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ОглавлениеPREFACE
Authors are strange parents. Some never wean their offspring, preferring to keep them on their knee, forever close at hand. Others, like myself, punctually kick their progeny out the door, with orders never to call home. Apart from occasionally consulting a footnote or reference, I have not looked at City of Quartz since I sent the manuscript – the last relic of stone-age composition on an IBM typewriter – to my publisher in London in 1990.
Recently I skimmed through the bulk of this rather strange book, with its cryptic title and relentless black-and-white photographs taken by my friend and get-away-driver Robert Morrow. I was particularly nervous about re-encountering a sprawling chapter called ‘Homegrown Revolutions’. This huge expanse of crabgrass, a discursion on homeowners’ movements and the politics of NIMBYism, took centuries to research. It required reading, late at night on microform at the library of York University in Toronto where I was teaching political economy at the time, the various local editions of the L.A. Times for a thirty-year period.
As a result of these obscure labors, I became so attached to every sacred morsel of fact about picket fences and dog doo-doos that I failed to edit the chapter down to a reasonable length. I soon came to fear that I had made a suicidal mistake. ‘No one,’ I told myself, ‘will ever read this.’ Yet, some people obviously have; even a few who weren’t coerced into doing so by their tyrannical Marxist professors.
In a meditation on the capriciousness of publishing and reputation, the philosopher Ernst Bloch once asked: ‘Must books have fates?’ The answer, of course, is yes, but not the ones chosen by their authors. The fate of City of Quartz was largely determined by events that followed its publication: the explosive notoriety of L.A.-based gangster rap, the Rodney King atrocity, and, finally, the apocalyptic uprising that followed the acquittal of his assailants.
But the smell of smoke was already, so to speak, in the air by 1988 when I began writing the essays that constitute City of Quartz and which spilled over into several other, edited volumes. Although the owners of a certain graying newspaper on Spring Street may have missed the obvious omens, every eleven-year-old in the city knew that an explosion of some kind was coming. In a city tragically full of armed and angry teenagers, LAPD Chief Daryl Gates’s ‘Operation Hammer’ – with its Vietnam-like neighborhood sweeps and indiscriminate nightly harassment – was universally viewed as a deliberate provocation to riot.
Indeed, this was the interpretation of the two rookie officers who arrested me after the LAPD’s notorious attack on a peaceful Justice for Janitors demonstration in Century City in June 1990. I was in every sense a captive audience, cuffed in the back seat of their patrol car, as they launched into a hallucinatory rant about a coming Armageddon, LAPD versus Uzi-armed Crips and Bloods, on the streets of Southcentral. So, if there were premonitions of 1992 in City of Quartz they simply reflected anxieties visible on every graffiti-covered wall or, for that matter, every lawn sprouting a little ‘Armed Response’ sign.
City of Quartz, to use one of those Parisian terms that I usually try to run over with my pick-up truck, is the biography of a conjoncture: one of those moments, ripe with paradox and non-linearity, when previously separate currents of history suddenly converge with profoundly unpredictable results. City of Quartz – in a nutshell – is about the contradictory impact of economic globalization upon different segments of Los Angeles society.
In 1990, Los Angeles had been governed for almost a generation by a nationally unique coalition of downtown business interests, Westside entertainment-industry Democrats and Southside Black voters. After the helter-skelter of the 1960s, when the reactionary populism of rogue mayor Sam Yorty had come perilously close to wrecking the city, the administration of Mayor Tom Bradley, elected in 1973, represented the first sustained experiment in government by elite consensus. The long conflict between Westside and Downtown elites ended in a historic compromise that included Westside support for accelerated downtown redevelopment, and Downtown (especially Chandler-dynasty) support for a largely Democratic City Hall. Westside/Downtown cooperation under the honest brokerage of Tom Bradley made possible the most ambitious expansion of municipal infrastructure since William Mulholland built the original Aqueduct.
