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THREE

The Spatial Politics of Southern California’s Logistics Regime

THIS CHAPTER EXPLAINS HOW CIVIC leaders capitalized on two key political and economic phenomena to make Southern California into the largest distribution gateway in the United States. I first examine how the global economic restructuring that began in the 1970s produced a crisis discourse among policy makers, who argued for strategic interventions to lessen the financial shocks tied to industrial job losses. I then review how the same global economic changes that triggered capital flight away from Los Angeles and other cities in the United States provided economic opportunities for local private and public leaders to invest in transpacific trade corridors. This mix between the discourse of crisis and the material geographies of a shifting global capitalism set the stage for a new spatial politics that culminated in a regional development regime centered on logistics. By recognizing these intersections—between the local and the global, the discursive and the material—we can glean a better understanding of how metropolitan space was produced through the contentious politics of logistics development.

Regions are particularly important as a scale of analysis because they help us grasp how local actors have used statecraft to renegotiate their territorial relationship with global capitalism. Several scholars have made this point, including members of the new regionalism school, who argued that globalization increased the importance of city-regions and provided useful insight into the “new territorial structures and imaginaries” that were produced during the globalization shift.¹ While city-regions have been widely studied, Jonas and Ward argue that this body of work has downplayed “how new territorial forms are constructed politically and reproduced through everyday acts and struggles around consumption and social reproduction.”² My analysis of logistics addresses this gap in the literature because it brings the politics of regional development into conversation with the social and material infrastructures of modern consumption. More specifically, I use the geographic concept of landscape to analyze how regions are necessarily produced as both ideological constructs and material structures. Don Mitchell defines landscape as “the conscious construction of a perspective, a way of seeing the region that, in concert with policies, laws, and institutions, physically makes the land, produces the landscape materially, and sustains it ideologically.”³ Landscape is therefore a spatial ideology that bridges discursive and material space, similar to what Lefebvre calls “representations of space.”⁴ These representations rationalize the production of particular material spaces. Spatial ideologies are powerful tools because they set the parameters for the production of space by invoking everyday language to produce a commonsense or normative understanding of dominant spatial practices.

Spatial ideologies were particularly important to logistics development because before the elaborate system of roads and rail lines that connect inland warehouses to the San Pedro Bay ports could be built, planners and investors had to first imagine and design the region as an intricate hub for global goods. These cognitive and discursive mappings supplied the ideological foundations for the region’s goods movement industry. The simple notion that Southern California could and should become a global logistics hub provided a powerful ideological and moral shield for regional leaders. Prologistics policies involved an ideological devotion that committed the region and its residents to a specific development path. I use a spatial politics framework to investigate how such ideological commitments were produced, performed, perceived, and contested through cultural and economic lenses/forces.

REGIONS IN THE AGE OF GLOBALIZATION

One of the strategies that Southern California’s political leaders used in the aftermath of global economic restructuring and manufacturing job losses included trying to lure investment away from other cities. In fact, interurban competition redefined regional politics and was especially fierce after the 1970s, when industrial cities had to fill the buildings and empty lots abandoned by deindustrialization. Increased regional competition affected urban political economy in four key ways. First, regions competed to improve their position in the international division of labor. Second, they tried to convert themselves into major centers of consumption. Third, regions tried to gain an advantage over control and command functions (financial services and business management). Fourth, regions engaged in more tenacious competition for governmental redistribution of resources.⁵ Southern California’s political leadership used each of these strategies to position the region for economic growth during the globalization era.

City and regional planners responded to increased competition by devising elaborate strategies to lure finance capital into decaying urban centers. They recruited various sectors, including modern convention centers, lavish lifestyle shopping experiences, refined cultural spaces, and mega sports stadiums.⁶ In Southern California local political leaders and regional planners used the changing economic landscape as an opportunity to mobilize the region for multiple development paths, including downtown revitalization, Hollywood entertainment, and port-based logistics. Although it is easy to see how money and power combined to produce the tall buildings and sports facilities of contemporary downtown Los Angeles and the financial complexes of Orange County, it is less obvious to discern the power and money embedded in the massive rail, port, and highway infrastructure projects that combine Southern California’s sprawling regional metropolis into a coherent, if somewhat unwieldy, whole.

