Physical description: The immensity of the megalopolis in Southern California is legendary. It is so big that even though sixteen million people share the same water, air, transportation network and regional economy, much of the area defines itself as "not Los Angeles." The regional Metropolitan Planning Organization, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG), is the largest of 700 councils of governments nationwide. Its six counties and 188 cities cover 38,000 square miles with a population ten times the population of the Portland Metro area. This huge metropolis covers an vast and varied landscape. On the west is the Pacific Ocean. On the north, rugged mountains separate the region from California's vast and fertile Central Valley. To the east are mountains and desert. The only manmade boundary is to the south where the massive Camp Pendleton Marine Base divides Los Angeles from the San Diego metro region.
Los Angeles County, with its nine million people, lies at the center. To the south are Orange County's three million people. To the east is the rapidly growing Inland Empire, the western halves of the mammoth Riverside and San Bernardino counties. On the northwestern edge is Ventura County, where fields are giving way to commuter subdivisions.
Historical growth patterns: The indigenous dwellers were primarily hunters and gatherers when Spanish colonists arrived from Mexico to establish the pueblo of Los Angeles in 1781. By 1848, the date of American annexation, less than ten thousand residents lived in the region. The transcontinental railroad sparked the growth of settlement and export agriculture. Land grant ranchos were subdivided into farms, groves and towns.
The beginning of the twentieth century marked a decisive turning point as Los Angeles acquired imported water, built a deep water port and created a vast web of trolley lines. Agriculture gave way to industrial growth. The popular mythology of a region fueled by sunshine overlooks the reality that an aggressive and often brutal strategy was pursued to promote industrial development. By the end of World War Two, Los Angeles was home to the second largest manufacturing concentration in the world.
In the post-war era, Los Angeles became the model for suburban opportunity summed up in the "California Dream." The building of the freeway network opened up vast new tracts of land for decentralized growth. With the abandonment of the trolley system, downtown Los Angeles struggled to maintain its hegemony over the increasingly fragmented metropolitan area as other centers emerged. Trade and service industries played an increasing role in the economy and "edge city" development was at the forefront of job creation by the middle of the seventies. In-migration from the rest of the nation dipped during the severe recession of 1989, but immigration from Mexico, Central America and Asia continued.
Metropolitan government structures: SCAG, the Metropolitan Planning Organization for the region, was created thirty years ago. Almost all of its emphasis is on transportation, reflecting its funding base. It co-exists with strongly independent transportation agencies in each of the six counties. Pressure to decentralize, or even break up SCAG, led to the creation of fourteen subregions, many of which have established semi-autonomous councils of government of their own. Now SCAG is governed by a 70 member Regional Council of city and county elected officials. SCAG has also created a Regional Advisory Council that seeks to represent constituencies outside local government.
Under California's fragmented local government structure, numerous independent special districts exercise considerable autonomy and influence. The Metropolitan Water District, which covers much virtually all of Southern California, including the San Diego region, exercises significant power through its control of a critical resource. The Southern California Air Quality Management District is also a major force in regional issues due to the continuing failure to meet federal clean air standards. Much of the region's trash and sewage is handled by independent sanitation districts. Community colleges and K-12 school districts are also separately elected and governed. Twenty years ago, state voters created the Coastal Commission which retains significant power over development near the ocean.
Economy: Optimistically lauded during the Eighties boom as "recession-proof," the Southern California economy suffered its worst downturn since the Depression during 1989-1994. Triggered by cutbacks in aerospace, defense and banking and the collapse of real estate speculation and construction, the recession eliminated nearly 11% of the job base in Los Angeles County.
The regional economy, however, remains indisputably both the largest and most diverse in the nation, with strong representation in fourteen different industry clusters. On its own it would be the twelfth largest economy in the world. Even during the recession, the surging growth of trade with Asia pushed Los Angeles past New York as the nation's top trade hub.
Motion pictures and entertainment have shown explosive growth with employment in movies expanding 20% in the last year alone. The construction of the multibillion dollar new campus for the Getty reflects a much broader investment in the visual and performing arts. A dynamic center of innovation in media and communications, Los Angeles is the world's pre-eminent exporter of culture and images.
Rebounding from the severe recession, the Los Angeles region now leads the nation in business start-ups. Apparel is growing and so are other manufacturing sectors. Tourism has recovered. The strongest growth in the region has come in Orange County where unemployment dipped to just 3.4% in February. Since the end of the recession, Los Angeles County has been generating sixty to ninety thousand jobs a year, cutting unemployment from a height of 10.1% to 7.2% currently. The Inland Empire has also narrowed the gap between their unemployment rate and that of the nation as a whole.
