The New Byzantium Faces Age-Old Issues

The San Fernando Valley, Venice and San Pedro secede from Los Angeles. Is that a crisis? Yes, not because boundaries change but because it continues a crisis that has haunted politics in Los Angeles for more than 50 years. It began symbolically with the “Zoot Suit” riots in 1943, when soldiers stationed near downtown launched their version of a land offensive against Mexican youths. Dozens of young men were beaten mercilessly while the police watched or even assisted.

Of course, that grisly scandal has passed into legend, like many others in Los Angeles’ “colorful” history. The paranoia that it represented, however--a hatred of the urban core and myths about the suburbs as beyond history, incapable of aging--has never gone away. When Los Angeles transformed during World War II into a dense, smoggy, racially mixed city, it suddenly resembled Chicago or New York. This was perceived by many as a betrayal; they felt that the urban core ought to be quarantined from the rest of the city. Many people still feel that way. Poor neighborhoods are presumed to be a drain on the future of the entire region.

But where do the boundaries of the “inner” city really end? Many poor neighborhoods are in the suburbs as well. The denser, the more “urban” the postwar suburbs get--more slums, more corporate headquarters, more banking districts, media companies and gridlock--the more the cry for secession.

Obviously, some services have been withheld from the Valley, highlighted by the debates over subway routes and funding. But that is a slender part of a problem whose heart is the definition of the city itself in 1997. The older definitions have lapsed. Downtown life is an oxymoron. Pedestrian patterns have practically no relationship to downtown. They are too portable for any location, much too homogenized. Even dance clubs change neighborhoods every few months. And Saturday night can be Xeroxed: Multiplexes and outdoor malls resemble one another so thoroughly that it is difficult to tell which Starbucks you are in. What’s more, downtown districts are increasingly suburbanized anyway, into scripted, themed spaces that feel as “safe” as malls.

Meanwhile, 1990s “suburban” malls are supposed to look more like downtowns, though the mutation often feels more like the New York sets at Paramount or Warner Bros. We have neither an urban future nor a suburban one, only a drift, though not an uninteresting drift. There is no profound direction for policy to follow. And the racist hysteria that has stirred the pot for urban planning since the 1940s is still there.

Worse still, public investment has shrunk. Postwar suburbs were the product of big government (GI bills, freeway projects) even more than inner cities. Now that government is downsizing, these suburban neighborhoods feel the pinch. They have to pay their own way just when their costs are escalating. Their infrastructure has matured; they face what inner cities did in the ‘50s. Assessments in many suburbs have soared, from excises on sanitation to capital campaigns for public schools. So why not break away?

Because secession, in the long term, may bring more duplication than improvements. It is not likely to restore the suburban purity of the ‘50s. Instead, let us let go of myths lingering from the postwar era and see the problem long term. Investment in homesteading older neighborhoods, both suburban and urban districts, is needed. Tourist quick fixes--sports arenas, symphony halls--won’t revive these areas. Our transportation plan has to be gutted and restructured. Our educational institutions have to be redesigned and vastly improved. The urban mix of the inner city needs to be studied as a laboratory for what awaits all of Southern California.

Los Angeles is the New Byzantium for world trade and global media. Like ancient Byzantium, its convection of races and classes as well as its corruptions are breathtaking. But such complexity requires regionwide policies. Secession may prove little more than a stalling tactic, may not recoup enough money and worse still, may forestall the massive reevaluation that is already overdue.