The Great Age of Booms--Adios : Hearts of the City / Exploring attitudes and issues behind the news

Broke, broke. Everywhere you look, we’re broke. Pick up the paper, it says house prices went down again. When did house prices last go up? Hard to remember. Must have been when Lockheed was still pumping out fighters in Burbank. When PSA--remember PSA?--charged 25 bucks to fly to Frisco. When Security Pacific had branches everywhere. Remember Security Pacific?

Anyway, we’re broke. L.A. County is broke, gonna lay off workers. Orange County is beyond broke, refuses to pay its bills. Both L.A. and O.C. want Sacramento to bail them out. Problem is, Sacramento has been broke for years and can’t bail out anybody. So it tosses them some of their own subway money, and the counties set upon it like hyenas.

And you can read all about this in the daily paper, which is laying off workers of its own. Surely, the good times have departed us here in Paradise. Did you know that the rest of the country has been having a swell time the last two years, enjoying a little boomlet in the economy? I know because I read it in the paper, which says it happened everywhere but here.

Somehow, this broke business doesn’t feel right, not in Southern California. Every locale makes a subtle deal with the people who live there, and part of our deal was, we got richer quicker and stayed richer longer than other places. Oh, maybe not rich, but at least we got our little piece of the pie, right? And a bigger piece it was than anything you would get in Cleveland. Other places rusted or just got tired, but in L.A. we simply had another boom--no wimpy boomlets here--and charged on.

Can’t blame us for believing that the booms would never end. They go back to the beginning of time, or at least the beginning of time in L.A. No one can remember when they didn’t come rolling in, one after the other, like big breakers at Zuma. Historian David Lavender, describing that singular moment in 1879 when L.A. was about to launch its first boom, notes that we were embarking on “the most extended period of sustained growth ever experienced by any equally compact region of the United States.”

Or, as another historian, Carey McWilliams, put it: “The history of Los Angeles is the history of its booms.”

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Each boom was different, and each seemed to arrive as a gift. The first, in the 1880s, grew out of a fare war between the railroads. In the early 1880s the fare for the journey from Missouri to Los Angeles stood at $125. As the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific railroads commenced a brutal war for the traffic, fares dropped to $100, then $12, then $4, and finally $1.

Tens of thousands of new residents arrived each month. New towns grew out of the desert. The Santa Fe alone brought three and four passenger trains a day into the city, dumping the bewildered Midwesterners at the stations where land sharks awaited them with lot deeds stuffed in their back pockets. Huge real estate fortunes were created this way, fostering L.A.’s first elite.

Then came the oil boom of 1906, when derricks sprang up all over the city, followed by a tourist boom that made Pasadena the destination resort of Midwestern millionaires. But nothing matched the boom of the 1920s, set off by the opening of the first all-weather, transcontinental highway. The movie industry grew out of nowhere, oil was discovered all along the coast, and the real estate business exploded. As McWilliams put it, “For Southern California, the decade [of the 1920s] was one long drunken orgy, one protracted debauch.”

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Actually, the entire period from 1880 to 1930 amounted to a debauch. How big? In the 1880s the population of Southern California tripled, ending with a population of 201,000. By 1910, it had more than tripled again. By the end of the ‘20s, it had quadrupled and stood at 3 million.

And that swift ascent, of course, merely set the stage for the Mother of All Booms in the 1950s. And finally our Defense-inspired boom of the 1980s now, alas, gone to its reward in boom heaven.

At the end of it all, here we sit, broke and confused. What happened? True enough, L.A. has experienced a few troughs before in its lurching journey from boom to boom. But this trough feels different. It has lasted so long and knocked off so many companies and local governments, the suspicion grows that the next boom may not be coming at all.

Jack Kyser, longtime local economist and now head of the Economic Development Corp., suggests that may be the case. “We’ve probably entered a new age,” he says. “People ask me, ‘When is the next boom coming?’ and I say to them, ‘That’s probably the wrong question.’ In the past the old booms were almost always given to us. They came along because of the railroads or oil or the war. I don’t think we are going to receive those kinds of gifts anymore. We’re going to have to work at it harder from now on. We’re going to have to use what we have.”

Economically speaking, Kyser is talking about a structural change. No region can boom along forever. Eventually it grows too large, it runs out of boom-time resources. In a word, it matures.

Most likely, that’s us. Mature. An awful word, but it suggests we won’t be broke forever. In truth, not everyone is broke now. Disney just bought Cap Cities/ABC and made Burbank the media capital of the universe. In good time, the rest of us will get a little momentum and start to catch up. As Kyser says, the recovery this time will be constructed of many, many pieces. A little banking, a little international trade, a little technology, a little entertainment.

Many pieces, not one big thing. A slow recovery, nothing sudden. Sounds like every place else. And that’s the sad point. We’ve joined the rest of the world. It had to happen sometime, we just didn’t know when. Now, we do. Adios, booms. Hello, boomlets.