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.
Ron W. Coan 