Nevertheless, the connections between global commodity flows and local development regimes are there if we peel back enough layers to reveal how the region expanded between 1980 and 2010. One factor that will become more evident is how policy makers orchestrated the transfer of private and public resources into the regional goods movement economy as they scrambled to make Southern California into a major shipping gateway for transpacific goods. This transfer of resources and political support for logistics development marked a new type of spatial politics in Southern California. A regional political framework was especially important because port boosters had to convince the 188 independent cities and six counties that make up the Southern California region, not all of which had an obvious relationship with logistics, that they should cooperate on transportation infrastructure projects. The act of convincing disparate entities and constituencies that logistics was the solution to the region’s manufacturing crisis of the 1990s and 2000s illustrates how the ideological and material politics of space were central to logistics development.⁷ Crisis and its antithesis—logistics—were deployed as a political tool by California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s special adviser for economic affairs, David Crane, who argued that the “country is dramatically under-infrastructured” as a rationalization for public support of infrastructure spending.⁸ When Crane said “infrastructure” he meant logistics and transportation. Key members of the logistics industry and regional economic boosters made similar arguments. Jack Kyser, former chief economist of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation (LAEDC), regularly warned the public that the region was “running out of trade infrastructure capacity.”⁹ The Pacific Merchant Shipping Association added to the urgent call by arguing that shippers were “building their supply chains around California” because the lack of “freight supporting infrastructure” was making it inefficient and costly to do business with the West Coast.¹⁰

Logistics infrastructure created a new political field; the stakes included access to public funds during the neoliberal era, when social services were being slashed or privatized. Port boosters justified their access to state funding streams by claiming that logistics and infrastructure generated public benefits. Planners with SCAG, for example, cited the region’s notorious traffic problems to rationalize further spending on grade separations that they claimed would relieve congestion while mitigating the negative impact of the goods movement industry on public citizens. Employees of SCAG claimed that regional leaders could improve logistics efficiencies and ease commuter traffic if they reduced “conflicts between trains and motor vehicles by separating at-grade crossings.”¹¹ Seemingly banal discussions about grade separations and infrastructure were in fact essential to a $2.5 billion plan to extend the logistics system through the San Gabriel Valley and the Inland Empire.¹²

Government support for infrastructure projects was critical because among other things it stimulated speculative growth in the logistics industry. Larry Keller, a former executive director for the Port of Los Angeles (POLA), explained how this happened when he spoke before a congressional hearing on the Alameda Corridor project: “In the early 1980’s, it was apparent an improved infrastructure would be required if the cargo transportation system serving the Ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach was to handle the predicted growth in cargo through the West Coast ports.”¹³ The notion that cargo was predicted to grow and that infrastructure was required became the central operating logic for logistics boosters. Official projections estimated that port capacity was at 144,500,000 tons in 1989 and was expected to reach 221,800,000 tons by 2020.¹⁴ Port leaders pointed to the anticipated growth in Asian manufacturing, arguing that Southern California could and should establish itself as the nation’s main gateway for transpacific commodity shipments.

Keller’s statement reflects part of the political strategy that port boosters used to turn the region into a major logistics hub; they used speculative data to problematize the need for public spending on transportation infrastructure and proposed a strategic plan to solve this perceived problem. The logic of this argument—that growth is coming and we must therefore prepare to absorb it—became the governing ethos for a new regional development regime that rerouted public transportation funds into logistics-supporting infrastructure. Official projections performed two key functions.

First, they naturalized growth and provided a road map for port boosters to create a spatial economy that privileged logistics development. Although it is easy to dismiss boosterish claims as political rhetoric and wishful thinking, spatial ideologies can serve as powerful narratives, especially when they motivate people to act. Spatial ideologies, such as those espoused by prologistics boosters, involve what John R. Logan and Harvey L. Molotch described as “[p]eople dreaming, planning, and organizing themselves to make money” and represent “the agents through which accumulation does its work at the level of the urban place.”¹⁵

Second, these speculative logistics ideologies necessitated new institutions to manage the expanding territorial scope and scale of development that was required to meet future projections. For example, SCAG’s $26 billion Multi-County Goods Movement Action Plan (MCGMAP) called for the creation of the Southern California Institution to Execute Infrastructure Construction (SCIEIC). This new oversight body would be responsible for developing, collecting, and implementing plans to further expand the region’s transportation infrastructure. According to SCAG, “No existing institution, under its current authorities, can manage the building of the wide range of infrastructure projects needed to implement the logistics-based economic strategy region wide.”¹⁶ One of the SCIEIC’s key tasks was to reduce intraregional competition by facilitating collaborative funding initiatives.

