To Stem Secessionism, Adopt a Borough System

A postmodernist era demands postmodernist solutions. Accordingly, it is time to consider the evolution of a borough system for Los Angeles as a way of localizing the city by federating its districts. Otherwise, another postmodernist idea--creative destruction--might prevail and destroy Los Angeles now and forever.

In 1948, L.A. Mayor Fletcher Bowron advanced the idea of a borough system as a way of balancing the city both as a whole and as a mosaic of districts. The sheer efficiency of Los Angeles in the postwar era, however, soon rendered the idea irrelevant. Modernism, after all--and Los Angeles was at the time the most modern of modern U.S. cities--preferred large, generalized, almost abstract organizations of corporate and/or governmental power. Witness the ascendancy in the private sector of General Motors, General Electric, General Mills, General Dynamics and General Foods. Witness the weaving together of the nation through the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. Witness, locally, the rise of the Los Angeles Police Department under Chief William H. Parker and the near-Vatican status of the Department of Water and Power.

The fact is that Los Angeles was able to handle its postwar growth through an exercise of civic intervention based upon economies of scale. The bigger and more unified a governmental entity, the more efficient it seemed. Into the 1960s, one Los Angeles government saw itself serving one Los Angeles people, who, in turn, perceived themselves as one homogenous group (Watts 1965 constituted a wake-up call to this particular notion) living in one place with a more or less standardized lifestyle.

Today, large entities, whether public or private, arouse immediate suspicion, if not outright hostility. Our postmodernist sensibility prizes the non-standardized, the local. Far from embodying one sensibility, the Los Angeles of today embodies multiple states of consciousness, in which each Los Angeleno assembles a civic identity out of factors of race, class, ethnicity, religion, language--and neighborhood. Everyone is demanding an intensification of local value and context.

Secessionists have exploited this shift in sensibility--from the general to the local, from the standard to the non-standard, from the citywide to the neighborhood-oriented--and made of it a campaign to deconstruct the very notion of Los Angeles itself. Yet, as far as Los Angeles is concerned, secessionism is a half-baked idea. Great cities do not voluntarily put themselves out of business. Secessionism can be studied at taxpayers’ expense, as is currently happening; but the majority of voters of Los Angeles will never agree to the dismemberment of their city.

On the other hand, in assessing secessionism as a half-baked idea, one must concede that, like most such ideas, it does contain compelling elements of truth. Times have changed.

So, rather than deconstruct Los Angeles through secessionism, why not re-envision Los Angeles as a federation of boroughs, each of them distinct and quasi-autonomous in a number of respects, yet comprising one city? New York City did this in 1898, when it reinvented itself in a new charter as a unified metropolis of five boroughs, splitting Manhattan and the Bronx into two boroughs and annexing the independent city of Brooklyn, the county of Queens and Richmond, which was officially renamed Staten Island in 1975.

Voters approved this notion of a Greater New York, as it was called, because the borough system fostered efficiencies in transportation (including the subway system then under construction), bridge and roadway management, water and sewage systems and other civic services while continuing to nurture local identities. Even Brooklyn, the most populated and most venerable of the boroughs, a distinguished city in its own right, gained in the trade-off. Something else was accomplished: the idea of metropolitan New York as the de facto capital of Anglo America: a city of five boroughs that would dominate the finances, culture and imagination of the American people for a good part of the 20th century.

How might a borough system come to Los Angeles? What would be the difference between such a system and the breakup of the city as proposed by secessionists? Wouldn’t a borough system be just as duplicative and wasteful as the secessionist alternative? How would the neighborhood councils called for by the new charter fit into such a scheme?

First, the vision thing. History is at once on our side. In “Los Angeles A to Z: An Encyclopedia of the City and County,” Leonard and Dale Pitt provide an account of how the original city of 1781 became in its present format “a one-legged, east-facing turkey with feathers ruffled.” Just as Los Angeles multiplied exponentially through population booms, the Pitts tell us, so, too, did the city exponentially increase its size through annexation: from 28.01 square miles in 1781 to 89.61 square miles by 1910, to 363.92 square miles by 1920, to 465 square miles by 1970. There was almost never a time that Los Angeles was not growing in population or expanding its land size or doing both.

