A View From Abroad

This is an excerpt from the June 29, 1996 edition of the Economist, published in London.

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Look northwards from a hilltop just off Interstate 405. The San Fernando Valley stretches before you, on and on until it vanishes into the blue-grey haze that veils the whole Los Angeles region. Downtown Los Angeles, 20 miles behind you, with its massive high-rises and urban grit, is a world away.

That is the problem. The San Fernando Valley is its own world: the quintessential suburban enclave, best known as the home of the 1970s TV sitcom “The Brady Bunch.” Now some of its politicians want to make that distinctiveness political as well as geographical. To the secessionist ranks of the Quebecois and the Chechens, now add the Valley people.

Secessionists are usually motivated by oppression. Not here. If there are any bits of Los Angeles that might reasonably resent a heavy-handed alien government, they are the poor areas of South-Central Los Angeles and Compton, not the far-flung bourgeois enclaves of the Valley. The only political complaint of the Valley-dwellers is that they are sick of sending taxes downtown in exchange for what they feel are substandard services; and especially, some whites and Latinos might add, for downtown’s blacks. An independent city of the San Fernando Valley, say the secessionists, would have about 1.6 million people--more than Dallas, Detroit, or the entire state of New Hampshire. Many Valley residents, afraid of crime or an interminable freeway drive, never venture downtown anyway. “You have to take a day off work to get to your local government,” says Paula Boland, a Republican in the California Assembly who leads the secessionist charge. “You have your life endangered, and maybe you can park and maybe you can’t.”

There is an uglier undercurrent. Rich white Angelenos are a bit more receptive to the idea of letting parts of the city split off, whether they are in the San Fernando Valley or on the Westside, a well-off part of Los Angeles south of the Valley. Conversely, poor blacks and Latinos, many in the south of the city, are more reluctant. Regional splintering may, in fact, be the ultimate white flight.

There would be plenty of money in Los Angeles without the San Fernando Valley (Beverly Hills and Bel-Air are not going anywhere), but secession would still be a blow. The real danger is not that the Valley will defect tomorrow, but that Angelenos are losing whatever sense they had of common destiny--leaving nothing to stop splintering [from] eventually occurring. The Valley could be the first bit to leave, followed by parts of the Westside, and maybe then by Latinos concentrated in east Los Angeles. Even if this effort at secession fizzles, the Valley may make other attempts. If at first you don’t secede, try again.