Los Angeles Is Dead; Neighborhoods Rule

After a decade of turmoil and change, Los Angeles has arrived at a moment of relative stability. Immigration to the region has slowed. The city’s middle class has stopped hemorrhaging to the suburbs. The homicide rate, though inching higher, is still lower today than it was in the late 1970s. The economy is moving ahead. For all its problems--chief among them the Rampart police scandal and a shortage of affordable housing--the city has managed to cast off the cloud of doom hovering above it just a few years ago.

Perhaps not surprisingly, then, this year’s mayoral race is inspiring significantly less passion and interest than the 1993 campaign to succeed Tom Bradley. There is a good reason for that: We have silently become what we then feared, and we’re more resilient for having weathered the apocalypse. And that has profound implications for the kind of leadership the city now needs.

Occurring after the 1992 L.A. riots, in the middle of a recession and at the front of a nasty anti-immigrant backlash, the 1993 political climate could be summed up in one word: fear. Candidate Richard Riordan mailed out campaign brochures featuring a sinister image of a gun barrel pointing directly at the reader. Another candidate, former U.S. ambassador to Mexico Julian Nava, suggested posting as many as 10,000 federal troops in the streets of L.A. until people began to be- have themselves. The pervading sense of fear transcended concern for economic and physical safety. There was a broader, more fundamental apprehension of what Los Angeles was on the verge of becoming.

The anti-immigrant fervor that convulsed California in the early 1990s has been wrongly ascribed to the recurring need to find a scapegoat during hard economic times. Its more powerful catalyst was that California had reached its ethnic tipping point. Massive, continued Latin American immigration was transforming the state, and the riots and recession only underscored the sense that California, particularly L.A., had made a cultural shift for which nobody had been prepared. Proposition 187, the 1994 anti-illegal-immigrant ballot initiative, gave public voice to the growing fear that many natives from across the ideological and ethnic spectra had silently shared: The barbarians were at the gates.

In addition to tough measures, tough times sometimes inspire grand visions. In 1993, while Riordan promised to return L.A. to its glory days, his chief competitor, then-Councilman Mike Woo, proposed an Urban Peace Corps that would put young people to work on community projects. Transportation guru Nick Patsaouras, another candidate, wanted to remold L.A. into a European-style city, in which residents preferred strolling to cruising.

By contrast, this year’s leading mayoral candidates have hardly distinguished themselves from one another. Their sometimes exceedingly polite debates showcase them agreeing more often than not. Whatever vision each claims to possess is not terribly different from that of the others. In any case, the few voters who attend debate forums seem more interested in local problem-solving than sweeping visions.

A big casualty of the past decade has been the very idea of Los Angeles. Perhaps inevitably, L.A. has become a city of neighborhoods. While 47.8% of respondents to a 1997 survey by the Center for the Study of Los Angeles asserted that the city was headed in the wrong direction, nearly the same percentage (44%) said their own neighborhoods were improving. The city itself has become a negative abstraction.

One of Riordan’s abiding accomplishments as mayor will have been to nurture L.A.’s burgeoning sense of place. At very little cost to taxpayers, the city has put up signs designating new neighborhoods and bolstering fledgling local identities. For decades, Angelenos were more interested in the continued expansion of the city’s frontiers than in preserving the soul of its historic core. As the city continued to move west to the ocean and north to the upper regions of the Valley, it succumbed to a type of geographical amnesia. We became a place with no places. For a time, we all just lived in Los Angeles.

But when the city could expand no farther, it began to collapse back onto itself. Feeling adrift in an overextended, crowded and increasingly ominous metropolis, Angelenos began to draw tighter lines around themselves. Particularly after the riots, city residents sought to connect with their broken hometown in the only way they felt they could. The city with no neighborhoods suddenly became a collection of neighborhoods with no city.

It is frequently said that L.A. needs an old-fashioned leader to build coalitions across the city, someone who can unite the disparate parts of Los Angeles and resurrect a shared sense of cityhood. But L.A. is not greater than the sum of its parts. The disjuncture between one end of the city and the other is part of its greatness. Migrants may move to New York to become part of a civic enterprise, but the beauty of L.A. is that here one doesn’t feel obliged to be a part of anything.

More than a leader, L.A. needs a mayor who can attend to the disparate and disorganized details of this vast city. We don’t need a visionary to take us into the future, because we are already there. The natives who remained in L.A. through the exodus of the early 1990s consciously decided to stay. The newcomers who arrived within the past 20 years have begun to settle in. For the moment, at least, the city is not hanging on the precipice of change. We are still getting used to our new skin.

L.A.’s rebellious regions, special interests and diverse ethnic groups can best hope to find common ground if the city is both solvent and stable. Civic order, it has been said, is the primary prerequisite for successful cosmopolitanism.

Novelist Ray Bradbury has described Los Angeles as a cipher for millions of individual dreams. “Whatever you decide, L.A. becomes,” he writes. “It stands still. You move.” In other words, our civic vision does not flow from the top down, but from the bottom up. Analysts and political consultants like to pretend that L.A. can be reduced to a handful of competing, organized agendas. But we all know that the city is more anarchic than any electoral game plan. In this city of nearly 4 million people, a paltry 100,000 votes could catapult a candidate into the June 5 runoff. The winner will assume the reins of the weakest mayoralty of any big city in the United States.

We don’t need a mayor to tell us who we are or where we’re going. That’s our job. We need someone we can trust to pay the bills and mind the streets so that the rest of us--most of whom will not vote--are free to do whatever it is we came here to do.