The driving force behind such consolidation, especially in the 20th century, was water and land development. True, members of the oligarchy got rich along the way. But for whatever reasons and however manipulated they might have been, a majority of the voters of Los Angeles, together with the voters of communities that were candidates for annexation, willed Los Angeles into being in its present 472-square-mile format.

They envisioned Los Angeles as a metropolis greater than the sum total of its parts, just as their counterparts in Greater New York had done in 1898. Had metropolitan Los Angeles been more developed in any one of its acquired parts--had, for example, there been a Brooklyn to absorb instead of the orchards of Hollywood and the lima bean fields of the Westside--something like a borough system most likely would have developed. But what’s 100 years or so in the history of great cities? What New York did of necessity in 1898, Los Angeles can start doing now.

Boroughizing Los Angeles begins with acknowledging that the city has become a complex interaction of even more complex parts--but has not lost its civic identity. That identity consists, on a practical level, of things that can be done most efficiently by the city as a whole: run a port or an airport, for example, provide water and electricity, police and fire protection, a main and branch library system, a central park and zoo. Yet, there are other civic functions and services--schools and neighborhood zoning come immediately to mind, together with certain aspects of police and fire protection--that function best when they function in direct response to local desires and conditions.

Paradoxically, there is an existing model for such interactivity: the county of Los Angeles, which is a federation of autonomous and/or quasi-autonomous borough-like entities. From this perspective, the county is a de facto metropolis, although it cannot name itself as such. Why? Because unlike the city of Los Angeles, the county of Los Angeles has never been a city: has never, that is, been possessed of that civic identity that once conferred can never be taken away. Again and again, county voters have rejected the obvious solution of establishing an elected chief executive for the county and thereby bringing tripartite government to one of the largest governmental entities in the United States, which continues to be ruled as a legislative fiefdom.

New York City possessed sovereignty before the charter of 1898, even if the city consisted only of Manhattan and a portion of the Bronx. Los Angeles has possessed such sovereignty since 1781, even if it was originally confined to a mere 28.01 square miles. That is why the city of Los Angeles can never be deconstructed back into the county, and why the county can never completely incorporate the city of Los Angeles or (if the secessionists have their way) its deconstructed parts.

Once this envisionment is underway, practical responses to the city as a federation of boroughs can begin. Already, the sociological and cultural components of such borough thinking are in place. Westside Los Angeles, after all, possesses a distinctly Upper East Side and Upper West Side Manhattan flavor, as far as people, institutions and attitudes are concerned. Hollywood recalls lower Manhattan in its entertainment orientation and bohemian raffishness. In its mid-American ambition and rectilinear grid, the San Fernando Valley reprises Queens. In its textured ethnicity and connection to a former and founding grandeur, East Los Angeles recalls Brooklyn. South-Central evokes the Bronx; and San Pedro/Wilmington, in both its southern remoteness and maritime ambience, makes for a perfect Staten Island.

Fortuitously, the neighborhood councils authorized by the new charter can provide the building blocks of this new borough-oriented sensibility. Taken individually, each council is too small to constitute a borough. Yet, each council will establish a basic and indivisible unit of local reference for civic life. In time, the councils will cluster cooperatively from region to region, as individual councils seek to maximize their influence through association. Thus, a borough system can be achieved from the ground up, rather than through a bureaucratic imposition from above, which the City Council would never willingly let happen anyway.

At some future time, federations of neighborhood councils will constitute boroughs, and these boroughs, in turn, further federated, will constitute the essential unity of Los Angeles. The city itself, meanwhile, will have maintained its essential unity through adherence to the ancient and wise principle of subsidiarity: of doing locally everything that should be done locally, and doing regionally everything that should be done regionally, in the boroughs, and, finally, doing singularly only those things that Los Angeles as a unified city should be doing.

A year after New Yorkers voted in the Greater New York borough system, the voters of the San Francisco Bay Area rejected a comparable plan of organization. That left the city of San Francisco isolated from its urban and suburban hinterlands, to the detriment of all. By keeping Los Angeles together through diversification, the City of Angels will not, like San Francisco, be confined to its almost claustrophobic historic core: a Monte Carlo in good times, true, but in bad times the dumping ground for all those urban problems and problematic urban peoples whom the secessionists wish to leave behind.