The Decline of Los Angeles

Touching on LA’s history, contemporary malaise and decline, Forbes has published a scathing assessment on The Decline of Los Angeles.

A Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and executive editor of New Geography.com Joel Kotkin asks why the city that has declined under Villaraigosa’s reign would so willingly re-elect him.

Now L.A. seems to be fading rapidly toward irrelevancy. Its economy has tanked faster than that of the nation, with unemployment now close to 10%. The port appears in decline, the roads in awful shape and the once potent industrial base continues to shrink.

Job growth in the area, notes a forecast by the University of California at Santa Barbara, dropped 0.6% last year and is expected to plunge far more rapidly this year. Roughly one-fifth of the population depends on public assistance or benefits to survive.

Once a primary destination for Americans, L.A.--along with places like Detroit, New York and Chicago--now suffers among the highest rates of out-migration in the country. Particularly hard hit has been its base of middle-class families, which continues to shrink. This is painfully evident in places like the San Fernando Valley, where I live, long a middle-class outpost for L.A., much like Queens and Staten Island are for New York.

In such a context, Villaraigosa's upcoming coronation seems hard to comprehend. By most accounts, he has been at best a mediocre mayor, with few real accomplishments besides keeping police chief Bill Bratton, a man appointed by his predecessor. So far, Bratton has managed to keep the lid on crime, a testament both to his skills and to the demographic aging of much of the city.

All true, except that Kotkin missed Chief Bratton’s role in the disaster.

Bratton has not kept “the lid on crime” but has managed, as he was appointed to do, to keep the lid on crime statistics and reporting. By reporting burglaries as trespass (with a theft) and incorporating neighborhoods of vehicle burglaries into single incidents, it’s hard to believe that statistics remain as high as they are. This is not a difficult feat when the mayor pays the Chief $300K/year to not arrest his friends, while prosecutors, the judiciary and the media willingly play along. Without accurate reporting, Sheriff Baca’s pending release of another one-third of LA’s inmates onto the streets of LA will not likely bruise Bratton’s juked statistics.

LA has, for all intents and purposes, returned to the corrupt days of the Shaw Administration (1930s) and even Hollywood’s yellowed façade cannot save it.