Los Angeles

Los Angeles: the City Economic Development Built

Los Angeles

Los Angeles dates from the 17th century. Its 1900 its population slightly exceeded 100,000, the 36th largest city in the nation. Yet as late as 1870 fewer than 5800 lived within its borders. LA itself was a Privatist growth machine that spun off a series of interrelated, yet autonomous cities, counties and unincorporated areas–“a multi-headed beast with no center” (Fulton, 2001). Characterized by a poorly demarcated downtown, a series of waterfront centers spread the length and the breath of the city itself, and a plethora of main streets with commercial strips, behind which were sprawling residential neighborhoods. The metropolitan area stretched over several counties, a hundred miles along the coast and a hundred miles deep into California’s interior–with more autonomous jurisdictional policy systems than could ever be imagined—sprawl does not begin to describe it

The metropolitan economy became home to a host of host of emerging gazelles: technology, oil, Hollywood/entertainment, tourism, aerospace, agriculture, international trade, business services–and a robust construction-home building-finance sector that consumed ever more land to provide homes, shops and jobs for a seemingly endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. An oil boom, a southern California affair, by 1914 moved California into first place among the oil-producing states of America. La was “cluster” heaven as well.

The result was a decentralized settlement pattern quite different from the industrial cities in the East and Midwest … metropolitan Los Angeles did not grow by radiating from a single center. It appeared when many different centers blurred together … [Huntington’s streetcar system] a backbone [that] made sprawl permanent by facilitating long-distance commuting. Soon the automobile began to fill in the gaps. (Fulton, 2001, pp. 8-9)

Fulton conceived as Los Angeles as “the anti-city“. How did this so-called “anti-city” get built? What role did economic development play?

As a starting point Los Angeles enjoyed few, if any, natural advantages. To Clark (Clark, 1983, p. 283) there was never any economic or geo-political reason for Los Angeles to exist. The geography it occupied was surrounded by desert and mountains, had no access to natural resources relevant to the industries that eventually located there, no water, and in the beginning, virtually no people. A no-man’s land between different cultures and ethnic groups, LA didn’t possess a natural harbor with access to the Pacific. “Not only is Southern California an island, it is a desert island”. “Through a combination of advertising and engineering, Los Angeles created the conditions that nature did not provide”.

Los Angeles was alleged to be new kind of city: a post-industrial city with a new economy, politics, and society whose development started when the Eastern industrial city was entering its golden years. “Los Angeles brought in the money necessary for an expanding economy, not through exporting goods but by drawing in people. The migrants did not come just for factory jobs, of which the city had few to offer, but in the pursuit of hopes and dreams”. Once there, the jobs came. “Los Angeles became the nation’s dream spinner and faith healer: the city of the Second Chance (Clark, 1983, p. 269). In some ways Los Angeles was an ED pyramid scheme based upon attracting people, which attracted money and firms. To attract migrants meant infrastructure, and hustling jobs from new industries and sectors that had never existed previously. If there is any city that “economic development built” Los Angeles was it. Los Angeles, the un-immaculate conception, created itself, as opposed to San Francisco, the offspring of location and monopolistic starting advantage.

Los Angeles had many city builders (Huntington, Wiggins, Mulholland and Harry Chandler (McWilliams, 1946)) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests” that drew from the area’s distinctive political culture of Midwestern Privatist immigrants [that produced] the most effective growth machine) ever created” (Fulton, 2001, p. 7). No one city-building could ever construct this rapidly sprawling, uncontrollable physical mass, it took an oligarchy to build it, and manage its infrastructures: water, housing, transportation—and attraction. With so many city-builders simultaneously their havoc on that arid land, it was useful for this oligarchy to find a place, a structure, to come together to amass and package their individual power and resources. That structure, LA’s principal EDO in the city-building era was the chamber of commerce. In an age when chambers were full of one percenters that was not unique. What was different was that the oligopoly used the chamber not to accommodate growth—but to foster it. LA’s early chamber anticipated the Houston’s 8F elite and Dallas’s Citizen’s Council by nearly fifty years.

The City that ED built

Founded in 1781, it was an 1887 Santa Fe Railroad, speculative bubble “set[ing] a standard for flimflam” never again equaled– that launched LA into history. The LA real estate speculative boom was made possible in a city of only 6,000 by a $600,000 “subsidy” paid to attract the Southern Pacific Railroad in 1876. After that “Some promoters attached oranges to Joshua trees”[i]; banks lent money, and developers laid out a half-million lots of land. A second line, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe opened in 1883 by which time population had increased to about 11,000. In 1887 it cost only $1 to travel from the Mississippi Valley to LA. “To increase traffic the railroads sought to attract settlers and mounted a national advertising campaign that pictured Southern California as the Garden of Eden. Rate wars meant that cheap overland transportation was available (Blackford, 1993, p. 18).

The advertising schemes worked—the city grew by 500 percent in less than one year—to 50,000 plus. And within months the bubble burst.

