LIKE protagonists in a Hollywood movie, Los Angeles seems always to be hurtling towards triumph or disaster. In 1988 the LA 2000 Committee declared that its strategic site and magnetic powers to attract capital and labour would make Los Angeles “THE city of the 21st century”, just as New York, London and Paris had owned previous eras. Writing 25 years later, the Los Angeles 2020 Commission discloses a darker vision for America’s second city. In two reports with names that might have been borrowed from clapped-out action thrillers (“A Time for Truth” and “A Time for Action”) the commission paints a picture of a city in steep decline and a leadership sluggish in thought and action.
Four years after its report, the optimistic spirit of the LA 2000 Committee went up in smoke in the Los Angeles riots. The city is much safer now, but the 2020 commission has grounds for pessimism. The problems outlined in its first report, published in December, are serious: dismal public schools, crumbling infrastructure and soaring employee costs. A city still celebrated as a place of dynamism and opportunity is unable to create jobs for its growing workforce. Since 1990 total employment has actually fallen, though that figure disguises some wild fluctuations (see chart). In 2012 the official poverty rate for Los Angeles County was 19.1%; in 2011, on a broader measure that takes the cost of living and government benefits into account, it stood at 26.9%. Even Hollywood is tottering, as film and TV producers are lured away by tax bribes in other states.
Back to basics
It was against this backdrop that Eric Garcetti (pictured), the mayor of Los Angeles, delivered his first state-of-the-city address on April 10th and, four days later, his first budget proposal, worth $8.1 billion. Both followed the understated approach to governing that Mr Garcetti has adopted since taking office last June. Unlike his recent predecessors, the mayor proposed no show-stopping initiatives or benchmarks against which he could be judged. His would be a “back-to-basics” regime, he declared. The big news from the state-of-the-city address was that a motorway lane would open a few months earlier than expected.
Young, smooth and charming, the mayor is easy to like. He talks a good game on transparency and transport, and can speak frankly about some of the city’s problems. City Hall, he said last week, had become a place “where jobs go to die, strangled by bureaucracy and indifference”. In a recent public forum your correspondent received a mayoral correction when he noted that Mr Garcetti had described terminals at Los Angeles’s airport as terrible; the word he had actually used, the mayor said, was “crappy”.
Yet some observers are asking when all this real talk will translate into action. Few of the pledges Mr Garcetti made last week were costed or came with deadlines. By budget day his campaign vow to scrap the city’s gross-receipts business tax had shrivelled to a plan to snip it from 0.51% to 0.425% over the next four years (although he continues to promise its elimination). Sceptics grouch that they have no idea what the mayor spends his time doing.
Such complaints are merely the mutterings of the commentariat, says Raphe Sonenshein, head of the Pat Brown Institute at California State University, Los Angeles. Angelenos, never as concerned with the high politics of city government as their peers in New York or Chicago, worry about such things as potholes and electricity bills (Los Angeles’s Department of Water and Power is the largest municipal utility in the United States). Mr Garcetti has devoted much time to tinkering with the city’s bureaucracy; such manoeuvrings may not attract headlines, says Mr Sonenshein, but they are more likely to yield results than the expansive visions of some of his predecessors, which often flopped. Mr Garcetti emphasises that he wants to turn Los Angeles into America’s “best-run” city.
Yet that leaves many questions unanswered. In 2003 retirement costs accounted for 3% of the city’s general fund; now they gobble up 18%, a figure that will rise further without action. Los Angeles’s public schools, which mainly serve Latino children, perform poorly, raising fears of stratification along ethnic as well as economic lines. Some American mayors have tackled these issues head-on, reforming pension plans or pushing charter schools. Mr Garcetti has had little to say about them (schools, admittedly, lie largely outside his jurisdiction, but that has not stopped other mayors from piping up).
The same could be said for another threat to Los Angeles’s economic future. Rising house prices drive so many Angelenos out that the population of the metropolitan area grew by only 3.7% between 2000 and 2010, slower than every other big metro area bar New York. As elsewhere along the Californian coast, high demand and supply constraints have conspired to lift prices; and often it is middle-income residents who are forced to leave. House prices in Los Angeles rose by 17% last year, and last October Trulia, a real-estate website, found that Los Angeles was the second-least affordable city for middle-class housing in America, behind San Francisco.
In a city not known for restraint, Mr Garcetti’s approach can be refreshing. But it is too soon to determine whether it is working. A sterner test than he has yet faced may lie before him, in the form of one of the disasters, natural or man-made, that befall the city from time to time, or a fiscal crunch that could force a hard decision on taxes (vast deficits are projected for years). If not, his challenge will be to demonstrate that his modest proposals are enough to tackle Los Angeles’s deep-seated problems.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Clipped wings"
