L.A. 2025

For most of the century, Los Angeles has been regarded as an American freak.

And not just by hellfire preachers and everyone within a 500-mile radius of Iowa City. Urban planners, too, have looked upon the sprawl as a city designed more by demons than angels. After all, unlike real American cities such as New York or Chicago, Los Angeles has no true center. The city doesn’t rise up, it spreads out, and with all the apparent care of an ink bottle spilled onto graph paper.

Its citizens for the most part don’t dwell in apartments or high-rises. About half live in single-family homes--nearly four times the number as in New York or Chicago. Its architecture is wildly inconsistent. Art Deco next to Postmodern next to Spanish Colonial next to . . . well, who could say what that was?

Its citizens don’t walk the streets or mix on its near-nonexistent public transportation system. They lock themselves in their cars and drive on never-ending freeways.

But now at the twilight of the same century, Los Angeles is being seen in a different light. Instead of a fragmented slab of overbuilt desert rock seemingly ready to crack off the continent, the city is increasingly being recast as an American beauty of great potential.

“Los Angeles is the city of the future,” said H. Eric Schockman, a USC professor and co-editor of “Rethinking Los Angeles” (Sage Publications, 1996). “We need to look upon it as the example, not the anomaly.”

So, if Los Angeles is the city of the future, then what is the future of the city? In particular, what is the near future of its neighborhoods where so many races, religions, languages, cultures, classes and ages live? Perhaps surprisingly, many say all the signs are positive.

To some, however, just posing the question is an act of sheer optimism. Considering the reckless manner in which neighborhoods were allowed to flourish on major fault lines or near fire zones, the city’s destiny is to float face down in the Pacific Ocean.

With smog, mudslides, earthquakes and its prolific production of pornographic films, Los Angeles is still the city most likely to be destroyed in a television miniseries or a major motion picture. As author Mike Davis put it in “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles” (Verso, 1990): “. . . a whole generation [in Los Angeles] is being shunted toward some impossible Armageddon.”

But far away from the arguments of urban planners and authors, Los Angeles neighborhoods seem less concerned about the apocalypse than they are about the stuff of everyday life. Schools, safety, traffic, even landscaping dominate their list of things to be improved in the next 25 years down the road.

In part because of the prominent role of the single-family dwelling in the city’s development, neighborhoods want to see themselves as close-knit communities despite the fact they live in one of the largest cities in the world. Residents may know they are only miles from office towers or congested freeways, but they choose to focus on their block parties and the miracle of having a backyard in a major city.

“We want the attractive feel of a small town rather than a metropolitan feel,” said Lynn Barbee, who has lived in Echo Park for 17 years and heads the Echo Park Improvement Assn. “We want to preserve as much of our neighborhood as we can.”

Like many neighborhoods, Echo Park--named after the park at the community’s center just off the Hollywood freeway and known for its lake, steep hills and many artisans--believes the way to strengthen the neighborhood is to fight high-density building projects and to beautify the area. In the last few years, Barbee’s volunteer group has painted over graffiti and planted more than 500 trees along neighborhood streets.

“When these trees [mature], it’s going to be beautiful driving down Sunset Boulevard,” she said.

But driving other parts of the city will not be beautiful no matter how many trees are growing. In the next 40 years, the population of Los Angeles County is expected to jump by at least 4 million to 13.8 million--and the newcomers probably won’t walk to work. Improvements in public transportation may ease traffic congestion somewhat, but most officials foresee slow going on the region’s freeways.

While gridlock will provide its own frustrations, urban planners believe the increases actually may prove beneficial to the city’s neighborhoods. Instead of spending hours on the freeways every day, middle- and upper-middle-class residents will seek out once-suspect neighborhoods to be closer to their jobs, Schockman said.

“You’re already seeing it in neighborhoods around downtown. These places were once verboten” he said. “But they are now being reinvigorated because you’re 10 minutes from downtown and you get a Mediterranean climate and view.”

One such neighborhood is Echo Park, where gang members are seemingly being replaced with working professionals. Residents, once fearful of being outside at night, now say they enjoy evening walks.

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The perception is based on encouraging numbers. In the last year, gang crime in Echo Park has dropped 23%, and in the last six years violent crime is down 40%.

But some in the predominately Latino neighborhood complain that the newly arrived professionals, who are mostly white, are widening class divisions and tend to shop outside the community.

These kinds of class and ethnic clashes are typical of neighborhoods undergoing demographic changes, and they are only going to intensify in coming decades, experts say.

By 2040, if current population patterns continue, the Latino and Asian populations in Los Angeles County will nearly double from 4.3 million to 8.8 million and from 1.2 million to 2 million, respectively, according to the California State Department of Finance. Conversely, the once-majority white population will drop by roughly one-third from 3.2 million to 2.2 million, while the African American presence will fall by one-fifth from 927,000 to 764,000.

How Los Angeles residents tolerate their neighbors will play a large role in the health and vitality of the city, experts add.

Some fear the next wave of population shifts will be too much for some to handle and worry they may lead to a resurgence of the gated communities--a powerful symbolic measure of a city’s unity or disunity. Typically, these very affluent enclaves hire private security, restrict street access and erect walls around their neighborhoods.