Indeed, the greatest single achievement of the Bradley era was the immense program of new investment in ports and airports that allowed L.A. to become a dominating hub of Pacific Rim commerce, and, thus, to survive the eventual post-Cold War downsizing of its aerospace economy. Bradley, moreover, was able to accomplish these Robert Moses-like feats despite a hostile environment of tax revolts, government downsizing and Reaganomics. His administration hewed to the conservative principle – pioneered by Mulholland and his fellow Progressives in the Department of Water and Power – that utilities should be self-financing and fiscally inviolable. In other words, any notional profits from the operation of the Port or LAX must be reinvested in situ.
Exploiting tax-increment financing, City Hall ratified the same principle for Downtown: fiscal windfalls from the appreciation of publicly-subsidized real-estate were ploughed right back into further redevelopment. These fiscal closed circuits sustained high levels of public investment in container docks, terminal buildings, and downtown bank skyscrapers that, in turn, kept happy a huge constituency of pro-globalization interests, including airlines, stevedoring companies, railroads, aerospace exporters, hotels, construction unions, downtown landowners, the Los Angeles Times, Japanese banks, Westside movie studios, big law firms, and the politicians dependent upon the largesse of all of the above.
But the city was subsidizing globalization without laying any claim on behalf of groups excluded from the direct benefits of international commerce. There was no mechanism to redistribute any share of additional city revenues to purposes other than infrastructure or Downtown renewal. There was no ‘linkage’, in other words, between corporate-oriented public investment and the social needs that desperately fought for attention in the rest of the city budget. Moreover, the dynamic leadership concentrated on improving the Harbor, LAX and Downtown (and, later, organizing the Bradley festschriften of the 1984 Olympics) seemed directly subtracted from attention paid to the city’s neighborhoods and their subsistence needs.
It is astonishing, in retrospect, how little heed City Hall paid to plant closure and redlining in the Southcentral neighborhoods that were Tom Bradley’s original political base. Or, how little effort was made to redress the generation-long disfranchisement of the Eastside on the city council and the exclusion of Chicanos from significant leadership roles in the ruling coalition. Likewise, it is difficult to explain why the city council failed, despite innumerable warnings and protests, to downzone a city plan that was everywhere destabilizing residential quality of life with massive and irrational densities of permissible new development. Along Ventura Boulevard skyscrapers were literally sprouting from the front yards of single-family homes.
By the time I sat down to write City of Quartz, on the eve of Southern California’s greatest postwar recession, Bradley’s growth coalition was still intact, even triumphant, but it was fast losing control of its social landscape. From Porter Ranch to Watts, L.A.’s neighborhoods were ablaze with angry grievances and suburban sans culottes were threatening to overthrow the city’s ancien régime.
In the Valley, a so-called ‘slow-growth movement’ had suddenly coalesced out of the molecular agitation of hundreds of local homeowners’ associations. Although many of the movement’s concerns about declining environmental quality, traffic and density were entirely legitimate, ‘slow growth’ also had ugly racial and ethnic overtones of an Anglo gerontocracy selfishly defending its privileges against the job and housing needs of young Latino and Asian populations. Indeed, many of the key leaders of the homeowners’ revolt had originally won their stripes in opposition to school integration in the early 1970s (and they would continue in the 1990s to rail at new immigrants and unite with business interests to unsuccessfully promote the succession of the Valley).
Meanwhile, in the neglected flat lands of Mid-City and Southcentral Los Angeles, the invisible hand was wielding an Uzi, as crack cocaine sales – the local form of economic globalization – gave a terrible new economic impetus to gang warfare. The slaughter in the streets, three gang killings a day by 1990, also emboldened the LAPD to aggressively expand its power. By 1988, Angelenos nervously wondered who really ran their city: Mayor Bradley or the megalomaniac Chief of Police, Daryl Gates?
Meanwhile the very success of the Bradley coalition’s program of globalization was transforming the composition of the regional elites who constituted its membership. Everything was up for sale and, against the background of the ‘super-yen,’ Japanese capital (with Canadian investors in a close second place) suddenly became the major stakeholder in both downtown real-estate and Westside movie studios. Editorial writers waxed hyperbolically about Downtown L.A.’s brilliant future as a command center of the Pacific Rim, while City Hall veterans wondered whether the city’s new investors would become ‘players’ or not. Old elites, meanwhile, were disappearing into the darkness of their San Marino and Montecito mausoleums.