Speculative data and the political discourse of eminent growth also played a key role in producing logistics as an economic category. Logistics, like all economic constructs, “is not found as an empirical object among other worldly things”; Susan Buck-Morss notes that for these constructs, “to be ‘seen’ by the human perceptual apparatus it has to undergo a process, crucial for science, of representational mapping.”¹⁷ The invention of logistics as an economic and spatial category by regional leaders gave that “thing” agency because the very act of labeling it turned it into a political object that could be tracked and measured. Chapter 6 gives a more detailed account of how logistics was stitched together as a container for various economic indicators. For now it is important to note that markets are produced and not naturally occurring phenomena; they are assembled and embedded in particular geographies by political actors and market forces.

SPECULATIVE GROWTH REGIME

Of course imagining development and actually building something are very different things. It is not enough to simply examine the discursive techniques that local political and business elites used to craft a discourse of development with the hope of luring potential investors. After all, many municipal leaders have crafted elaborate development plans only to see them languish. Just because local boosters want to turn their city into the next Silicon Valley or world-class gateway doesn’t mean that it will happen. What made Southern California different was its ability to capture some of the post-1980s global capital flows while other regions suffered from economic restructuring. Before attributing too much power to the state, it is important to point out that the implementation of a logistics development path was a messy process. It is much too simple to argue that logistics development was neatly implemented and that the built environment was merely a reflection of a centralized state strategy. While the San Pedro Bay ports pursued an orchestrated strategy of port and rail expansion, other parts of the region succumbed to rampant speculative development, which was not always actively managed by port leaders. To fully understand how this happened, we need to trace how specific circuits of capital intersected with local interests to build the material spaces that enabled globalization to flourish. This requires examining how local actors aligned their development prospects with the interests of the global goods movement industry.¹⁸

Local actors first had to create new governance systems before they could build a territorially coherent regional distribution network.¹⁹ The two semiautonomous commissions that govern the Los Angeles and Long Beach ports took the lead on many of the progrowth policy initiatives.²⁰ Harbor commissioners had considerable power to set the development agenda by both approving individual projects and crafting longer term master plans that affected the entire region.²¹ Southern California’s production as a global logistics hub was orchestrated through a series of planning studies and joint funding projects that were coordinated by SCAG. These studies brought together planners and policy makers from different jurisdictions and provided a training ground for regional governance at a time when coordinated state action was unusual. The volume of policy papers, planning studies, and joint funding proposals that SCAG sponsored became a blueprint for regional cooperation and propelled logistics-based economic development.²²

Planning for port expansion began during the 1980s with the creation of The San Pedro Bay Ports 2020 Master Plan and the Alameda Corridor project.²³ The 2020 Master Plan was adopted by authorities from the POLA and the Port of Long Beach. It highlighted three key project areas that would serve as focal points for future growth. First, port officials laid out plans to dredge the harbor to provide deeper channels for larger capacity ships. Second, some of the dredged material would be used to infill six hundred acres of harbor property, with the idea that this new area would provide enough space for thirty-eight additional terminals. Finally, the plan called for construction of an extensive inland distribution system that linked the ports with rail, highways, and intermodal facilities. Essentially, the 2020 Master Plan and later documents such as the MCGMAP used speculative port data to produce a commonsense or hegemonic rationale in which the region’s economic future depended on optimizing future port capacity.²⁴

While port officials planned for growth, they were concerned that worsening traffic congestion would negatively affect the region’s capacity to absorb future trade. SCAG formed the Ports Advisory Committee (PAC) in 1981 to address some of these potential roadblocks. The PAC developed a series of proposals meant to improve traffic flows on roadways surrounding port terminals. Next, the PAC turned its attention to inland distribution, especially to the region’s rail system. Inland distribution was particularly worrisome for port authorities because future imports would have to compete with commuters as delivery trucks and trains connected incoming container goods with transcontinental road and rail systems. By 1983 the PAC had produced the basic plan for what would become the $2.4 billion Alameda Corridor rail project. The proposed project included twenty miles of rail lines and grade separations meant to improve connections between the ports and the transcontinental rail lines located near downtown Los Angeles. The crown jewel of the project included a ten-mile-long open trench that provided traffic-free passage for freight trains traveling between the city of Carson and 25th Street along the LA/Vernon/Maywood border.