“We’re definitely going to see more gated communities,” said Dale D. Maharidge, a Stanford professor and author of “The Coming White Minority--California Eruptions and the Nation’s Future” (Vintage, 1996). “They’ll still be mostly white, but [increasing wealth] will allow blacks, Latinos and Asians to be behind the gates too. They have the same interest in security as anyone else.”

The danger of more gated communities is it can lead to what he calls a “Prop. 13 on steroids” mentality. “Eventually, they’ll get their own police, libraries, schools,” Maharidge said. “They’ll reason, ‘I got mine. Why the hell should I worry about those people out there?’ ”

However, others contend gated communities have run their course. Approvals for street closures--a necessary component for a gated community--are rarely granted, according to Schockman, a political science professor and former consultant to the city council.

While conceding gated communities probably will always exist, Schockman believes that some of the current ones will fail in the years to come. Crime, usually the chief motivator for the gates to begin with, has dropped dramatically across the county, so residents may tire of paying high association dues to ward off a danger that has dissipated, Schockman believes.

“Eventually, people have to engage the world,” said Schockman, a pro bono policy director of the city’s charter reform. “Even if for the mere practicality of shopping. You can’t live in an island.”

Few communities know this better than Silver Lake, a highly diverse community five miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles known for its reservoir, beautiful ‘30s architecture and its roots in the motion picture business. A snapshot of its 110-year-old school, Ivanhoe Elementary, provides a portrait of the community: 38% white, 28% Latino, 18% Asian, 9% African American, 6% Filipino and 1% Native American.

Years ago, a suggestion that portions of the community be gated was shot down immediately, recalls Spence Soohoo, a past president and current board member of the Silver Lake Residents Assn.

“It was never seriously considered at all,” said Soohoo, who has lived in the community for 22 years. “An egalitarian mentality prevails here. Who are we to set ourselves up on a pedestal [in a gated community]?”

But even if all the walls in the city’s gated communities came tumbling down, there still are longtime barriers separating Los Angeles residents.

“America has never been a truly open society,” said Janet Abu-Lughod, author of “New York, Chicago, Los Angeles” (University of Minnesota Press, 1999). “Though it’s getting better, it’s still segregated, especially by race and class.”

Attempts to integrate upscale, even middle-income, neighborhoods with low-income housing routinely meet stiff opposition in Los Angeles. That’s unlikely to change, say urban observers. Meanwhile, real estate prices, flirting with all-time highs in Los Angeles, all but prohibit side-by-side living between classes.

Even in progressive neighborhoods such as Silver Lake, where classes mix as much or more than anywhere else in the city, suspicions between income groups is not uncommon. A proposed community recreation center has prompted accusations that the affluent hill residents want to limit access by lower-income flatland residents.

But there may be signs that some long-standing divisions may yet lessen and that diverse communities aren’t confined to downtown areas. In marked contrast to only a few decades ago, neighborhoods in the greater Los Angeles region are gradually becoming more integrated.

About two in five residents say they live in communities that are mostly white, and seven in 10 said minorities moving into their neighborhoods had no effect on the quality of life, according to a recent Los Angeles Times poll.

Of course, in Los Angeles, as in the rest of the country, it’s sometimes difficult to say who is a “minority” and who is not.

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“There are no pure lines,” said Abu-Lughod. “People need to begin to understand that their own lines are mixed. Then, we can learn to become more tolerant. . . . I hope within 50 years, when Americans are asked what race they are by [the census], they answer ‘other.’ ”

Open-minded attitudes among some racial and ethnic groups are also visible at the ballot box. In the city’s last mayoral election, whites and Latinos were largely responsible for keeping Richard Riordan in office. More than 60% of whites and Latinos backed the incumbent mayor against challenger Tom Hayden.

“The old pattern of Anglo control in Los Angeles is gone,” Abu-Lughod said. “Coalitions across ethnic and racial groups, and partially based on class, are now possible.”

But the recent controversy surrounding the ouster of Ruben Zacarias, former chief of the predominately Latino Los Angeles Unified School District, serves as a stark reminder of ethnic divides in the city. Hundreds of Latinos rallied to Zacarias’ side and accused the four school board members who voted him out of “disrespecting the Latino community.”

More troubling, African Americans still face the most obstacles to full participation in the mainstream culture, say city observers. Despite recent advances, a disproportionate number of African Americans in Los Angeles are either unemployed or consigned to low-wage jobs and live in areas underserved by the city.

“The fact is between the riots in 1965 and 1992, Los Angeles did not improve,” said Abu-Lughod, a professor emerita of sociology at Northwestern University. “I won’t say it was the same riot, but it did take place in the same place, many of the issues were the same, and the evaluations afterward were the same.”

The rise of Latino power could help stabilize city politics and neighborhoods, Abu-Lughod said. Drawing a parallel with group dynamics, Abu-Lughod says a group of two can either live or die together, but groups of three or more encourage the development of coalitions.

Whatever the future of Los Angeles, the country and the world will be watching.

“Los Angeles is a crucible,” Maharidge said. “It’s a laboratory for California and America. I don’t want to sound Pollyanna, but everyday people get up and got to work and live and work among people of other races and classes. And most of the time, it works.”

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Martin Miller can be reached by e-mail at martin.miller@latimes.com.