The defense, aerospace and finance sectors are unlikely to regain their pre-recession job levels in the foreseeable future. Real estate development has also lagged, reflecting a significant oversupply from the Eighties boom. Perhaps the most troubling economic trend has been the decline of the manufacturing corridor along Alameda that once rivaled the German Ruhr. Although there are signs of renewal, it has fewer jobs today than it did in 1983 and the surrounding working-class suburbs are now the poorest area in the Pacific West.
Ecology: The region's ecosystems have so far proven remarkably durable despite the paying of vast tracts of land, the entombing in concrete of most of the region's rivers and the poisoning of the air and land with toxic wastes. Air quality, while still the worst in the nation, is better than it was, with unhealthful days declining from 208 in 1985 to 136 in 1994. While ocean pollution remains a critical concern, progress has also been made there as well.
The addition, however, of seven million people over the next twenty years under current growth patterns cannot be viewed with anything but alarm. The compounding stress this will put on the air, water, habitat and transportation capacity of Southern California is critical. Perhaps more significantly, that magnitude of growth will trigger ugly and destructive political conflicts with incalculably divisive results.
Societal change: Southern California continues to be the definer of societal change in the United States in virtually every indicator. Trends not only tend to emerge first in this region, the power of the region's movie/music/media combine broadcasts these changes in exaggerated form not only to the nation, but around the world. For better and for worse, Los Angeles plays a dominant role in shaping both the reality and the image of who we are as Americans, how we act and even what we believe.
Defining trends: Perceptions and realities are hard to pin down in such a vast and diverse region, but certain key concerns stand out:
Class, ethnic and distribution issues: The media frenzy surrounding the O.J. Simpson trials has caricatured white-black divisions, but the riot of 1992 underlined the profound class and ethnic challenges, faced not only by the City of Los Angeles, but the entire region. Media stereotypes of unremitting antagonism are belied by rates of inter-ethnic marriage that are five times the national average, but ballot propositions like 187 and 209 aggravate tensions. While upward mobility, particularly for Latinos, is greater than popularly recognized, there remains a large and isolated inner city underclass of both African-American and Latino poor living in devastated neighborhoods with little hope for upward or outward mobility.
Ambitious programs to bridge the widening income gap through economic and community development have faltered with the inability of Rebuild Los Angeles (RLA) to generate massive corporate investment and of the City of Los Angeles to win "Empowerment Zone" designation. These highly-publicized let-downs have fostered cynicism and suspicion about anti-poverty efforts, giving way to emotional and symbolic debates over the "Living Wage" ordinance passed in March by the Los Angeles City Council. Although championed by labor and religious activists and adamantly opposed by business interests, it is projected to affect less than .5% of the workforce.
Challenges and opportunities: The scale, diversity and visibility of the Los Angeles metropolitan region separate it from every other region in the nation, presenting enormous problems and opportunities. As a giant economic engine and social cauldron, it's health directly affects all of California and the nation.
The essential challenge for Southern California is to re-imagine an interdependent future for the 21st Century. The 1984 Olympics left a golden glow, a vision of a world city poised on the Pacific Rim, a multicultural ethnopolis where public-private partnerships achieved great things. Yet just five years later, the recession and then the riots punctured that image. The bashing of Southern California by the media poisoned external perceptions and dashed regional aspirations. With the Olympic vision discredited, the region has yet to embrace a new unifying vision to guide its decentralized interests and institutions toward common endeavor.
The future is not what it used to be for Southern California. Three movies scripts are optioned for the 21st century. The disaster epic, given wide coverage in the media, assumes that central Los Angeles is becoming a Third World nightmare. Foreshadowed by the 1992 riots, brutal gang violence and the collapse of the county health system, this script portrays Los Angeles as an armed camp where the rich and poor live in heavily fortified proximity and loathing. The shrinking middle class flees to gated suburbs and the tax base of the inner city collapses. Horrific traffic and environmental degradation eventually destroys the region's economic and social viability. This grim forecast is often accompanied by major natural disasters, particularly a crippling earthquake.
The working title for a more sober storyline is "Some Win, Some Lose, So What?" The revival of the economy makes the doomsday version less credible, so this script predicts the return to business as usual. The future is an updated rerun of the familiar past. In this movie, hot new growth industries thrive along with areas where they make their home. Meanwhile, brownfield ghettoes and barrios smolder, but don't explode. Ethnic antagonisms fester, but most people get along. Technology and tolls keep the transportation system from breaking down. As government and public institutions limp along, the private sector increasingly replaces public services for those that can afford them.
Little credence is given to an optimistic scenario in which the Los Angeles region capitalizes on its unique strengths and rekindles a new Olympian vision. In this bold alternative, the Los Angeles region forges a collaborative ethic that stresses voluntary cohesion to achieve a more livable and sustainable future. This 21st Century epic offers Southern California the goal of striving for both an enviable quality of life and a prosperous standard of living. It builds on our ethnic and geographic diversity as a mirror of the planet and a model for others. This happy-ending script remains sidelined as "sappy and unrealistic."
