yes, above all, new jobs have to develop here. But these are continuing basic needs, not signs of a fundamental change in Southern California’s prospects.

In 1988, having recently hosted an Olympics without the financial fiascoes typical of other cities, Los Angeles could boastfully claim to be the urban solution that worked. The future of Los Angeles was limitless. The city was on its way to becoming the capital of the 21st Century. In hindsight, we can realize our civic willingness to embrace the upside and minimize the downside.

In 1993, the feeling was that the city was sick unto death, that its time had come and gone, and that its future was inevitable decline. Unwarranted optimism has turned to unwarranted pessimism.

In Los Angeles today, the immediate economic outlook may be flat, but the city is fighting back, not passively waiting for something to turn up. Mayor Riordan is building a consensus on ways to put more police on the street. We are developing new economic underpinnings in biomedical engineering, in entertainment and communications technology, and in advanced transportation systems. Universities, government and corporations are cooperating as never before, in partnerships like Cal-Start (developing the clean auto engine of the future) and Project California (developing new transportation and telecommunication systems); private philanthropy is stepping in to help. Civic coalitions like LEARN are changing the process of education and the concept of community. RLA and Community Build are taking on the difficult task of bringing economic resources to the inner city and in the process they are building community in the most ethnically and culturally diverse city in the world.

All of the potential is still there, waiting to be tapped by citizens committed to the future of this city.