Someone had to pick up the pieces. “At a meeting of business leaders on 15 October 1888, Harrison Gray Otis, editor of the Los Angeles Times, spearheaded the creation of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which embarked on a course of continuous promotion, distributing two million pieces of literature within the next three years. From this time forward, Los Angeles advertised itself relentlessly as the golden land of promise and hope” (Clark, 1983, pp. 270-1) Population growth preceded economic expansion. People created jobs.

The ED strategy was to have an EDO that could get the collateral material out, but also imagination to do the unthinkable, the audacity to create the bizarre, and the sales/charisma to attract staff and business investment. That man was Frank Wiggins; first as promotion director than Chamber CEO. Wiggins’s believed that oranges personified sun, hope, and a land of plenty. He took a bunch California orange growers to the St Louis World Fair and set up an exhibit. He followed up with three orange exhibits at the Chicago World’s Fair (he brought with him 375,000 oranges). To grow so many oranges Wiggins organized an orange grower’s cooperative (Sunkist) and started shipping oranges across the nation with scenic covers on the crates. His tourism program was incredibly successful.

At the 1893 World’s Fair he constructed a giant elephant made of walnuts and brought it back for permanent exhibit in Los Angeles. “At the same permanent exhibit, visited by 185,000 people annually … was a giant tower of ears of corn, shaped into a giant ear [of corn presumably], and a statute of a huge bottle of wine, made up of many smaller bottles” (Mead, 2014, pp. 168-9). Diversifying his hoopla, the chamber targeted the new aircraft sector, then the automobile—Wiggins strongly pressed LA transportation officials to build more roads fast.

In 1907 a movie entrepreneur, William Selig, got a brochure in the mail from Wiggins. The brochure promised 350 days of sun in Los Angeles. At the moment Selig was mad because of recent bad weather in Chicago, so he sent a crew to LA to film. “Others quickly followed him with the chamber doing all it could to attract them. By 1915 the Chamber was bragging that 80 percent of the nation’s movies were made in LA” Hollywood, a small community in 1870, incorporated in 1903 (annexed in 1910) was the creation of “the father of Hollywood”, H. J. Whitley, president of the Los Pacific Boulevard and Development Company. Its 1910 annexation was facilitated by the odd fact that Hollywood zoning did not permit a movie theatre within city limits—LA would. D .W. Griffith was the first to produce a movie in Hollywood, a 17 minute affair called “Old California”. The first film made in Hollywood by a Hollywood studio was filmed in Whitley’s living room in 1911. By 1920 four major film companies, Paramount, RKO, Warner and Columbia had set up studios in Hollywood. The initial “Hollywood” sign on the hill went up in 1923. Whoever said collateral mailings are worthless?

When he died in 1924 Wiggins had worked for the chamber for 35 years; it had 7500 members. LA during his career grew from 50,000 to 576,000 and five years after his death, 1.2 million. Life Magazine described Wiggins as “the greatest city booster that ever lived” (Mead, 2014, pp. 169-70).

[i] Could someone explain the Joshua thing to me? I guess oranges don’t grow on Joshua trees?

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Los Angeles Infrastructure

Orange juice needs water —and so do hordes of new residents. The man who delivered it, the villain of the “Chinatown” movie, was LA’s chief engineer William Mulholland. Born in 1877 Ireland , Mulholland, as head of LA’s water department, fabricated a plan to get water by aqueducts from the Owens River at the base of the Sierra Mountains 223 miles away. He annexed the San Fernando Valley to do it, but by 1920 he provided whatever water LA needed to meet its growth needs. In so doing, of course, he triggered the infamous California Water Wars. The collapse of a dam in 1928, however, resulted in the deaths of sixty-four workers and destroyed several small cities. That ended his career.

It was not the automobile that got Los Angeles residents around in the early years. Rather, it was the arguably best transportation system of its time, the (yellow and red) trolley-streetcar Pacific Electric Railway. Advertising that one could “live in the country and work in the city”, the Pacific Electric connected the forty-two jurisdictions that comprised LA metro–facilitating the now-famous sprawled LA area. The Railway went thirty-five miles out and was reputed in 1910 to be the nation’s largest interurban transportation network, stretching 1300 miles in twenty separate lines. The Pacific Electric was owned and managed by Henry Huntington, a New York-born railroad magnate. As streetcar owners were “wont” to do, numerous real estate projects, subdivisions, and neighborhoods were financed and built along his lines. Huntington was a Wiggin’s supporter and a “booster extraordinaire”.

Having said all this, LA became known as the city constructed for the automobile. In 1920, the city abandoned the Pacific Electric and paved it over with a road system. “By 1930, Los Angeles County contained more cars per resident than any other community in the world”.[6]

[1] Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890-1920, op. cit., p. 18.

[2] David L. Clark, “Improbable Los Angeles”, op. cit. pp. 270-271. Could someone explain the Joshua thing to me?