Goals: The urgent task faced by all of Southern California is to maintain (or even enhance) the quality of life and standard of living for the next generation in the face of a massive increase in population. Over the next twenty years, internal birth rates alone will add a five million people to the six-county region, equivalent to adding the entire state of Maryland to our population. Continued in-migration, particularly from Latin America and Asia, is expected to add another two million, or the equivalent of Kansas.
Every single issue facing the region is magnified by this demographic reality. Education must prepare a growing population to compete in the global marketplace. The economy must grow to provide the jobs and revenues. The environment must be sustained in the face of land and auto usage that is growing even faster the population. Without effective governance, the continuing efforts by cities and other institutions to capture the benefits and avoid the costs of this growth will lead to calamitous conflicts. We cannot avoid growing, the question is will our region grow together or grow apart?
Strategies: The failure of the fragmented Los Angeles region to organize itself for the future frequently seduces observers to imagine a radically different model. Perhaps metro government patterned after Portland. Perhaps a Joint Venture Southern California designed along the lines of the San Jose effort.
There are lessons in those examples worth examining. But no single entity can encompass the staggering diversity and complexity of the region. The strategy for Los Angeles is to build a coherent network of institutions and relationships capable of coordinating and balancing widely divergent interests to pursue the common good.
But what incentives encourage the building of such institutions and relationships?
The national models of the Metropolitan Planning Organizations, the Private Industry Councils and the Empowerment Zones each represent largely self-organized and voluntary partnerships keyed to the allocation of federal funding. Yet the federal government itself has failed to coordinate its array of economic development, housing, education, healthcare and environmental protection to encourage integrated metropolitan structures. For the large and polycentric Los Angeles metropolitan region, federal incentives could be a key catalyst for creating a stronger governance and collaborative network among governments, key institutions and the public.
Achievements to date: There have been a number of promising initiatives that represent building blocks for a collaborative metropolitan structure. SCAG's "bottom up" restructuring has strengthened both its credibility at the top as well as its viability at the subregional level. Numerous subregional cooperative programs are being strengthened or created in response to local initiative.
The Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative began as an innovative approach to community empowerment funded by the "Livable Communities Initiative" of the U.S. Department of Transportation. For just $3.4 million, a hopeful partnership was established between local communities, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the federal government. But there has been little funding to implement the plans drawn up.
But there is a notable paucity of regional civic leadership. The building of broad-based citizen coalitions or effective public-private partnerships has lagged.
Constraints and barriers: The most salient barrier to the evolution of a more visible and functional regional network of collaboration and governance is lack of will. Many factors contribute to this, including exhaustion or retirement of traditional leaders leaving a vacuum for new leadership that has not yet emerged; lack of tangible incentives to ensure participation of key sectors; and the misplaced belief that such a project is impossible because it hasn't yet happened. But perhaps the most basic problem is the failure to recognize the common regional connections that connect people across city, class and ethnic boundaries. Although the dominant television stations broadcast to the entire region, they virtually never examine the connection between isolated events and issues in a regional context. The result of all these factors is that regional consciousness is off the radar screen, an abstract, unrealistic, idealistic mirage.
The uniqueness of the Los Angeles metropolitan region means that success can't come from imposing models of regional collaboration from elsewhere. But it doesn't mean that success can't come at all. Cynical complacency breeds a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Regional infrastructure and transportation upgrades: The region is struggling with historic decisions about its infrastructure. In air transport, LAX is evaluating a major expansion strategy. In Orange County, the move to make El Toro Naval Air Station a civilian airport has become the area's most divisive issue in decades. As the long-planned expansion of Burbank Airport also remains mired in controversy, pressure increases for expansion at the edge using Palmdale, Ontario and March Air Force Base.
The ports have become the largest in the nation, but the next challenge is moving freight through the region. The Alameda corridor represents a $2 billion first step, but the SCAG's draft of the Regional Transportation Plan projects that trucks will eat up huge portions of the cramped capacity on the region's freeways in the years ahead. The source of revenue for multibillion dollar solutions has not been identified.
Just six years ago, it seemed that Los Angeles County might lead the region in building a viable transit network. But while boardings on the MTA's subway and light rail lines as well as Metrolink commuter trains are approaching 100,000 a day, the bright promise of rail has been badly tarnished by poor planning, fiscal woes and political intrigue. Attention has shifted back to road-building strategies, notably toll roads like the 91 Freeway segment recently opened in Orange County.
With the huge investment of more than $80 billion in public surface transportation funds slated to be spent over the next twenty years, the possibility exists for integrating land use strategies to significantly redirect this public investment toward investment in more compact, livable and sustainable communities.