Both the 2020 Master Plan and the Alameda Corridor marked a new period of regional planning cooperation among federal, state, county, and municipal agencies, an unusual occurrence in a governance landscape normally dominated by municipal fragmentation. The corridor was a public-private partnership that, according to the California State Office of Research, was meant to “produce a sustainable economic development strategy that will effectively meet the challenges of a 21st century global economy.”²⁵ The Alameda Corridor Transportation Authority (ACTA), which oversaw the project, created institutional opportunities to access public funds. This was especially important because regional trade corridors required multi-jurisdictional alliances to secure funding, gain regulatory approval, and earn stakeholder consent. ACTA had broad support from SCAG, the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (LACMTA), and the San Pedro Bay Ports Harbor Commissions.

The Alameda Corridor was the beginning of a neoliberal private-public logistics regime that created new governance institutions to access public funding for port-related infrastructure. Prior to ACTA, regional transportation agencies did not have a spending category for logistics funding. ACTA’s former general manager, Gill Hicks, described how the organization was locked out of public funds during a congressional hearing: “Initially, ACTA was frozen out of the competition for these funds because there was no category in which to compete. The Alameda Corridor was not a freeway project, nor a light rail project.”²⁶ ACTA taught Alameda Corridor leaders to create new institutional mechanisms that enabled them to apply for funding from regional, state, and federal agencies. Their first move was to access funds from the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission (LACTC), the organization in charge of distributing state and federal funds for Los Angeles County transportation needs.

ACTA and SCAG also asked Heinz Heckeroth, the director of Caltrans District 7, for funding. Heckeroth suggested that SCAG “coordinate a systems-level analysis of the transportation access needs of the ports.”²⁷ Such a plan could provide an evidence-based, comprehensive initiative that state and federal officials would view more favorably. Port leaders complied, and according to Gill Hicks ACTA set out “to develop an action plan for improving traffic conditions in the port area and to raise funds for implementing that plan.”²⁸ One result was the creation of the PAC in October 1981, which became instrumental in redirecting public transportation funds into the Alameda Corridor project. Finally, after two years of lobbying by ACTA leaders, the regional transportation agency (LACTC and later LACMTA) adopted new funding categories and went on to provide $347 million in grants during the 1990s. Regional transportation leaders agreed to fund logistics spending “on the basis that goods movement projects such as the Alameda Corridor are essential for reducing congestion and air pollution and for maintaining a healthy economy.”²⁹

ACTA’s biggest success occurred in 1996 and 1997, when President Bill Clinton signed a federal loan for $400 million. Clinton’s decision to allocate the funds was made after regional, state, and federal actors successfully framed Southern California’s logistics network as a public good worthy of federal funding. The federal loan was only granted after the Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act (ISTEA) of 1991 and the National Highway System Designation Act (NHSDA) of 1995 identified the Alameda Corridor as a high-priority corridor. Under ISTEA, those projects that were designated as high-priority corridors were eligible to receive federal financing from a special revolving loan fund. Key actors from Southern California’s private and public sector lobbied for this high-priority designation. Gill Hicks claimed, “Members of ACTA’s coalition and advocacy team successfully communicated the key message that the project was vital to the health of the nation’s economy because it would dramatically improve a critical international trade corridor, linking every other state in the union to the largest port complex in the United States.”³⁰

Local port boosters also gained access to federal funding streams by capitalizing on concerns over national security after the assault on New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. The LAEDC, for example, cited possible security threats when it solicited federal funds to support port operations. According to an LAEDC report from 2003, “the US Department of Defense (DoD) has designated more than 38,000 miles of rail lines—including those out of Southern California—as strategically important national assets.”³¹ The report continued, arguing that “these strategic rail corridors help connect military installations to ports and intermodal transfer facilities and to ensure that US military forces have the ability to mobilize heavy equipment, such as tanks and tracked vehicles, as needed.” Statements such as these further rationalized state involvement in transportation systems, equating commerce with military readiness and logistics. The connection was clear in the LAEDC report, which noted, “Nearly 200 military installations require access to commercial rail lines.” Logistics and the military are in fact inextricably linked; this connection can be traced back to military supply chains that stressed efficiency and speed by deploying technology and transportation systems to deliver supplies. As Deborah Cowen points out, the military roots of logistics rules out any discussion of the business of logistics without considering the role that the state has played in developing the technologies and strategies of commodity circulation.³²