The social and politico-economic tectonic plates that underlay Los Angeles in 1989, in other words, had accumulated such impossible stress loads that you could almost hear the Hollywood Hills groaning. In a setting of increasing instability, only Tom Bradley seemed unchangeable, although his imposing gravitas – so reassuring in 1973 – now seemed tired and remote. (The mayor, in fact, was the silent prisoner of personal and political scandals, with the Times secretly holding the mortgage on his reputation.)
That was almost twenty years ago. And twenty years in the life of a metropolis as dynamic and unpredictable as Los Angeles is an entire historical epoch. The years of suspense, of the ‘conjuncture,’ became the years of crisis, a conjugation of social and natural disaster almost unprecedented in modern American history, followed by years of recuperation and, we are told, sunshine and prosperity, with nary a noirish cloud on the horizon. After a municipal election (2005) sadly devoid of new concepts, genuine passions, or substantive debate, Los Angeles at last has a mayor – Antonio Villaraigosa – with a surname that resounds with the same accent as the majority of the population.
The election of Villaraigosa – once a fiery trade-union and civil-liberties activist – should have been Los Angeles’s ‘La Guardia moment,’ an opportunity to sweep City Hall clean of its old scheming cabals with their monomaniac obsession with gentrifying Downtown at the expense of the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods. Instead Villaraigosa, like Tom Bradley in 1973—4, has become a non-threatening paragon of liberal accommodation to an unchanging elite agenda of pharaonic redevelopment projects. The former rebel from east of the River is now the jaded booster of a ‘Downtown renaissance’ that promotes super-cathedrals, billionaire sports franchises, mega-museums, Yuppie lofts, and drunken Frank Gehry skyscrapers at the expense of social justice and affordable housing. He endorses an evil plan to expel the majority of the homeless from Downtown in order to satisfy the greed of its landowners and gentrifiers.
Villaraigosa, to be sure, owed his victory to the renascent power of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor and, like his immediate predecessors, Richard Riordan and James Hahn, he is an earnest advocate of negotiation and incremental social progress: always within the parameters, of course, of what billionaire patrons like Eli Broad and Ron Burkle will allow. Westsiders, struggling to reconcile their obscene real-estate equities with their residual social consciences, may find reassurance in the fact that Los Angeles continues to be governed by a smug coalition of corporate philanthropy and emasculated liberalism – with Villaraigosa as a Latin Bradley – but the blunted thrust of regime change has different, less-happy implications for the rest of the city.
If there was ever a time for fire in the belly and a radical politics of hope, it is now. Despite the mountain of gold that has been built downtown, Los Angeles remains vulnerable to the same explosive convergence of street anger, poverty, environmental crisis, and capital flight that made the early 1990s its worst crisis period since the early Depression. Los Angeles, of course, will not fall into the ocean, but it could resume the arc of decline that began in the early 1990s: slowly bleeding high-wage jobs, skilled workers, and fiscal resources. No great American city – the recent case of New Orleans aside – is so susceptible to downward mobility over the next generation.
Why do I continue to be so pessimistic? Taking 1990 as a baseline, consider some of the most important structural trends and social changes of the generation that has followed the original ‘conjuncture’ of City of Quartz.
1. REGIONAL (IM)MOBILITY
In 1990 the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission’s ambitious program of subway and light-rail construction held the promise of increased mobility and reduced pollution. But in 2006, the imminent future is massive immobility and staggering congestion. Right now locals pay a ‘congestion tax’ – ninety-three hours per commuter per year lost in traffic delays – that is the highest in the United States, and twice as high as it was in 1982. In the worst scenario, it could double again in another decade.
In the late Bradley years – it should now be clear – Los Angeles wrote the textbook on bad transport planning and even worse project management. The big-ticket projects of this era turned out to be costly fiascos: a Wilshire subway that didn’t actually go down Wilshire Boulevard, or to the Eastside, for that matter; a light rail to the airport that didn’t actually go to LAX; and a Alameda corridor that was designed to take truck-hauled containers off the Long Beach Freeway, but has failed to do so. Everyone loves to ride the subway, but few appreciate that it is underwritten by huge operating subsidies – almost $27 per passenger – that have been financed out of the pockets of bus riders. Between 1991 and 1997, as fares increased, the bus system lost 17 per cent of its passenger volume or 71 million trips: hardly a victory for mass transit. Overall, mass transit accounts for only one out of every fifty trips within the region.