[3] Chris Mead, The Magicians of Main Street, op. cit., pp. 168-169.

[4] BTW, the famous Hollywood sign on the hill went up in 1923.

[5] Chris Mead, The Magicians of Main Street, op. cit., pp. 169-170.

[6] David L. Clark, Improbable Los Angeles, op. cit., p. 272.

Los Angeles

Los Angeles: the Bradley Years

Emerging in 1973 from this odd marriage between a Privatist, FIRE dominated growth machine and a Progressive Democratic political coalition was a reformist city council member, Tom Bradley (a former police officer, then lawyer) who on his second try for mayor was elected mayor. Bradley ran on a liberal, coalition-building, multi-racial and neighborhood based platform. Bradley was Los Angeles first black mayor and his tenure lasted two decades until 1993. As such he could be included in Teaford’s messiah mayor category, but, in our opinion that would obscure the distinctiveness and minimize the “thrust” of his administration–he was out less to “save” Los Angeles than to ensure its arrival as a world class city with international aspirations. Arguably the centerpieces of this vision materialized in the form of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and a massive redesign and modernization of the Airport, Harbor and Port facilities.

Bradley was especially noted for his ability to bring divergent groups together. To be sure, by the end of his administration his coalition-building image had weathered quite substantially, but until the Rodney King riots of 1992 Los Angeles enjoyed a period of relative racial harmony which sharply contrasted with many other large American cities. Without doubt, the intensity and scale of the riots revealed deep, embedded frustrations which had not been effectively addressed during Bradley’s administration[1]. It was, however, not from want of trying. Bradley did in 1973 have a vision of a “cosmopolitan Los Angeles, a world class city with mass transportation, global trade especially with the Far East, a vibrant downtown, a strong harbor, a busy international airport, and a belief in diversity. For Bradley, this vision was not just about growth; it was also about opening up new opportunities for those left out”.[2]

While the growth machine had opposed Bradley, the new mayor wasted little time in securing the passage (1974-75) of major downtown redevelopment legislation. Creating the Community Redevelopment Agency and launching the “central business redevelopment project” covering 255 blocks. Between 1975 and 2010 that project poured $750 million dollars into the Los Angeles downtown. The downtown redevelopment plan rested upon Bradley’s sense that the then fragile condition of downtown Los Angeles was insufficient to its aspiration of being a world class city. “Much of the plan was designed by a business group called the Los Angeles Central City Development Corporation”[3], a private, business-led economic development organization. Bradley’s embrace of their plan was the beginning of his administration’s commitment to business development and physical-infrastructure modernization. In this and other initiatives he enlisted the support of the infamous FIRE growth machine which, along with labor unions, became a central element in his electoral coalition and policy focus.

The Los Angeles downtown had never prospered well as the Privatist growth machine had favored the more lucrative waterfront view areas for commercial development. To avoid the possible central city decline witnessed across the nation during this period, Bradley had initiated the project. The project included the usual high-rise commercial and non-profit suspects long associated with urban renewal-like physical redevelopment and it also required the linkage by mass transit of the downtown to other key areas of the city (and Airport). But the downtown redevelopment plan also included several neighborhoods, including Watts and was focused on rebuilding and retaining key private firms (grocery stores) and shopping strips (Crenshaw and Slauson-Vermont districts) in the inner city areas devastated by the 1965 Watts riots.

Bradley’s redevelopment plan both overlapped and circumscribed an earlier 1970 planning initiative launched by the city’s planning director, Calvin Hamilton. Hamilton’s “centers concept” called for concentrating Los Angeles sprawling, car-based, decentralized strips and residential areas into high-density centers (very similar in spirit and in practice to transit-oriented development and smart growth so prevalent today). The centers concept, according to Fulton, “challenged the basic precept of the growth machine: that raw land must be continually consumed for the economy to prosper”[4]. While Bradley’s mass transit initiative would have been an integral component of the centers concept, the downtown redevelopment project was Bradley’s initiative and Hamilton (another proprietary department chief) did not receive consistent support from the mayor. The centers concept initiative, however, based as it was on extensive citizen participation in its development, generated considerable neighborhood-based resistance to the Bradley initiative.

At this point a brief tangential observation may be warranted. Bradley’s redevelopment agenda can be justifiably and simply viewed as a variation of urban renewal long the chief economic development strategy of large cities in the postwar period. The context, within which Bradley’s initiative rested, however, was that of a city which was growing significantly, showed no serious signs of decline and was intended to achieve an aspirational status of a world class city. This goal-set behind Los Angeles urban renewal reflected the growth aspirations of many Sunbelt central cities–to be sure on a reduced scale. This diversity in goal-sets from those cities that used urban renewal at the same time in the Northeast and Midwest demonstrated that economic development strategies and tools can, and are, employed to pursue quite divergent goals and objectives.