FINANCE CAPITAL AND THE LOGISTICS STATE

Jeff Holt, vice president of Goldman, Sachs & Co. and manager of the municipal finance division of the Fixed Income Currency and Commodities Group, served as the underwriter for the Alameda Corridor and articulated how public finance and regional planning were both central to the formation of Southern California’s logistics regime. He attributed the project’s success to coordinated regional planning that enabled the state to create new markets by developing the infrastructure that private interests were not willing to take on themselves. Holt touched on this dilemma when he told a congressional hearing committee that “the big question is always, how do we pay for the large public works projects that everyone needs but that no one agency, on its own, can afford.” He also claimed that “the Alameda Corridor is possibly the best example of how multiple parties in a public/private partnership can come together to fund such large projects.”³³ Again, the underlying assumption was that the state should play a key role in creating new logistics markets by funding regional infrastructure.

This ideological conflation between the market and the public good was expressed by the executive director for the POLA, who testified, “In reality, the beneficiary of the Alameda Corridor’s successful completion and operation is the American public, to whom our domestic and global transportation efficiency is critical.”³⁴ Both of these comments exemplify the mediating role that the state has historically played in mobilizing space for the advancement of capitalism when individual capitalists cannot agree to take collective action.³⁵ Capitalists are also buttressed by the conflation between the interests of capital and an undifferentiated “American public,” a point that becomes more important when we discuss how social movement organizations contested this claim.

Cooperation and state support were particularly important to financial underwriters because they introduced greater stability and thus made the project more feasible for long-term finance schemes. Consequently, as Holt explained, Congress set aside a “$59 million appropriation for a loan-loss reserve [which] made a $400 million loan available which, in turn, made it possible to borrow an additional $1.2 billion from the capital markets to complete the $2.4 billion total project cost [for the Alameda Corridor].”³⁶ In total, the $2.4 billion needed to complete the Alameda Corridor came from a variety of public-private sources, including, revenue bonds (51%); Federal loans (18%); The Ports (18 %); California State grants (8%) and other sources (5%), mostly from the LA MTA.³⁷

Aside from the funding, the Alameda Corridor also taught policy makers how to act regionally and how to deploy public financing to support the region’s goods movement infrastructure, a lesson they would apply to future projects. In fact, the federal loan to ACTA served as a model for the Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) of 1998, a federal program that provides direct loans and lines of credit to “projects of national and regional significance.” TIFIA provided “improved access to capital markets, flexible repayment terms, and potentially more favorable interest rates than can be found in private capital markets for similar instruments.”³⁸ In short, ACTA taught local and federal actors how to mobilize the state for private-public partnerships by rescaling the spatial politics of growth. Regional cooperation was particularly important as the cost of infrastructure projects rose and local funding sources dwindled.

Federal programs like TIFIA encouraged regional coordination and created incentives for local actors to develop new institutions and governance networks. SCAG’s adoption of the National Freight Gateway Strategy Agreement in 2006 marked a significant move toward greater collaboration. The agreement was established through a memorandum of understanding that encouraged coordinated efforts on transportation capacity and environmental protection. Major federal and local agencies signed on, including the U.S. Department of Transportation (USDOT), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Army Corps of Engineers, the California Department of Transportation (CADOT), SCAG, and transportation authorities for local counties.³⁹ The memorandum incentivized regional collaboration by giving signees access to more funding. According to the agreement, agencies pledged “to cooperate with all stakeholders in the area to improve freight throughput capacity while protecting and enhancing the natural and human environment.” Yvonne Burke, Los Angeles County supervisor and SCAG’s then president, claimed that “this new Southern California partnership will be vital to ensure our entire region’s mutual goods movement needs, from the Ports to the farthest reaches of the Inland Empire.”⁴⁰

Each of the projects that I have outlined in this section assumed that logistics was a viable growth industry and that it provided social benefits for the region’s residents. Both of these claims were part of the ideological toolkit that regional leaders used to expand the geographic reach of logistics development.