Likewise, both city and county have allowed politically powerful developers – like Maguire Thomas at Playa Vista or Newhall Ranch in the Santa Clara River Valley – to dump huge new volumes of traffic into the most congested nodes without any real mitigation. The projected 70,000-resident Tejon Ranch near Gorman (property formerly owned by the Chandler dynasty of the Los Angeles Times) will be even worse: the beginning of gridlock that someday may extend to Bakersfield in the San Joaquin Valley. Regionally, we are no closer to real planning or coordination of housing, jobs and transportation than we were fifty years ago. There is much talk about ‘smart growth’ and ‘new urbanism,’ but, with few exceptions, the regional norms are still dumb sprawl and senile suburbanism. Some politicians still invoke magic bullets and sci-fi fixes, like 200 mph maglev trains, but Sacramento – which has recently siphoned off $2.5 billion in transportation funds to cover the budget deficit – is unable even to fill the potholes in our aging freeways. Southern California, as a result, is quickly turning into one huge angry parking lot. Congestion will inevitably drive away more jobs and business, while also fueling an ugly neo-Malthusian politics – already audible on the AM dial – of blaming immigrants (whose environmental footprint is actually the smallest) for declining physical and social mobility.
2. BRANCHVILLE
In the late 1980s, boosters of the now forgotten ‘L.A. 2000’ scheme were claiming that L.A. would soon become the new command center of the California and Pacific Rim economies, the ‘headquarters of the 21st century’. The more incautious – perhaps they had smoked too much jimson weed – even foresaw Downtown as a second Manhattan, thanks to the Archimedean lever of Japanese investment. What a delirious vision.
In fact, Japanese capital – suffering huge losses – couldn’t bail out of Downtown fast enough during the recession of the early 1990s. Financial consolidations, in the wake of the savings and loan meltdown and bank deregulation, left Los Angeles for the first time in its history without a single major locally headquartered bank. Indeed, apart from the odd oil company and some of the entertainment giants, Los Angeles is hardly a headquarters city at all. The final insult, of course, was Otis Chandler’s decision – forced by the scandals and bloodbaths on Spring Street – to put a silver stake through his grandfather’s heart and sell the Times, the flagship of local capitalism, to the Chicago Tribune empire.
Thus Los Angeles has entered the twenty-first century, as it did the twentieth, largely as an economic colony of corporations and investors headquartered elsewhere: San Francisco, Charlotte, New York, Chicago and Tokyo. A dozen or so billionaires, including Sumner Redstone, Kirk Kerkorian, Marvin Davis and David Geffen, still receive mail at L.A. zip codes but, with the exception of Eli Broad (the new uber-patron of Downtown culture), their commitment to the region is unclear, even inscrutable. Rupert Murdoch is currently the biggest fish in the pond, but is he a local player? Hardly anyone knows. An ‘elite’ – in the aggressive, almost militarized sense of Harry Chandler and his friends in the 1920s – hardly exists in Los Angeles anymore. Power and wealth, of course, remain massively concentrated, but there is a real sense of transience. Too many of the nouveaux riches keep their bags packed, ready to bolt the city if it again catches fire or erupts in mayhem.
3. MANUFACTURING DECLINE
By 1990, the Los Angeles region had lost most of the ‘Fordist’ industries that once made it the nation’s second-largest center of auto and tire manufacture. Of its fourteen largest non-defense plants, twelve, including Kaiser in Fontana and GM in Southgate, had been shut down and their machinery exported to China. Yet, unlike anywhere else, the region actually gained manufacturing jobs in the 1980s through expanding aerospace payrolls and a light manufacturing boom – apparel, toys, furniture – centered around Downtown. For a decade, Los Angeles surpassed Chicago, with the largest manufacturing workforce in the country.