Education and workforce development investments: While the quality of the region's higher education systems remains internationally renowned, the success of primary and secondary schools lags. School district finances are now controlled almost entirely in Sacramento as a result of Propositions 13 and 198.
With new administrators taking the helm of key institutions including UCLA, the Los Angeles Community Colleges and the Los Angeles Unified School District, the time is right for new leadership in public education and lifelong learning. The internet and other new technology offer new high tech frontiers for education, while parental and community involvement represent high touch imperatives.
Financial capital access: Los Angeles is a world trade center that during the last decade was singularly successful in attracting national and foreign capital. The dramatic shift in external perceptions that followed the recession and the riots undermined that access as has the disappearance of several major headquarters banks. But venture capital is returning to fund new business and even real estate in the new economy. The new Community Development Bank has $700 million in capital for businesses and areas traditionally bypassed by conventional financing, although it has barely begun to make significant loans.
Research and technology strategies: For nearly fifty years, the nation invested heavily in the region's technological prowess through the defense industry. In the wake of drastic cutbacks, the combination of the region's diverse economy and its worldclass universities has fostered an unheralded seeding of high tech businesses that rivals in number, if not in concentration, the Silicon Valley.
Calstart was to be a showcase public-private partnership to build a world-class clean vehicle industry in the region. It has fallen short of what were perhaps overblown expectations, but presents a still promising model of public-private collaboration.
Market development and promotion of business and trade: No trade offices or junkets can match the extraordinary global reach of the international business and trade contacts and relationships of Southern California businesses and entrepreneurs. But the entire region has a stake in overcoming negative perceptions about doing business in Southern California. That has been the goal of the New Los Angeles Marketing Partnership and other networks, like the San Gabriel Valley City and Commerce Consortium.
Reform of the state's fiscal structure would significantly lessen destructive zero-sum competition between cities for sales tax generators and free up resources for investment in more productive economic development strategies.
Community and economic development/revitalization: The successes of cities as varied as Monrovia, Pasadena, Glendale, Burbank, Santa Monica and Huntington Beach offer models of community revitalization. These older suburbs have emerged as nimble regional competitors contending with both the far larger City of Los Angeles and newer edge cities like Irvine and Thousand Oaks.
What remains a challenge is applying these models to the grim reality of inner city Los Angeles (which now includes parts of the San Fernando Valley) and the rust-belt in the Alameda corridor. Two of the most promising efforts in those areas have been the revitalization of Whittier Boulevard and the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative. Both approaches tie transit corridors to economic revival strategies with strong grass roots business and community participation.
There is also a rich array of Community Development Corporations in the region which need greater technical assistance and more reliable sources of funding to move beyond their individual achievements in building affordable housing or promoting small businesses to a more holistic program of neighborhood revitalization and self-help.
Environmental preservation and restoration: The success of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy in preserving a large and environmentally viable habitat and recreational resource is an underappreciated success story. So is the way Heal the Bay garnered attention and action to address ocean pollution. Similarly creative and appropriate efforts are foreseeable to restore the Los Angeles River; to protect the unpaved areas of Orange County and the Inland Empire; and to recover the brownfields sites in the Alameda corridor.
Environmental goals, especially when coupled with broader quality of life and livable community concerns, still exert powerful support in the region. In last November's election, voters in both the City of Los Angeles and the County of Los Angeles approved park and recreation bonds totaling more than $1 billion dollars.
On a regional scale, growth management strategies are critically needed to redirect growth from haphazard, auto-dependent sprawl. The City of Moreno Valley in Riverside County is a textbook example of subdivisions and shopping centers growing to a size of 140,000 residents without either the jobs or the local revenue base to support itself. Long overdue is reform of the dependence of cities and counties on sales tax revenue allocated to point of sale. This destructive financing approach pits governments against each other to subsidize retail development to the neglect of value-added businesses.
Urban growth boundaries are probably not appropriate for the polycentric form of the Southern California region, but coordination of public and private infrastructure investment might accomplish some of the same goals of promoting compact, transit-accessible new development.
Quality of life enhancements: The rise of a "livable communities" movement and strategy offers a powerful tool for reversing the decline in quality of life by mobilizing community leaders and citizens. A livable region will be created one community at a time, but the successful adaptation of innovations in one community to many others has already proven to be a powerful tool for regional revitalization. This movement is also broad enough to encompass the wide range of civic and community leaders, organizations and coalitions needed to reinvigorate civic consciousness and civic action across city, county, class and ethnic lines.
Safe parks, quality schools, open libraries, walkable neighborhoods, convenient transit, affordable housing as well as art, culture and beauty -- these basics of livable communities can galvanize citizen commitment to "improve, don't move" and to end the cycle of throw-away communities. By investing in the local quality of life, communities can also bolster their economic competiveness and potentially reduce the fiscal, social and environmental costs of regional transportation.