NEW REGIONAL LOGICS

Port boosters used their publicly subsidized funds to modernize shipping facilities near the docks. Many of the initial projects focused on updating existing technologies to keep up with shifts in the logistics industry. This included building new facilities that accommodated bigger shipments. In fact, the ability to accommodate massive post-Panamax ships, which can carry more than eight thousand TEUs, made the San Pedro Bay a lucrative gateway choice for shippers looking to transport large quantities of containers from Asian markets to the continental United States; something other ports, like those in the Bay Area, were struggling to keep up with. Large ship capacity is just one of the factors that enabled the San Pedro Bay ports to capture 56 percent of containerized Asian imports by 2005.⁴¹ Port leaders also implemented strategies like the Pier Pass Program, which increased capacity by moving more traffic to off-peak hours.⁴² While these changes successfully increased capacity, policy makers were convinced that the existing trade infrastructure would not meet the region’s future needs.

Port expansion continued in the 2000s, but Southern California faced mounting competition from other regions, including Canada and the East Coast. Boosters cited the increased competition from other ports to further consolidate public support for regional logistics. Local leaders were especially concerned that the expansion of the Panama Canal, scheduled to be completed by 2015, would allow East Coast ports to siphon off future trade, away from Southern California.⁴³ Concerns mounted in 2003 when the Panama Canal Authority forged a strategic marketing alliance that openly encouraged shippers to bypass West Coast ports. The alliance was meant to “spur investment, increase trade and promote the ‘All-Water-Route’ (the route from Asia to the U.S. East and Gulf Coasts via the Panama Canal).”⁴⁴ Canal leaders signed memorandums of understanding with ten U.S. ports, including the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, the Georgia Ports Authority, and the South Carolina State Ports Authority.⁴⁵ The partnership was another example of how entrepreneurial state actors competed with other regions for capital investment by forming new distribution networks.

Southern California’s overland system of trucks and trains maintained its competitive advantages in the face of growing competition, especially among shippers who wanted an efficient JIT distribution system. West Coast distribution enabled shippers to reroute delivery trucks much more quickly than having to orchestrate the same task via ship, especially if market conditions changed while the goods were at sea. Instead, ships could deliver their goods to Southern California, where they could then be dispatched to the correct markets, all in a timelier manner than having to wait for ships to make their deliveries through the Panama Canal. A time advantage was especially enticing to shippers who managed high-value goods because it enabled them to avoid delivery interruptions. Overland distribution also provided greater protection from delays. If shipments for multiple markets are traveling on a single ship and that ship is delayed along the longer all-ocean route through the Panama Canal, then many more markets may be affected. Trucks, trains, and cross-dock facilities allow shippers to distribute the risk across different markets; fewer markets are affected if one truck is delayed than when an entire ship loaded with containers is delayed. Southern California ports capitalized on these flexible management techniques and gained a competitive advantage over other regions.

Nonetheless, Southern California’s port boosters used mounting port competition to seek federal support for logistics development. This was especially true when Canadian port leaders—including government actors—aggressively courted shippers by launching a multi-million-dollar marketing campaign aimed directly at Southern California. In 2009 Geraldine Knatz, then the executive director for the POLA, responded to the campaign by declaring, “We’re not going to sit around and let Canada steal our business.”⁴⁶ Knatz’s unequivocal performance—of port official as entrepreneurial agent—allowed her to jump multiple geographical scales. By invoking a foreign threat, she linked her job as a local, quasi-public representative to the ports, the region, the state, and the nation. Knatz and other regional leaders pushed for a national freight movement infrastructure policy to act as a foil against the perceived intrusion from the north, an appeal that harkened back to the Alameda Corridor project of the 1980s.

Private sector members of the logistics regime, including the National Retail Federation, the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, and the Retail Industry Leaders Association, pursued their own federal policies because they believed that centralized strategic plans were needed to overcome fragmented, multijurisdictional planning. For example, in a plan presented at a National Freight Transportation hearing in 2008, industry leaders claimed, “Coordination within transportation corridors can only be achieved by eliminating the piecemeal action of local governments, port authorities, and regional planning organizations.”⁴⁷ They argued for coordination along “an entire transportation corridor.” According to industry leaders who were present at the hearing, “This systemic perspective, which only the state can provide, must be applied to the prioritization, coordination, and oversight of infrastructure projects.”