But in the 1990s, Los Angeles County lost one-third of that compensatory industrial job base, as defense jobs were transferred to other regions, and light manufacturing was exported to border maquiladoras or to China. In an era of national Republican hegemony, the heavily Democratic Los Angeles region has lost its former competitive advantage in Washington: witness the blatant partisan politics in the early 1990s behind the transfer of thousands of Lockheed jobs from Burbank to Newt Gingrich’s congressional district in Marrietta, Georgia. The recent announcement that Boeing will be terminating the assembly of 717s in the former McDonnell Douglas plant in Long Beach marks the end of a historical era.
For fifty years, Southern California’s military–industrial economy was irrigated by an aqueduct of tax dollars from Washington: in some years, the net gain – via the inter-regional transfer of tax resources – was as much as $6 to $8 billion. Now the fiscal differential flows the other way: Los Angeles County – like Michigan or Ohio in the 1950s – now pays more in federal taxes than it receives in federal expenditures. Between 1983 and 1996 real per capita federal spending in Southern California fell by a whopping 14 per cent.
The decline of manufacturing jobs in the regional core (Los Angeles and Orange counties), moreover, has not been compensated for by small increases in the Inland Empire and San Diego counties. In addition, over the next few years Los Angeles may lose half of its apparel employment to China. The burden of deindustrialization, of course, is most heavily felt in Los Angeles’ new-immigrant neighborhoods, where the garment industry has been a major employer. As manufacturing employment shrinks, an already precarious low-wage workforce is further compressed into a limited spectrum of service-sector jobs in restaurants, hotels, offices, theme parks, and private homes.
This service-heavy economy, based upon a myriad of poorly-capitalized small businesses, is especially vulnerable to fluctuations in economic weather. Indeed both the rate of business formation, and the rate of business failure, remain higher than in most other metropolitan regions. This generates plenty of heartwarming stories about successful ethnic enterprise, but it also ensures an equally high rate of broken dreams and bankruptcy. Too many ethnic donut stores, nail parlors, tiendas, taco wagons, landscaping services, auto repair shops, and hairdressing studios survive only by dint of heroic feats of family self-exploitation. The employees of the micro-enterprise sector, moreover, tend to eke out survival at the barest minimum: caught in a gigantic low-wage, largely off-the-books, economic ghetto.
4. THE NEW INEQUALITY
In 1988, as I was writing City of Quartz, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors threatened to shutdown the ER at the California Medical Center. This was the beginning of what has become Los Angeles’ permanent health care crisis as County government has struggled unsuccessfully to maintain enough hospital beds to deal with the needs of 2.5 million uninsured residents. The County has been caught in a scissors between declining fiscal capacity (the legacy of Proposition 13 in 1978) and the refusal of so many local employers to provide health benefits to their workers. In Southcentral L.A. one in two adults lacks any form of health insurance. Less than one-third of private employers in California as a whole, and even less in Los Angeles County, pay the full cost of their workers’ health insurance premiums.
As a result, in 1995, 1999, and again in 2002, the supervisors almost closed USC-County General Hospital itself: a ‘Chernobyl-like’ meltdown of health care only narrowly avoided by desperate measures at the last minute, including an emergency parcel tax and a grudging federal bailout. Although USC-County is still open, sixteen vital community health clinics have been closed, as has the ER at scandal-plagued Martin Luther King General in Willowbrook. The working poor in Los Angeles, in consequence, have only marginally better access to health care than they might possess in Mexico City or Rio de Janeiro.
The County health crisis – still just a step away from system breakdown and catastrophe – is emblematic of the larger deficit of investment in a humane social safety net. Los Angeles, as it did in 1990, continues to house the poor in the street (an estimated 90,000 homeless in the County), and the mentally ill in jails. The so-called civic ‘recovery’ of the mid-1990s and the ensuing dotcom boom years did disappointingly little to reduce the mass of poverty in the city; indeed, according to the L.A. Coalition to End Hunger and Homelessness, the number of people living in ‘high poverty’ in Los Angeles doubled during the 1990s. Los Angeles, according to United Way, remains ‘the nation’s poverty capital’ with the largest number of poor of any metropolitan area. The City’s family poverty rate is double the national average, and an amazing 59 per cent of students in public schools qualify for free or reduced-price lunch programs. (More broadly, the L.A.—Riverside—Orange County area has the highest percentage of families in poverty and the lowest percentage of high school graduates of the nation’s fourteen largest metropolitan areas.)