Continuing on our tangential escapade and path of simplistic generalizations, we also comment upon a critical distinguishing characteristic between economic development in areas of growth from economic development in areas of decline. In geographies of growth economic development shares its preeminent position with planning. Planning appears to be significantly more critical and involved in the policy process in those cities undergoing growth. In contrast, cities in decline frequently expect planning and planning tools to more support economic development initiatives and prospects. This is a gross and simplistic observation, we admit, but it does reflect a trend our research has consistently uncovered.

It is interesting also to note that in the period we are presently discussing, the use of TIF exploded throughout California jurisdictions. In fact, Bradley’s neighborhood redevelopment plan would be in subsequent practice, largely financed by TIF (especially in the post-1990 period). During this time (post 1980 especially), the redevelopment agency (an EDO created through state SSS legislation, multiplied like rabbits throughout the state. In many jurisdictions, the redevelopment agency was linked, in various ways, to the jurisdiction’s planning departments–in effect merging or subsuming economic development with planning. Many a California redevelopment agency would be directed by and staffed with planners. Certainly, in our discussion of 1980’s Northeast and Midwest we say that planning was quite secondary to economic development in the central cities–but found some expression in both Smart Growth and New Urbanism in the growing suburbs. It may be the relationship of planning and economic development in growing jurisdictions was also supported by the pre-World War II history we retold in previous chapters. In any case, as we resume our tale of 1980’s City of Los Angeles, we will see further evidence of planning-related forces injecting themselves into economic development policy and strategy.

Bradley’s neighborhood redevelopment project quickly ran into rocky shoals. It generated controversy from the get-go–not only from the “centers concept” people, but from a more wide-spread frustration of car-bound commuters tired of congestion, and from neighborhoods tired of the “over the counter” permitting and zoning available to projects of the growth machine members. The growth coalition had enjoyed too much of a good thing for way too long and Bradley and his economic development program got caught up in it. On top of this opposition the growing tumult which culminated with the tax rebellion, Proposition 13 in 1978, and the Reagan fiscal cutbacks beginning after 1981 even a growing city felt fiscal and revenue constraints. Neighborhood redevelopment and economic development, loaded with tax abatements and TIF deals, took the wind out of much of the 1974 plan and reduced it to a series of controversies, legal challenges, and political battles yielding only a few dramatic projects. The transit initiative stalled completely.

By the middle 1980’s Bradley’s and his growth machine allies economic development projects ran headlong into California’s infamously famous initiative and referendum process. During the 1970’s the state had augmented its environmental protection and planning laws to allow enhanced citizen access to challenge planning, zoning and environmental elements of projects through referendums. One state legislative enactment required Los Angeles to implement Calvin Hamilton’s centers concept general plan. The rezoning included in that plan was supposed to have been completed by 1982, but it was only one fourth implemented by 1984 when the city council simply defunded the rezoning and ended any further compliance with state statutes.

By 1985, legal actions by neighborhood groups resumed the process (Bradley in 1985 was able to remove Hamilton from office, however). In this tenuous stalemate between Bradley, planning requirements and neighborhood activists (not to mention Bradley running for Governor), political opponents and potential mayoral rival candidates introduced an initiative, Proposition U, for the 1986 election. Proposition U was NIMBY personified and it would have cut commercial zoning districts in half throughout the city In the November election it passed with sixty-nine percent of the votes. Bradley had lost the gubernatorial election and he now returned to focus on Los Angeles in the midst of what became labeled as the “slow growth revolution”. One aspect of this slow growth movement was personified with the popular “Not Yet New York” grouping which rejected outright Bradley’s aspirational economic development strategy to make Los Angeles a world class international city.

Bradley was now an unwilling implementer of a slow growth planning movement which stood a counter ends to his electoral coalition and the policy priorities of his administration. Over the next few years, Bradley grudgingly introduced conforming legislation; he complied with various court imposed restrictions (environmental reviews for economic development projects, for instance). By 1989, however, with his political opponents outmaneuvered, Orange County defeating its slow growth initiative, and Proposition U proponents and the average citizen moving onto their new agendas, the movement had peaked and momentum was dissipating. Bradley was once again freer to revive his electoral coalition for a last hurrah and unlike Frank Skeffington, he won it. With his fifth term in hand, Bradley returned to office and resumed his old economic development aspirations.

But a comparison of Bradley’s late 1980’s economic development program with, for example, his world city contemporaneous counterpart, Ed Koch, discussed earlier, could not be more revealing of how economic development is different in a growing community from economic development in a declining one. Bradley was coping with a victorious slow growth Proposition U environment which had essentially stopped his aspirational economic development agenda.

In a postscript, the downtown redevelopment did spring to life during the 1990’s–largely in the years of Bradley’s post-1993 Republican successor Richard Riordan. The Staples Center, a $400 million dollar sports and entertainment project opened in 1999, the Walt Disney Concert Hall (designed by Frank Gehry) and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels were key destination projects which inspired a dramatic high rise skyline transformation of the downtown area. Housing projects and significant retail investment also followed during this period. Always controversial, the $95 million dollar tax abatement to retain Stephen Spielberg’s DreamWorks film studio caused more than a few heads to nod in disapproval[5]. Still and all, Tom Bradley had left his mark on economic development in Los Angeles.

