The Next L.A. / Reinventing Our Future : Essay : The Public Sphere Matters : Angelenos must create ways for politicians to act decisively--and then be held accountable

If California has long seemed an exaggerated version of America, Los Angeles has been California squared. Think of the car culture, suburbanization, even the recasting of the melting pot with new ores from Asia and Latin America: California has led America and Los Angeles had led California.

In no respect has this pattern been more powerful than in the denigration of the public sphere. America was founded in an effort to escape distant government control, and it has never fully shed its suspicion of centralized power. Throughout its history, that current has been especially powerful in California. With rare exceptions--the Progressive Era most notably--politics and public life have had a dim presence in the state.

To most Californians, at most points in the state’s history, government has seemed moribund, sluggish and irrelevant--especially when compared with the thriving, dynamic private energy that built Hollywood and Silicon Valley and extended a manifest destiny of subdivisions and shopping malls to hillsides and deserts and valleys. In the wake of such relentless thrust, the common wisdom in California commands that the best thing government can do is get out of the way.

Has this been true anywhere more powerfully than in Los Angeles? In cities like Chicago, Boston and New York, local government is theater, sport and spectacle, the funnel through which all grievances are processed; in Los Angeles, most people probably couldn’t point a tourist in the direction of City Hall.

Through its history, the Southern California dream has been defined in units of one: one driver, in one car, commuting to a single-family home with a yard and a pool that made public spaces redundant. In that environment, the role of collective decisions--and collective responsibilities--recedes to the point of erasure.

The region’s natural advantages--especially a climate that attracted a steady stream of settlers and made economic growth appear as dependable as the sunshine--reinforced this tendency to slight the importance of public decisions. But, in fact, viewing Los Angeles as the triumph of individualism has always been a mistake.

As much as anything else, the city is a concrete manifestation of public will expressed through government: “an artifact of public works,” as Mike Davis, a guerrilla local historian, wrote in his acclaimed book “City of Quartz.” With its fragile foothold in the desert, Los Angeles simply would not exist without vast public works--water projects and freeways--and vast public spending, particularly in the defense budget. On that foundation, California has built a sprawling university system that constituted a vast public investment in its own future.

And yet it is the myth of Los Angeles as a product of private imagination that defines the city’s civic life--with tangible results. One has been a stunted sense of public possibility. In the last two weeks, as commuters have crowded the Metrolink and other forms of public transportation, the same conversation has been repeated at countless dinner tables across the basin: “Everyone for the first time is talking about why don’t we have mass transit,” said screenwriter Gary Ross, president of the Los Angeles Library Commission.

The damage to freeways has forced the city to look to such innovative--for Los Angeles, borderline revolutionary--ideas as turning major east-west surface streets like Pico Boulevard into reversible one-way thoroughfares during rush hour. But, as Ross noted, it’s not as if people were satisfied with the flow of traffic before the freeways buckled.

“Why weren’t any of these solutions discussed until there was an earthquake?” he wondered. He could just as well have asked why there has been so little serious discussion of seismic safety--or, for that matter, so little regulation of development in canyons vulnerable to wildfires.

The answer may be insufficient expectation that public actions can alleviate problems like these, and thus insufficient pressure on politicians to search out and push solutions past the inevitable resistance. It’s not that Angelenos are fatalistic: it’s just that relatively few seem inclined to see elections and government as a way of resolving their concerns.

Faced with a pothole or a problem with trash collection, they may be more likely to call their homeowners’ association than their city council representative. “The first instinct of a Californian or Angeleno is not to look to government for a solution to a problem,” said Bill Carrick, a Los Angeles-based Democratic political consultant who has worked in municipal elections around the country.

In such an environment, it should be no surprise that politics rarely attracts innovative thinkers and visionaries. California has produced some smart, tenacious politicians like Reps. Henry Waxman, Maxine Waters and former GOP Senate candidate Ed Zschau. But the overall quality of the state’s political leadership is disappointing. Longtime California political activists like Steve Merksamer, a top Republican strategist, have often observed that talented young Californians overwhelmingly view politics as a dusty road to nowhere.

