Is L.A. failing California?
California has a huge problem that it can’t remove with a recall election. The problem’s name is Los Angeles.
We, Californians, love to lambaste San Francisco, its wealth, powerful politicians and self-parodying progressivism. But it’s actually L.A. County — home to one in four Californians — that undermines our state the most.
California as a whole can’t prosper if its biggest, most diverse metropolis keeps floundering. Since the early 1990s recession, L.A. has been a drag on California’s economic growth and employment. L.A. hasn’t matched California’s gains in education, health or voter turnout. And Los Angeles has been the biggest driver of high poverty rates and rising inequality across the state.
L.A. is also where California lost the pandemic. The county of 10 million has one-third of the state’s COVID cases and 40 percent of the deaths. If Los Angeles had controlled COVID better, California as a whole might not be compared unfavorably to Florida and other states.
L.A.’s outsized coronavirus failures also had a statewide impact. State officials created public confusion as they sought, in vain, to produce COVID guidance that could fit small counties with few cases and California’s largest county, a virus hotspot. Maddeningly, the dysfunctional
L.A. Unified School District and its teachers’ union used their political muscle to delay by months Gov. Gavin Newsom’s efforts to reopen schools not just in L.A., but statewide.
In this context, it made sense that Newsom broke with precedent and held this year’s state of the state speech in Dodger Stadium, rather than in the Capitol in Sacramento. If L.A. doesn’t control the virus, and rebound from the pandemic’s economic and educational damage, the state will be in deep trouble — and Newsom could be recalled later this year.
But the stakes of getting it right in Los Angeles extend beyond the fates of the governor or the state. L.A.’s struggles point to larger American failures to make prosperity equitable, and provide the disadvantaged with a foundation for building higher-wage employment and family wealth.
As outlined in a 2020 report, “No Going Back L.A.,” from the Committee for Greater L.A., Los Angeles is on this struggle’s front lines because it experienced major demographic change before the rest of the U.S. The county’s share of people of color has risen from 47 percent in 1980 to 73 percent today. During the same time, middle-class jobs fled and wages stagnated. Systemic racial disparities cost Los Angeles $300 billion-plus annually in GDP, according to USC’s Equity Research Institute.
Ending these disparities is an epic task of integration — connecting people, opportunities, schools, businesses, health care and policies to keep people from falling behind. But L.A., for all its success creating culture that connects the world, is rotten at integrating itself.
This problem is not new. In 1946, journalist and lawyer Carey McWilliams wrote that Los Angeles is “chronically unable to integrate its population,” observing “There is something disturbing about this corner of America, a sinister suggestion of transience. There is a quality, hostile to men in the very earth and air here.”
That prose mirrors the 21st century conclusions of the UCLA scholar Michael Storper, who studied the different economic trajectories of the Bay Area and L.A. In 1970, those two big regional economies were at parity. Now the Bay Area is 30 percent richer than L.A.
Why? Because Bay Area people and institutions networked, and collaboratively built Silicon Valley. But L.A. didn’t do the same — its communities and institutions remained separate and siloed. Among the results: wages for L.A.’s lowest-paid workers declined by 25 percent since 1979, even as housing costs soared.
Pre-pandemic, L.A. defenders could dismiss criticism by pointing to declining crime, rising graduation rates or ambitious plans to fight homelessness. But the coronavirus made L.A.’s deeper problems undeniable. COVID followed the map of L.A.’s inequality, killing at higher rates in our most overcrowded and underserved communities.
The big question now is whether L.A. can connect itself and build new supportive systems for its people. To that end, the “No Going Back L.A.” report is promising, as a collaboration of the Committee for Greater L.A. and USC and UCLA scholars. The report’s ideas include stronger protections for undocumented Angelenos, a regional housing strategy and making high-speed internet a civil right.
Transforming L.A. from segregated patchwork into integrated whole will require the expertise and support of the rest of California. The politics of assisting our biggest county won’t be easy. But California needs to save L.A., so it can save itself.