[1] Again, the frustrations were focused on the relationship of the black and minority communities with the City Police Department, a proprietary (civil service regulated) department beyond the control of the mayor. Bradley, a former police officer, had waged a twenty year war against the Police Chief Daryl Gates. To some (Joel Kotkin, for instance) the riots were more a “class based” upheaval (given participation by Hispanics, Koreans and some Whites as well).Gates lost his position as a result of the riots which focused considerable national attention on Los Angeles in a Presidential election atmosphere.

[2] Raphael J. Sonenshein, “Tom Bradley and Downtown Redevelopment” July 23, 2012

[3] Raphael J. Sonenshein, “Tom Bradley and Downtown Redevelopment” July 23, 2012

[4] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op. cit. p. 48.

[5] See for instance Peter Drier, “The Struggle for our Cities”, Social Policy, Summer, 1996. Also, Drier, John Mollenkopf and Todd Swanstrom, Place matters: Metropolitics for the Twenty-first Century (Lawrence Kansas, University of Kansas Press, 2001), p. 189.

Los Angeles

See Preface William Gibson, City of Quartz (2^nd Ed) (NY, Verso2006)—Book is essential for post Bradley LA coalitions and politics, policy system and strong ED component—themes he develops: public private union nirvana, decline of Fortress California manufacturing, victory of sprawl and growth coalition and “acceptance” of the formless physical spread, Anglo exodus like Miami, Vilargarosa as Latin Bradley with focus on CBD, skyscrapers and a Pacific Rim future,–contrasted with a DC hell, Crisps, neglected neighborhoods, social injustice, homelessness, extreme poverty and bipolar wealth each sorted themselves out in Big Sort, the centrality of the police dept as defining wedge in politics; late arrival of Latinos into politics, founder of Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust.

1999 City /Charter Reform—advisory neighborhood councils, etc

Mayors: Bradley (1973), Riordan, 1993, Hahn (2001), Villaraigosa (2005) (president Amer Fed of Govt Employees); L Eric Garcetti (2013) he is first elected Jewish mayor, Chicano heritage also, Columbia University and Phd in ethnicity from London School of Economics—charter reform in 2017

Los Angeles:

Wait a minute! Los Angeles is not a suburb! Could have fooled me. Los Angeles just never got the memo outlining how central city and suburbs were to evolve. But that doesn’t seem to have stunted her growth. Los Angeles, in terms of population at least (3.8 million), is America’s present day second “World Class”, First Tier city (having edged out Chicago for their honor in 1990). In 1900 its population slightly exceeded 100,000 (36th largest city in the nation); New York City in that year was 1st with a population of over 3.4 million. By 1940, Los Angeles’s population of 1.5 million was 5^th; in 1960 3^rd with 2.5 million (NYC 7.8 million). During the fifties, Los Angeles grew by 26% and in the sixties by 13%. In the postwar era, LA flooded into the San Fernando Valley which acquired the label “America’s Suburb”. The now-infamous “Leave it to Beaver” show (1957-1963) was filmed totally on the Los Angeles Universal set, the two houses used reflecting the Southern California suburban motif.

Los Angeles

Fulton conceived as Los Angeles as “the anti-city“. How did this so-called “anti-city” get built? What role did economic development play?

The City that ED built

The advertising schemes worked—the city grew by 500 percent in less than one year—to 50,000 plus. And within months the bubble burst.

Los Angeles Infrastructure

Orange juice needs water —and so do hordes of new residents. The man who delivered it, the villain of the “Chinatown” movie, was LA’s chief engineer William Mulholland. Born in 1877 Ireland, Mulholland, as head of LA’s water department, fabricated a plan to get water by aqueducts from the Owens River at the base of the Sierra Mountains 223 miles away. He annexed the San Fernando Valley to do it, but by 1920 he provided whatever water LA needed to meet its growth needs. In so doing, of course, he triggered the infamous California Water Wars. The collapse of a dam in 1928, however, resulted in the deaths of sixty-four workers and destroyed several small cities. That ended his career.

It was not the automobile that got Los Angeles residents around in the early years. Rather, it was the arguably best transportation system of its time, the (yellow and red) trolley-streetcar Pacific Electric Railway. Advertising that one could “live in the country and work in the city”, the Pacific Electric connected the forty-two jurisdictions that comprised LA metro–facilitating the now-famous sprawled LA area. The Railway went thirty-five miles out; LA was reputed in 1910 to be the nation’s largest interurban transportation network, stretching 1300 miles with twenty separate lines. The Pacific Electric was owned and managed by Henry Huntington, a New York-born railroad magnate. As streetcar owners were “wont” to do, numerous real estate projects, subdivisions, and neighborhoods were financed and built along his lines. Huntington was a Wiggin’s supporter and a “booster extraordinaire”.

