Los Angeles’ next mayor will face impending crises
LOS ANGELES — Peter Nichols has lived for 22 years in a two-bedroom Cape Cod in the Fairfax district, in the flat, bungalow-lined midsection between the east and the west sides of Los Angeles.
His block used to make him proud, with its neat lawns and palm trees: Crime was low. Streets were clean. When a problem arose — drug use in the park, traffic from the nearby Melrose Avenue shopping district — the city seemed to know how to address it.
All that has changed. Homicides in his area have risen from one in 2019 to more than a dozen this year, according to the Los Angeles Police Department. He cannot drive more than a block or two without passing homeless encampments. Drought has withered the yards. Trash blows past on the Santa Ana winds.
Waves of robberies have left armed guards posted for months outside high-end sneaker boutiques. Earlier this month, police officers responding to a burglary four miles from Nichols’ house arrested a parolee in connection with the slaying of an 81-year-old philanthropist in her mansion.
“Now there’s this new variant,” he said about the coronavirus. “It’s like, what are we going to die of? Ricochet? Robbery gone wrong? Heat? Drought? Omicron? Delta? If you were watching this through the lens of a camera, you would think it was the makings of a disaster movie.”
As the nation’s second-most-populated city struggles to emerge from the wreckage of the pandemic, a pileup of crises is confronting Los Angeles — and those who hope to become its next mayor next year.
Tens of thousands of people remain unhoused, violent crime is up and sweeping problems like income disparity and global warming are reaching critical mass.
The anxiety is being felt in all corners of the city. In a recent poll by the Los Angeles Business
Council Institute and the Los
Angeles Times, 57 percent of county voters listed public safety as a serious or very serious problem, up 4 percentage points from an almost identical poll in 2019.
More than 9 in 10 voters said homelessness was a serious or very serious problem. And more than a third said they had experienced homelessness in the past year or knew someone who had.
“Rome is burning,” former Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa recently said in a local television interview.
In fact, crime rates are far below the historic peaks of the 1990s, coronavirus infections are a small fraction of last December’s terrifying levels and the city is making some progress in its breathtaking homelessness crisis, thanks to pandemic funding.
But the unease is already shaping next year’s mayoral race, a contest that civic leaders say will have the highest stakes in decades.
The urgency comes as Los Angeles’ current mayor, Eric Garcetti, enters the homestretch of his administration. Ineligible for reelection because of a twoterm limit, Garcetti is scheduled to leave office in December 2022.
With roughly a year left on the job, he also is “between two worlds,” he said in an interview this fall: He has been tapped by President Joe Biden to become the U.S. ambassador to India, but it has taken six months for his confirmation to be scheduled for its committee hearing Tuesday.
If confirmed, he could leave office early, and the City Council could name an interim replacement, but the fate of his nomination is uncertain: Republicans have slowed approvals for scores of the president’s nominees, and additional hurdles have arisen involving City Hall.
Even without those distractions, Garcetti can only do so much.
Los Angeles’ mayor is weak compared with other big-city mayors. Shaped by backlash to the East Coast machine politics of the early 1900s, Los Angeles is famously ambivalent about power and institutionally diffuse.