As the largest state in the country, California over the past generation has not produced its share of national figures. Since Richard Nixon (who was first elected to office in 1946), the only Californian who has had a lasting and significant impact on the nation’s political life is Ronald Reagan, born a Midwesterner. And Reagan represented a purified version of the Southern California ethos that government is the problem, not the solution.

Every day, in many ways, governments at all levels, from the county to the city to Congress, prove Reagan right. But the disasters of the last two years that have struck Los Angeles like so many hammer blows teach another lesson: There are problems that people and the market, however dynamic, cannot solve alone. If individuals cannot by themselves respond to the sudden disaster of an earthquake, is that lesson any less relevant for the slow-motion disasters of poverty, frayed race relations, freeway congestion or crime?

In re-imagining Los Angeles, the first step may be nothing more basic than saying this: The public sphere matters. That does not necessarily mean that Los Angeles needs bigger or more government; it means that Los Angeles needs smarter, more imaginative and more ambitious government.

What should that government look like? Many analysts believe that Los Angeles isn’t organized to solve its problems. These reformers divide primarily into two camps: One looks up, to larger regionwide units, and one down, toward more neighborhood control.

The regionalists argue that because the basin’s problems don’t respect municipal boundaries, it needs more institutions with regional powers, like the Air Quality Management District and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

“As long as we are in a debate that says local control is a good above all other, we are never going to get to the point where we realize that freeways, for instance, work only if they work in total,” said Jane G. Pisano, dean of the School of Public Administration at USC.

The neighborhood advocates say that government is already too distant from average people and that regionalism would just worsen that problem. They want to break down representation into smaller units, perhaps by doubling or tripling the size of the City Council. (Los Angeles City Council members now represent 235,000 people, compared to 144,000 in New York City.) Historian Mike Davis has put forward a more audacious proposal to create “a new tier of elected community or neighborhood government with, at minimum, advisory power over local land use, environment, policing and development issues.”

That might help connect residents more closely to government and incubate a new generation of local leaders. But political essayist Harold Meyerson worries that it might only intensify the parochialism that now asphyxiates city council debates; he suggests that Los Angeles emulate cities like Boston and add to the City Council members elected citywide, who would thus be compelled to consider the concerns of the whole.

Others talk about strengthening the mayor’s office--now one of the weakest in the country-- or expanding political control over the bureaucracy. Some would like to retire another vestige of the Progressive era: the nonpartisan nature of local elections that inhibits political organization along party lines.

Might any of these measures help Los Angeles move more purposefully toward decisions? Regional government can impose order on unnecessary local chaos; it can also be a way to remove decision further from public reach.

Local control can be democratizing; it can also be a form of secession. In thinking through these choices, the guiding principles should be creating forums through which Los Angeles’ many diverse communities can feel invested in the decisions that are made--but devising mechanisms that demand that decisions be made.

It may be already anachronistic or naive to speak of common interest in Los Angeles. Like all American cities, it is truly many cities, with many divergent interests.

But this earthquake teaches that the city shares at least common vulnerabilities. Natural disasters aren’t entirely democratic, but in the traffic jams clogging the Westside and San Fernando Valley, Ferraris sit as helplessly as rusting Chevys. The downturn in Los Angeles’ fortunes over the last five years, capped by this biblical series of natural disasters, has left no one entirely unscathed, psychologically if no other way.

“This earthquake has made very clear what the common interest is: common survival,” said Valerie Lynne Shaw, the administrator of a community development corporation in the Crenshaw District. “The atmosphere after the earthquake is totally different than the atmosphere after the riot. After the riots, everybody was afraid of each other; after the earthquake everybody wants to hug each other. The fact is that everybody was scared out of their wits.”

This tenuous--probably fleeting--sense of common vulnerability is a point from which to build. In truth, the most pressing problems affecting Southern California are beyond the capacity of local government to fully address. Even the national government, with vastly greater resources, is finding its hands full with the trends remaking the region--from the end of the Cold War to the cost and challenge of integrating a large immigrant population.

But although Los Angeles, like any other city, cannot solely determine its fate, neither is it helpless. No one pretends to have a blueprint for rebuilding from earthquake, riot, fire and economic upheaval. But to find one, the city may first have to clear the path for public officials to act decisively--and then be more vigilant in holding them accountable if they don’t.