Building Communities, Not Carving Them

When city planners drew their map of Los Angeles, they depicted a city of well-defined communities, where mountain ranges and major highways signal the end of one neighborhood and the beginning of another.

And when the Los Angeles Police Department decided how to deploy its officers, commanders combined adjacent areas into a logical plan for serving groups of neighboring communities.

But when the politicians mapped out who represents whom, Los Angeles became a crazy quilt, a political Rorschach ink blot test. The current council districts meander for miles with no regard for community boundaries. One council member represents Sunland and Tujunga but not Lake View Terrace. The same official represents half of Sun Valley but only slivers of North Hollywood and Studio City.

Other communities get the same treatment. Amazingly, only one-third of the city’s communities are represented by a single council member. Sylmar is cut in two. North Hills is divided three ways. Van Nuys is diced into five uneven pieces.

We are ill-served by this system, which discourages community participation, makes local problem-solving impractical and turns a fundamental concept of good representation on its head.

Relationships are society’s building blocks. Individuals come together in families. Groups of families make up neighborhoods. Collections of neighborhoods form communities. Communities, in turn, are the bricks and mortar of the modern city.

By dividing communities, we have weakened the city’s ties to what should serve as its foundation. What’s left amounts to a municipal house of straw.

The shortcomings of this system are all too obvious. Many residents don’t even know who represents them at City Hall. Spend a few minutes talking with any civic or business leader in the San Fernando Valley and you’re likely to hear a horror story about trying to build consensus among council members over a community problem. Putting up community signs in Van Nuys, for example, took activists two years of shuttle diplomacy among the area’s five council offices.

The problem plays itself out at election time as well. Because their districts bear no relation to communities, it’s often difficult to judge candidates on their accomplishments as community leaders.

The city’s current political map makes providing effective community representation difficult. Even the most dedicated elected officials find themselves spread too thin when districts stretch from Van Nuys to Venice.

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We can do better. The state Legislature should approve Assembly Bill 186, a measure I introduced to require that community boundaries be considered when local district lines are drawn.

Some claim that it may be difficult to preserve communities while complying with the federal Voting Rights Act, which safeguards the voting strength of minority groups. Clearly, those protections must take precedence.

But it is just as clear that politics has been a driving force in setting district lines. The spur on the end of the 7th Council District that takes in the former General Motors plant in Panorama City, for example, does nothing to concentrate the strength of minority voters. After all, no one lives there.

A growing coalition of community leaders has embraced the concept of taking neighborhood boundaries into account during the redistricting process. Several council members have voiced support for the idea as well, and it appears likely that these protections will be included in the final charter reform proposal.

Given that the council members themselves must ultimately approve the boundaries for their districts, we cannot expect to divorce politics from the process entirely.

But I believe approval of AB 186 will give communities a stronger hand to play in the next round of redistricting, which will follow the 2000 Census. And once that process begins, we can insist on a map that builds on communities rather than carving them up.