The Root of Secession’s Stall: Identity
The San Fernando Valley secession movement is stalled. What once seemed all but inevitable now appears increasingly unlikely. There are many reasons, most of them unrelated to the virtue of the cause. For example, the state’s energy crisis during the past year highlighted the importance of the Valley’s link to the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Sept. 11 and its aftermath made the very idea of breaking away seem “unpatriotic.”
But the biggest obstacle to the success of the secession movement is the Valley’s own political and social culture. Simply put, the Valley has a serious identity problem. On the one hand, as author Kevin Roderick has put it, the Valley looms as a kind of national archetype--”America’s suburb,” the ultimate expression of the greatest demographic shift in the late-20th century. At the same time, he notes, the Valley also appears to many as L.A.’s “oversized appendage,” a shapeless glob of places. Virtually all the Valley, with the exception of Burbank, Glendale, Calabasas, San Fernando and some smaller pockets, has been part of Los Angeles since 1915, when the area had less than 4,000 residents. Valleywide civic roots have not had an opportunity to grow.
As a result, although the L.A. portion of the Valley is now large enough to be America’s sixth-largest city, its cultural and political life remains almost completely subordinate to powerful forces over the hill, ranging from Westside sophistos to downtown political operatives. Lacking a coherent notion of what the Valley is or is becoming, secessionists have largely stated their case in negative terms: breaking away would end the indifference and abuse, real and imagined, coming from “over the hill.”
“The way you are going to get [secession] going is to come up with a vision,” says Studio City attorney David Fleming, who heads the San Fernando Valley Economic Alliance. “We need a vision, and if we don’t get it in the next few months, we are in real trouble.”
In contrast, the determined and increasingly aggressive opponents of secession draw on L.A.’s powerful political, economic and cultural traditions. This identity transcends normal political boundaries: The business establishment and left-labor groups are united in their opposition to Valley secession. The most important sector of this opposition is what may be called the “high church,”-- institutions and people who purport to speak for the people of Los Angeles. Worshippers in this church include business advocates of “civic grandeur,” men like entrepreneur Eli Broad and former Mayor Richard Riordan, whose notion of a Greater L.A. requires that the Valley remain subordinate.
The high-church vision of L.A. embraces such ideas as Staples Center, Walt Disney Hall and the L.A. County Museum of Art. To rival regions, notably New York City, high-church leaders, along with studio executives, constitute what’s left of L.A.’s big-business establishment, in what has become a decidedly small-business town. The high church even has its own spiritual leader, Cardinal Roger M. Mahony, whose new home, the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels, is rising downtown. Mahony has said that Valley secession would be tantamount to abandonment of L.A.’s poor, a view that Riordan also supports. Similar sentiments emanate from the universities and most media, which have traditionally been at odds with the cardinal or Riordan on other issues. Typical is the assertion in one recent foundation-backed paper, co-authored by a member of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Planning, that caricatured secession as a “class-based, strongly racialized movement of social separation.”
Perhaps more important, secession would threaten the political class that benefits most directly from L.A.’s dysfunctional governmental structure. Although largely elected by Valley voters, Mayor James K. Hahn now appears likely to lead a powerful coalition of labor, liberals and bureaucrats in the campaign against secession, which will likely run on two tracks. The Hahn-led city bureaucracy has already stated that it will challenge the new city’s taxing authority, as well as its ownership of city services from electricity to parks. Meanwhile, the municipal establishment, media, unions and academic elites will mimic Mahony and play the racist card in the hope of driving a wedge between the largely Anglo-led secessionists and the growing minority voting blocs in the Valley.
Arrayed against these forces, the “low church” secessionists are hopelessly outgunned. Although some medium-sized Valley businesses support separation, few major corporations based in the Valley are likely to rally to the secessionist cause. Furthermore, the “appendage” legacy has left the Valley without a civic institution to carry its flag, since virtually all dominant regional institutions are L.A.-centric. The Valley simply lacks the religious, social and community infrastructure enjoyed by small cities, a disadvantage embarrassingly evident on the political level.
Over the past decade, the Valley has not produced one single citywide leader of note. Former Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs once appeared to have that potential, but his poor showing in last year’s mayoral primary underscored the limits of his appeal. Furthermore, much of the Valley, as a result of redistricting games, is represented by politicians from outside the Valley. A proposed new Valley Latino seat wouldn’t likely produce a secessionist, since that would impede the quest of Latino elites to take over citywide power. Finally, the secessionists themselves, with the exception of Fleming and car dealer Bert Boeckmann, are a largely undistinguished crowd. Secession’s chief spokesman, Valley VOTE President Jeff Brain, unmasked recently as a Glendale resident, is regarded by heftier, less visible secessionists as woefully undersized for the high-profile job of rallying a powerful civic movement.
Yet, over the long term, the “over the hill” gang’s days as Valley dominator will end. For one thing, the Valley, in real terms, is structurally stronger than the rest of the city. It is gaining population, both in its heavily Latino northeast and predominately Anglo west, even as the rest of the city is stagnating. During the 1990s, the Valley’s population grew by 10.7%, more than 40% faster than the rest of the county. Politically, Valley voters now constitute almost half the city total.
Mahony’s views notwithstanding, the Valley has a thriving, if highly dispersed, ethnic economy, as befits a region whose population is now roughly half Latino and Asian. An economy of smaller enterprises, it generally outperformed the city on the other side of the hill in the 1990s, making the transition to the digital age in better shape than the rest of L.A., whose dependency on larger enterprises has retarded growth. Finally, although its Valleywide institutions--save for those focused on economic development--are comparatively weak, the region’s neighborhoods remain remarkably strong. Valley dwellers, particularly homeowners, are fiercely loyal to their residential pockets. Although lacking in grandiosity, their politics are less about ethnic and political symbolism than improving governmental services.
The emergence of Alex Padilla, the City Council president, and of home-grown politicians like California Assembly Speaker Robert M. Hertzberg and Andrei Cherny, who’s running for Hertzberg’s district seat, augurs a new leadership class capable of articulating a new Valley vision. The notion of a decentralized, neighborhood-dominated city government, focused on the concerns of the middle class, could prove the Valley’s enduring political contribution to Los Angeles.
Once such a vision develops, the Valley might be able to transcend its legacy as an exploited province and become the city’s beating heart.
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Joel Kotkin, a contributing editor to Opinion, is a senior fellow with the Davenport Institute for Public Policy at Pepperdine University and at the Milken Institute.