Having said all this, LA became known as the city constructed for the automobile. In 1920, the city (which had acquired the Pacific Electric) paved it over with a road system. “By 1930, Los Angeles County contained more cars per resident than any other community in the world” (Clark, 1983, p. 272).

Said and done, the most essential infrastructure required to achieve growth was people. It was the kind of people attracted to LA that made this all work. The residents and its culture were anti-urban–a central city with a suburban mentality and culture. Its annexation-enhanced boundaries included numerous semi-autonomous residential areas. With an “in born mistrust of big government and especially of political machines”, the region in which the City lie was a “plethora of small, self-governing cities… with government close to the people as the norm” (Fulton, 2001, p. 13). Unlike its northern neighbor, San Francisco, Los Angeles did not attract anywhere near the number of foreign-born or second generation immigrants. It did not form ethnic neighborhoods to the same degree. There were lots of immigrants from Mexico, Latin America, Asia, and some from southern and eastern Europe. But by 1910 only 4% was non-white and 19% foreign-born. LA did house ethnics, but they did not dominate the regional culture—instead they existed within it, often uncomfortably. Labor-management conflict was brutal and long-standing—but a monolithic business community, led by the Los Angeles Times, made union victories rare.

Most of the early LA population was multi-generation American–formerly resident in America’s (Midwest and Great Plains) small towns and farms. They had come to LA to retire or for health reasons (the climate was thought to be a cure for several serious diseases (TB) and as thought of as “a veritable sanatorium” (Blackford, 1993, p. 18). These residents did not need factory jobs—or any job. By 1921 21% (compared to 14-17% Eastern cities) of LA’s population was older than 55. The Great Migration’s first phase added a considerable number of white southerners to this mix. The political culture that followed from this was not that of San Francisco, Oakland, Portland or Seattle. Los Angeles in this era was a Midwestern, Prohibition-leaning, and Bible-touting, pretty much anti-union, and very much Republican city. In 1920 Sister Aimee Semple McPherson, the first evangelist to use the radio, founded the first religious radio station in the nation from Los Angeles.

[1] Boulder Springs embraced it in the post-World War II period, but so did Houston and so many other cities.

[i] Could someone explain the Joshua thing to me? I guess oranges don’t grow on Joshua trees?

Los Angeles was a twentieth century growth machine–growth based on sprawl, decentralization and suburbs. “Growth Machine” was exactly how William Fulton^[1] described Los Angeles–that and “fragmented metropolis”. These two concepts drove the twentieth century evolution of the West’s Queen of cities. City builders of Los Angeles (people like Huntington, Mulholland and Harry Chandler) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests” that drew from the area’s distinctive political culture of Midwestern Privatist immigrants to create “the most effective growth machine(s) ever created“^[2]. The core dynamos of Los Angeles’ growth machine were housing, real estate, control over transportation modalities, and infrastructure. The unplanned result was a metropolitan area of several counties stretching a hundred miles along the coast and a hundred miles deep into California’s interior. If ever a western city and suburb were simultaneous in their origin, it had to have been Los Angeles.

The result was a decentralized settlement pattern quite different from the industrial cities in the East and Midwest. Unlike almost every other city in the world, metropolitan Los Angeles did not grow by radiating from a single center. It appeared when many different centers blurred together. [Huntington’s Red Car bus system provided the region] a backbone, but made sprawl permanent by facilitating long-distance commuting. Soon the automobile began to fill in the gaps… a huge real estate infrastructure emerged. The modern homebuilding industry was practically invented in Los Angeles. So, ironically enough, was modern zoning, originally promoted by local subdivides as a tool to ensure high-quality (and high-profit) development. As early as the 1920’s, traffic engineers began working on designs for the freeway system.^[3]

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Los Angeles:

Los Angeles never got the memo outlining how central city and suburbs were supposed to evolve. That didn’t affect its growth. Los Angeles today, (3.8 million), is America’s second “World Class”, First Tier city (having edged out Chicago in 1990). In 1940, Los Angeles’s population of 1.5 million was 5^th; in 1960 3^rd (2.5 million versus NYC 7.8 million). During the fifties, Los Angeles grew by 26% and in the sixties by 13%. In the postwar era, LA flooded across the San Fernando Valley which acquired the label “America’s Suburb”. The now-infamous “Leave it to Beaver” show (1957-1963), filmed on the Los Angeles Universal set, seemingly reflecting the Southern California suburban motif, has become the national image of American life in the fifties. Los Angeles ought not to be regarded as a “typical” western city; it has emerged as America’s second “world” city and its relevant comparison is not Phoenix, but New York City or London.