Most of the poor, or at least poor parents, are in the labor force, and the persistence of such high levels of poverty through the last decade is evidence of labor markets that provide few footholds for occupational or income mobility. In part, this is the result of the educational shortfall in the labor force: an extraordinary 78 per cent of adults in Los Angeles County are not college graduates, and 1.8 million are illiterate. Adult education, in other words, is an enormous, largely unmet public need (as well as the vital precondition to reskilling and economic mobility).
Meanwhile, Los Angeles Unified School District continues its slow decline: two-fifths of current high school students do not graduate with their class. The Latino graduation rate is the worst: only 53 per cent. But wages in California over the last generation have increased only for workers with a college degree: those with high school or less have lost ground in the last decade. This may partially explain why Latino poverty in L.A. County soared from 22 to 35 per cent during the early 1990s recession, then fell back to an uncomfortable plateau of 30 per cent, where it has remained stuck ever since.
The other side of poverty and vulnerability, of course, is inequality, and the Los Angeles metropolitan area has almost Latin-American extremes of wealth and poverty. During the 1990s, real household incomes fell throughout much of Southern California, but the worst drop in the median income was in the City of Los Angeles, where it fell by 9.1 per cent. At the same time, the percentage of households in poverty increased from 18 to 22 per cent, while the percentage with an annual income of more than $100,000 increased from 9.7 to 15.7 per cent. Almost 700,000 working adults in L.A. County have incomes below the poverty line, and seven of the ten fastest-growing occupations in the city, including cashier and security guard, pay less than $25,000 per year. The Times editorialized in 2000 that L.A. and California had entered a ‘new Gilded Age’ where ‘the income gap between rich and poor is wider than at almost any time in history and magnified by the sudden wealth and lavish living of a growing elite’.
Meanwhile, the heirs of Howard Jarvis – almost thirty years on – continue to repel all assaults on the perverse edifice of Proposition 13. Land inflation remains the most destabilizing force in Southern California life, but Prop. 13, as Peter Shrag has so powerfully shown, ensures that the greater part of the real-estate windfall annually passes through the economy, on its way to buy Hummers, Laker tickets, and vacation homes, without paying a tithe to schools and the creation of the human capital on which the future of California will rest. Luxury lifestyles are subsidized, as it were, on both ends: by a seemingly infinite supply of cheap service labor, and by the tax advantages that accrue to real-estate and sumptuary consumption.
5. TERMINAL SUBURBS
Real-estate inflation is the tax that one portion of society – older, more affluent homeowners and corporate landowners in coastal areas – levies on the rest of society: especially younger, less affluent families. It is also the economic passport that allowed hundreds of thousands of largely white, affluent Southern Californians to vote with their feet and leave the region in the 1990s. The City of Los Angeles alone lost 200,000 white, non-Latino residents in the 1990s; the County, almost one-fifth of its total white population. This Anglo exodus – to a much smaller extent, also a Black out-migration – explains the ironic fate of the ‘slow-growth’ movement that in the 1980s so dominated the suburban landscape.
Fifteen years ago it was apparent that residential development had reached the last frontier of available land within an hour of the coast. Today, this final build-out is in progress from Santa Barbara to San Diego. The dirt is almost gone. In Orange County, the Los Angeles Times reported two years ago, there was room left for maybe 40,000 additional homes in Irvine and Rancho Mission Viejo east of San Juan Capistrano. Currently, Orange County has more than 3,600 residents per square mile; Los Angeles County around 2,200. Believe it or not, the Los Angeles–Anaheim—Riverside metropolitan area now has a higher density (8.31 people per acre) than the New York regional plan area (7.99) or San Francisco—Oakland (7.96).