Private sector calls for more centralized planning were a response to social movement organizations (SMOs) that successfully used their political capital to win concessions from local and regional state agencies. Business leaders warned that mounting labor unrest and environmental regulations were forcing shippers to route some of their goods away from the San Pedro Bay ports. Michael Jacob, vice president of the Pacific Merchant Shipping Association, argued, “We are actually on the front end of a long-term structural change of business models where people are building their supply chains around California.”⁴⁸ This threat narrative was also used to warn policy makers that failure to build enough infrastructure to meet future import projections would result in the loss of tax dollars and jobs to competing cities.⁴⁹ The underlying message was also clear: business leaders warned that efforts by unions, environmental groups, and liberal politicians to rein in logistics development would result in economic disaster. Such claims sounded like earlier probusiness warnings meant to throttle progressive forces by threatening that factories would move to less-regulated terrain.⁵⁰ The threat of capital abandonment was meant to discipline both social movements and progressive members of the local state. The warning was obvious: stop your demands for environmental justice and living wages or we’ll take our business somewhere else.

GREENING THE PORTS

The logistics regime embraced a green growth doctrine as a political compromise that would allow the ports to grow while dealing with some of the environmental issues that were being raised by SMOs. Several SMOs established themselves as viable opponents to the logistics regime by arguing that dogged pursuit of a port-based development policy agenda without also accounting for economic and environmental justice was shortsighted and damaging to the public good. Unions and environmental organizations used their growing political clout to challenge dominant neoliberal development narratives, including the idea that logistics represented an upward mobility path for blue-collar workers and poor residents. Instead, SMOs reframed the spatial politics of Southern California’s logistics regime by casting goods movement as a dangerous and poverty-inducing industry. An example of how this occurred can be traced back to the early 2000s during policy debates about future port expansion, when some politicians began to question how logistics expansion would affect local communities, especially those located near the ports. The following exchange between Long Beach congresswoman Juanita Millender-McDonald and Executive Director for the Port of Los Angeles Larry Keller highlights how environmental concerns inserted themselves into the production of Southern California’s logistics landscape:

Congresswoman Millender-McDonald: But are you saying that right now we are going to have a 700 percent increase in cargo with the dredging of both 400 and 300 pier completed, we will go into 24 million tons of cargo? Explain that to me.

Mr. Keller: Congresswoman, our cargo has increased 700 percent since the early 1980’s and in the next 20 years—the two ports right now are putting through about 10 million containers, imports and exports. By the year 2020, we expect that number to rise to 24 million—from 10 million to 24 million. We are not, by any means, done with our development between the two ports. We have additional landfills consolidations and dredging projects in order to allow the larger ships to come in.

Congresswoman Millender-McDonald: Uh-huh, absolutely. That is why it is so critically important that we make sure that the air, the quality of the environment is conducive to your continuing that, because we are looking forward to that, as we talk about international trade and other entities that will help us in our economic vitality.⁵¹

This exchange occurred in April 2001 during a congressional hearing on governmental reform. The interaction between Congresswoman Milliner-McDonald and Mr. Keller was particularly poignant because she had played a key role in supporting the Alameda Corridor project during the 1980s. More important, her comments indicated a specific political strategy that enabled future growth if port officials and private business interests paid attention to and mitigated negative environmental outcomes. This was not an antidevelopment intervention. In fact, it created a new path by linking effective environmental mitigation with progrowth policies. The result was a type of green development politics that adopted a pro-environment discourse while seeking technical solutions to possible negative effects. The underlying strategy hinted at by the congresswoman would shape how SMOs contested the unfettered expansion of the logistics regime.

Port leaders needed a green growth strategy because they were liable for environmental and health damages caused by the logistics industry. While the logistics regime touted tremendous trade growth as a positive outcome for the region, such rapid expansion also raised flags about the capacity to absorb the onslaught of new commodity shipments. The 700 percent increase in cargo mentioned by Larry Keller was an astonishing amount, because such vast quantities placed new burdens on the region’s environment. Consider the amount of space required to move ten million twenty-foot containers in the early 2000s. Volume created a spatial problem. Where did they intend to put all the stuff that was being imported, and how were they going to minimize environmental health damage in a densely populated urban area? At the time, most of the vehicles used to move those containers operated on diesel fuel, a deadly and cancer-causing toxin. By 2008 approximately thirty-seven hundred Californians were dying from cancer caused by exposure to logistics-related diesel emissions.⁵² Many more, eighteen thousand, died annually from exposure to ambient levels of diesel particulate matter. SMO activists used these diesel-related deaths as a counternarrative to push back against the logistics growth regime. Environmental justice activists argued that port expansion was disproportionately affecting parts of the region with high concentrations of poor, Black, and Latinx residents.⁵³