Los Angeles was a twentieth century growth machine—growth characterized by sprawl, decentralization and suburbs. “Growth Machine” was how William Fulton (Fulton, 2001) described Los Angeles–that and “fragmented metropolis”. Los Angeles city-builders (people like Huntington, Mulholland and Harry Chandler) were the tip of a small “cartel of powerful interests” that drew from the area’s distinctive Midwestern Privatist political culture to form “the most effective growth machine(s) ever created” (Fulton, 2001, p. 7). The dynamos of its growth machine were housing, real estate, and elite control over transportation and infrastructure. The mostly unplanned result was a metropolitan area comprised of several counties stretching a hundred miles along the coast and a hundred miles deep into California’s interior. If ever a western city and suburb were simultaneous in their development, it was Los Angeles.

Fulton describes a Privatist heaven that forged a series of interrelated fragmented cities, counties and unincorporated areas–“a multi-headed beast with no center“. Los Angeles City, with a weak downtown and a series of waterfront economic centers, spread the length and the breath of the city itself. Commercial strips, a lot deep backed up to sprawling residential neighborhoods, predominated. The economy was an unplanned, uncoordinated masterpiece of diversified gazelles: technology, Hollywood, aerospace, agriculture, international trade, business services–and a robust construction-home building-finance sector that consumed ever -more land for homes, shops and jobs to an endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. During this era, Disneyworld opened (1955), and the Dodgers (1958) and Angels (1961) came to town. Smog defined the City.

Fulton, among others, conceived Los Angeles as “the anti-city“. Its residents and its culture were anti-urban–a central city with a suburban mentality and culture. Contained within its boundaries were numerous residential areas that protected their autonomy. With an “in born mistrust of big government and especially of political machines”, the region was a “plethora of small, self-governing cities… with government close to the people as the norm” (Fulton, 2001, p. 13). Los Angeles area municipal governments traditionally have been weaker and more fragmented than, say New York City. The political structures of the metropolitan region were Progressive reformist. City managers, nonpartisan (mostly ward) elections, with a strong “Lakewood system”[i] dominated the metropolitan area.

Area policy systems were heavily impacted by a state-imposed referendum law that carried over to county/municipal levels. Presided over by a semi-weak, but highly visible mayor and an incredibly vibrant city council elected by wards in non-partisan elections, politics tended to be neighborhood- focused. Day to day policy-making, less affected by mayor than council, lent the impression the fifteen members were “the mayor of a city the size of Syracuse or Toledo.” (Fulton, 2001, p. 45) Elections in a decentralized city of this size were media affairs–driven by money and party affiliation. Independent boards/commissions and city department heads protected by civil service tenure and state regulation dominated municipal administration.

The mayor who presided over the war and early postwar years was progressive Democrat Fletcher Bowron (1938-1953) (Sitton, 2005). Like La Guardia, Bowron, a judge, came to power via a fusion party ticket elected by voters wanting change (La Guardia from Tammany), in Bowron’s case, a police scandal and corrupted municipal government. Bowron firmly embraced the fortress-military investment strategy and lent his limited powers to acquiring military investment, support of the Los Angeles port authority, and bond issues that built several cruisers for the Navy. During his era a good deal of the Los Angeles freeway system was built, and he aggressively demanded the internment of Japanese—and articulated a racist campaign against them—despite his general record as a liberal Progressive.

He aggressively sought New Deal public housing/slum clearance funds (10,000 constructed)—his would lead to his defeat in 1953 by a Republican opponent who, in a McCarthyist atmosphere, attacked him as socialist. The City during the fifties was “guided” by a Republican mayor who served two terms. Norris Poulson ran with support from the LA Times and regional business elites, opposed a Bowron 1953 housing project initiative—but later after attracting the Dodgers to LA, built a stadium on the site (battle of Chavez Ravine). He continued support for key infrastructure including LAX which commenced during his administration, and for enhancement of the LA port facilities. He also integrated the city’s police department and got yelled at by the visiting Nikita Khrushchev.

Bowron had been the longest serving mayor (five terms) and today is second to Bradley. Since 1961 to the present day, with one two-term exception, the mayor has been Democratic. Interestingly, from 1938 to 1993, only four men served as mayor.

[i] The Lakewood system, approved in 1954, allows cities and suburbs to contract with the county for pivotal services such as police, fire, garbage and the like. The unanticipated effect of the Lakewood system is that it facilitated municipal fragmentation transferring the costs of critical infrastructure and service needs to the urban county. Together with county wide special districts (in Los Angeles case the Water Authority is a good example), the Lakewood system enabled fragmentation as well as affordable municipal governance.