Homeowners associations, of course, still remain potent forces in local politics, and suburban coalitions still wrangle with developers over the scale and pace of land conversion. Likewise, the secession movement in the San Fernando Valley – which so shrewdly seized the center of attention in L.A. city politics for five years – can be construed as the virtual apotheosis of earlier slow-growth and NIMBYite protests. Yet it was also, I believe, a last hurrah.
Fifteen years on, slow-growth forces have won many small battles but lost the war. It is clear that thousands of households have resolved the contradictions of growth and residential quality of life by using their Southern California equity to purchase shares in dream retirements or new lives in amenity-rich areas throughout the West. The white flight from Southern California in the 1990s is unique in California history and was instigated by a number of different factors, ranging from recession, fear of crime and natural disaster, to the irresistible attractions of golf-centered utopias in the Arizona and Nevada deserts.
Local planners in exurban boomtowns like St. George, Utah and Casa Grande, Arizona estimate that about 40 per cent of their new residents are émigré Southern Californians. Similar numbers have been quoted by Hal Rothman and other experts on the supernova-like growth of southern Nevada. These ‘off-worlds,’ to use the terminology of Blade Runner, seem to be part of a larger sorting-out process by which white, religiously-conservative ‘red America’ is taking its distance from heavily immigrant and liberal ‘blue America’. Within Southern California itself, meanwhile, neighborhood diversity is too often an artifact of one group moving in, another moving out. Although there are some convincing examples of apparently stable suburban diversity – Cerritos, Quartz Hill or Moreno Valley – the larger tendency is still toward regional re-segregation represented by largely monochromatic Simi Valley, Laguna Hills, and Temecula Valley.
6. SPURNING THE PEACEMAKERS
Homicide is still the largest single cause of death for children under eighteen in Los Angeles County. Years ago, I used the Sheriff Department’s ‘gang-related homicide’ data to estimate that some 10,000 young people had been killed in the L.A. area’s street wars, from the formation of the first Crips sets in 1973—4 until 1992. This, of course, is a fantastic, horrifying figure, almost three times the death toll of the so-called ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland over a roughly similar time span. It is even more harrowing when we consider that most of the homicides have been concentrated in a handful of police divisions. Add to the number of dead the injured and permanently disabled, as well as those incarcerated or on parole for gang-related violations, and you have a measure of how completely Los Angeles – its adult leaderships and elites – has betrayed several generations of its children.
Soon after I published City of Quartz, I wrote and narrated an hour-long film for Channel 4 in the UK. In the documentary, I interviewed dozens of gang members, as well as community activists, on both the South and Eastside; none expressed even a grain of optimism about reducing gang violence. All the more extraordinary, then, when on the eve of the Rodney King riot, the leaderships of the major Black gangs in Watts announced a truce: a truce that endured for more than a decade and was replicated by local truces in other war-torn parts of the city. The initial response of the LAPD and Sheriff’s – especially the corrupt and tainted anti-gang unit, CRASH – was to do everything possible to sabotage and undermine the truce. To the credit of Chief Willie Williams, he pulled the dogs off; to the discredit of Mayor Riordan and his business backers, they refused any dialogue with the truce organizers.
It had been obvious for most of a generation that the only people who can end the street wars are the warriors themselves. Mindless punishment and super-incarceration have been societal disasters: locking away tens of thousands of young people in hyper-violent prisons, dominated by institutionalized race wars, without any semblance of education, rehabilitation or hope. The real function of the prison system, indeed, is not to safeguard communities, but to warehouse hatred for the day when it returns to the street. In contrast, the organizers of the gang truce movement offered an unprecedented framework for dialogue with the youth of the city: a chance to turn street warriors into community organizers and peacemakers. But with the heroic exceptions of Congress-woman Maxine Waters and State Senator Tom Hayden, no elected politician even bothered to listen. Funds from Rebuild L.A. went to the usual suspects – politically connected developers and ministers – while almost nothing trickled down to the housing projects or mean streets. Unlike 1965, there was no social postmortem on the causes of the riot, nor any serious new investment in youth employment and recreation, despite the proven track record of programs like the California Conservation Corps.
