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