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Fulton is describing the Privatist heaven, but the workings of that Privatist growth machine created a series of interrelated fragmented cities, counties and unincorporated areas–“a multi-headed beast with no center“, a central city of Los Angeles with a weak downtown and a series of waterfront economic centers spread the length and the breath of the city itself. Commercial strips, a lot deep and backed up to sprawling residential neighborhoods, predominated. During these years the famous electrified rail system disappeared year by year—replaced by even more freeways. The economy was a unplanned and uncoordinated masterpiece of diversified gazelles: technology, Hollywood, aerospace, agriculture, international trade (the City of Los Angeles Port and Long Beach Port which combined are the nation’s fourth largest port by tonnage), business services–and a robust construction-home building-finance sector that consumed ever more land to provide homes, shops and jobs for a seemingly endless stream of in-migrants and immigrants. By the end of the 1980’s Orange County, the next county over from Los Angeles county, the suburb of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, had a “downtown larger than San Francisco, and its own suburbs an hour even farther away from central Los Angeles“.^[4] During this era, Disneyworld opened (1955), and the Dodgers (1958) and Angels (1961) came to town. In 1965 the Watts riot resulted in thirty-four deaths and one thousand injuries. Smog defined the City^[5].

At the end of the postwar period (early 1970’s) a sub-Policy World “Los Angeles School” emerged and attempted to characterize and understand what they saw outside their windows. “They pointed to the decentralization of the metropolis, its multiple independent centers, its international connections, and its shifting employment patterns as models of future urban development …. Los Angeles [was] the paradigmatic expression of late capitalist industrialization, urbanization and social life”^[6]. Reyner Banham’s 1971 book, Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, summarized his take on Los Angeles as seventy miles of “surfurbia” make Los Angeles “the greatest-City-on-the-Shore-in-the-world”. To him Los Angeles “was structured around personal control over personal travel (“autopian freeways”) in which Wilshire Boulevard became the first linear downtown and neighborhoods were defined by freeways. “Life in Los Angeles means choice and circulation within an open environment that is spatially and perhaps even socially egalitarian”.^[7] The New York Times in 1955, however, described it as a “violently aggressive organism”. Goodness! How did all this happen?

As such Fulton conceives as Los Angeles as “the anti-city“. Its residents and its culture were anti-urban–a central city with a suburban mentality and culture. Contained within its annexation-imposed boundaries were numerous decentralized residential areas each of which permitted considerable perceived individual autonomy. With an “in born mistrust of big government and especially of political machines”, the region in which the City lie was a “plethora of small, self-governing cities… with government close to the people as the norm“.^[8] Economic development, such as it was, was Privatist, growth machine dominated, while its government and politics increasing became Progressive, decentralized, and robust. If one is honest with oneself, Los Angeles is the ruin of all economic and political models.

The political structures of the metropolitan region were reformist–i.e. Progressive reformist. City managers, nonpartisan (mostly ward) elections, with a strong “Lakewood system”^[9] dominated the metropolitan area. The Progressive political system was extended to the state level and that included an exceptionally strong referendum powers which penetrated to the county and municipal levels. Governed by a semi-weak mayor form of government combined with an incredibly vibrant city council elected by wards in non-partisan elections, politics tends to be decentralized and neighborhood/district focused. Day to day policy-making seems less affected by the mayor than the council–each of the fifteen members being in effect “the mayor of a city the size of Syracuse or Toledo….“^[10]

Elections in a decentralized city of this size were media affairs–driven by money and party affiliation. Independent boards/commissions and city department heads protected by civil service tenure and state regulations not only characterize, but dominate its municipal administration. The City (unlike its Orange County suburb) during the postwar period was guided by Republican mayors, Elected in 1961, the controversial Democrat populist Sam Yorty supported Nixon not Kennedy, and the Yorty administration clearly was a transition to a city politics dominated by Democrats. Since 1961 to the present day, with one two term exception, the mayor has been Democratic. Interestingly, from 1938 to 1993, only four men have served as mayor—with three serving three terms and Bradley, five.

Economic Development in LA Stephen Erie Annexation as a way of life—the role of the county, See Fletcher Bowin and urban renewal before 1953.

Reinforce that annexation declined in sixties—see Abbott urban for chap 7 suburban equality

Now the reader knows why Los Angeles came last in our discussion of western suburbanization. Sadly we are not yet done and will return to the topic in future chapter

Los Angeles

[1] William Fulton, The Reluctant Metropolis: the Politics of Urban Growth in Los Angeles (Baltimore, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001)

[2] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 7.

[3] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. pp. 8-9.

[4] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 12.

[5] Wikipedia claims the word was coined in 1905, but was found in an 1893 Los Angeles Times article.

[6] Carl Abbott, the Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., p. 127.

[7] Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: the Architecture of the Four Ecologies (New York, Harper & Row, 1971) and described in Abbott’s Metropolitan Frontier, op. cit., pp. 126-127; the New York Times December 18, 1955.

[8] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 13.

[9] The Lakewood system, approved in 1954, allows cities and suburbs to contract with the county for pivotal services such as police, fire, garbage and the like. The unanticipated effect of the Lakewood system is that it facilitated municipal fragmentation by transferring the costs of critical infrastructure and service needs to the urban county. Together with county wide special districts (in Los Angeles case the Water Authority is a good example), the Lakewood system enabled the fragmentation as well as more affordable municipal governance.

[10] William Fulton, the Reluctant Metropolis, op cit. p. 45

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