The failure to acknowledge the gang truce or build on its early successes was a first-rate tragedy, whose price we are now paying in an inexorable, deadly resumption of gang warfare. The gravest danger, as always, is inter-ethnic violence, spreading from the chronic warfare between Blacks and Latinos that is tolerated in the county jails and state prisons. Our overcrowded penal institutions, governed by a cynical calculus of social incapacitation, are expressive of the mean Victorian ethos that currently commands California politics.
7. CITY OF ORGANIZERS?
Finally, a cautious note of optimism. The local labor movement is largely missing from City of Quartz, yet – as I argued later in a little book called Magical Urbanism – Los Angeles over the last fifteen years became the principal R&D center for the future of the American labor movement. The militant, creative organizing campaigns of the janitors, hotel workers and drywall workers kept hope alive in L.A. during the tough years of the 1990s and helped train a new generation of activists. As elite power become more politically diffuse and uncertain, the renovated L.A. County Federation of Labor emerged as the single most important electoral and social force in the city. The successful Living Wage campaign demonstrated that local government could play a proactive role in restructuring labor markets and preventing the race to the bottom in wages and benefits. The long, bitter but ultimately successful campaign to defend the rights of catering and cleaning workers at USC – culminating in hunger strikes and mass arrests – took the battle into an inner sanctum of elite privilege and self-righteousness. Los Angeles in the 1990s became a city of organizers.
But Los Angeles’ new progressive politics, buoyed by the dynamism of the new unionism, has arrived at a watershed. Clearly, the labor movement needs to stay on the political offensive, expanding its clout into additional areas of vital interest to local working people, especially the politics of land-use, transportation, healthcare and housing. It requires an expansive vision and comprehensive program, yet the labor movement has mortgaged its future to a Democratic Party, large elements of which are in full retreat from traditional New Deal commitments. In striving to remake it, labor runs the risks of having its own new unity and militancy unmade instead. Indeed, some would argue that the Democratic Party is the inevitable graveyard of political principle.
Labor’s forward march in Los Angeles, and with it the future of the urban region, depends, in my opinion, upon further consolidation of a programmatic vision, built around a human needs agenda, that is not hostage to any individual campaign or political personality. Los Angeles needs, in short, a more, not less, ideological politics. I find nothing praiseworthy in current calls for more ‘centrism’ or ‘pragmatism’: euphemisms for the continual process of incremental adjustment to the rightward drift of the Democratic Party. In contrast, conservative Christian groups have built impressive political bases in local suburban politics largely through unyielding, programmatic tenacity. Odd to say, but many conservatives seem to have a better grasp of Gramsci than many on the Left. Above all, they understand the principle that a hegemonic politics must represent a consistent continuum of values: it must embody a morally coherent way of life.
Upton Sinclair – the most famous Socialist in Southern California in the 1920s and 1930s – understood this instinctively and completely. His EPIC movement of 1934 brilliantly used the ethic of the New Testament to argue the compelling case for production for use and full employment. He campaigned on the straightforward principle that the right to earn a living for one’s family transcends the right to own idle property. His campaign was a crusade that lit fires in the hearts of millions of ordinary Californians, most of whom had never previously paid any attention to ideas from the Left.
But what is the equivalent crusade today? What moral imperative should organize and give passion to a progressive politics for Los Angeles and California? The answer, I think, has been provided by the extraordinary, if underpublicised hearings that Los Angeles state senators Gloria Romero and Richard Alarcon conducted several years ago, which focused on the scandal of poverty, particularly child poverty in California. They argued with real eloquence that California – one of the richest societies in world history – needs to declare war on the poverty and youth violence in its inner cities and farm communities. This is the great issue – not tax relief for corporations and SUV owners, or persecution of undocumented immigrants – that should be the moral center of local and state politics.
The gigantic demonstrations of Latino immigrants and their allies in the spring of 2006, which reclaimed downtown Los Angeles in the name of El Pueblo, revealed the social power of the city’s blue-collar neighborhoods and suburbs. The challenge to labor activists and community organizers is to harness this emergent power to a consistent progressive program, and the centerpiece of that program, in my opinion, should be a social and economic bill of rights for the city’s children. At the end of the day, the best measure of the humanity of any society is the life and happiness of its children. We live in a rich society with poor children, and that should be intolerable.
San Diego, April 2006
