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GUEST COMMENTARY - A journey through Los Angeles, the adopted home of Vice President Kamala Harris, offers a masterclass in urban dysfunction. As you drive through the streets of the southside, and along Central Avenue, the historic main street of black LA, now mostly Hispanic, the ambience is increasingly reminiscent of Mexico City or Mumbai: broken pavements; battered buildings; outdoor swap meets; food stalls serving customers much as one would see in the developing world.
Democrats, particularly in deep blue California and even bluer cities like Los Angeles, can clearly win elections. But what they can’t do is govern effectively. Virtually every Democratic city in the land is now in decline. Crime, especially of the violent variety, is rising. That’s shadowed by continued out-migration to less dense, more conservative areas, a trend that’s seeing the country’s biggest cities lose out economically.
But if signs of progressive failure are clear from New York to San Francisco, it’s Los Angeles where I feel it most keenly. I’ve lived here since 1975. Back then, the idea that this diamond in the sands could tarnish was unimaginable. But it has. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, LA now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. Dovetailed by failing schools and parks, and an exodus of residents and businesses, long-term prospects of this great American city look bleak — a future that could yet be translated right across the country.
Beyond making life miserable for residents and visitors alike, the chaos on the southside has clear demographic consequences. When I arrived, almost 50 years ago, LA was the undisputed king of urban growth in America. From a population of barely 100,000 in 1900, the city grew to nearly four million. Now, though, the trend has reversed. Today, the city and county of Los Angeles, together home to 10 million people, has fewer residents than in 2010. Even worse, the state department of finance now projects that the county’s population will drop by over one million by 2060.
This is not an exodus, as some assert, of the poor, nor of blubbering Trumpistas. Rather, many emigres now come from the city’s once-vibrant, multi-racial middle class. According to an analysis of IRS data, many are middle-income families in their childbearing years. LA is also losing the minorities and foreign-born residents who for decades sustained the city’s economic and demographic vitality. These days, African-Americans and Latinos instead flock to places like Houston or Miami in search of opportunity. “We are becoming more dystopian,” says John Heath, a lawyer and south LA native. “We can’t house people affordably and only build luxury, and there’s no place for a middle class.”
There’s a vicious circle here. As ambitious Angelinos leave, so too do the jobs that might have induced them to stay. That’s clear enough in entertainment, the city’s signature industry and a key funder of progressive politicians such as Harris. Consider Disney’s fabled Pixar studio, with production moving to other states or overseas. The once-promising space industry is in danger of being kneecapped too: just look at the departure of SpaceX.
For the past five years, LA has lagged behind the national average for creating advanced industry jobs and, no less damning, Michael Kelly of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont-Mckenna Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry in LA, from manufacturing to finance and business services, has lost jobs or at best stagnated since 2019. Only the government-funded education and health sector showed significant growth. If the city had grown as quickly as the national average, Kelly calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs.
All this has happened in a city that once boasted a powerful business class. But now that so many firms have left, the city’s remaining “leaders” —increasingly inheritors of wealth and well-placed middlemen — seem remarkably relaxed about what’s happening. Many, Kelly suggests, prefer instead to focus on what’ll gain them cultural kudos. “They don’t care about fixing MacArthur Park or helping the southside,” is how he puts it. “All they care about is the Olympics.”
If, moreover, this was the story of one failing metropolis, that’d be bad enough. But LA’s decline reflects a similar trajectory experienced across the country. According to recent analysis, Texas and Florida are now the country’s high-growth hotspots. Just as striking, income growth in these mostly red states is about 40% higher than New York and New Jersey, as well as other liberal laggards like Oregon or Illinois.
But how did it happen? How was it that Los Angeles, alongside other titans of the last century, weaken so dramatically. Certainly, a plausible answer presents itself when you examine the electoral map. Like other urban centres, after all, politics have headed relentlessly Left for a quarter century in LA. The last Republican elected citywide, Richard Riordan, left office in 2001. Nor does a reversal seem likely anytime soon: Democrats in LA currently outnumber Republicans by over four to one.
The city’s shift to a one-party system has exacerbated corruption, with several council members and commissioners accused of bribery. Yet amid scandal, Los Angeles voters last year elected Karen Bass as their mayor by a considerable margin. A career Leftist, she travelled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a member of the so-called Venceremos brigade. In 2016, to mark the dictator’s death, she issued a praise-filled obituary to the man she called the “Comandante”.
Like her idol in Havana, she issues pronunciamentos and talks grandly about confronting homelessness and boosting the housing supply, the latter pledgenow part of Harris’ campaign. Yet with the middle classes fleeing, and local Republicans nowhere, City Hall has little incentive to fix LA’s underlying problems. Despite all the claims about tackling vagrancy — LA is the second-worst homeless capital of America — the City of Angels builds far fewer new homes per capita than almost every other large US metro. Unable to address the root causes of homelessness, Bass has instead fallen back on raising taxes and boosting government spending.
“With the middle classes fleeing, and local Republicans nowhere, City Hall has little incentive to fix LA’s underlying problems”
Given the city’s deepening budgetary hole, that’s perhaps inevitable, particularly when the tax base has fallen so precipitously. It hardly helps, moreover, that the mayor’s mild-mannered progressivism is making a bad situation even worse. Ultimately it’s about incentives in a one-party town. The plebs and the remaining middle class simply don’t matter compared to the key backers of progressive governance: the non-profit “blob” and public sector employees. This in part explains Bass’ reluctance to clean up the homeless camps, which are now legal, and her support for higher taxes, the source of wealth for those government workers who fund Democratic campaigns and specialise in “ballot harvesting” from voters in nursing homes.
Factor in that burgeoning reputation for graft, and it’s no wonder some criticssuggest that Bass has enriched non-profits and friendly developers — while doing very little to improve life for everyday people. To give one example, LA parks are often in disrepair, particularly compared with nearby suburbs. The Los Angeles Unified School District, for its part, consistently underperforms compared to state and national averages, notably failing its mostly Latino student body. Since 2019, over 80,000 have dropped out of the district, which also suffers from chronic absenteeism and high levels of violence. Almost half of LA’s workforce is unsurprisingly low-skilled.
“The city can’t do much, they can’t fix the streets, the schools or the parks,” says Jack Humphreville, a retired investment banker who writes for City Watch, an online media outfit that actually covers what is happening in the city. “They just take care of their allies.”
Beyond this litany of failure, meanwhile, the truly frustrating thing is that it doesn’t have to be like this. Southern California, after all, is blessed with superb weather, a legacy of technological innovation and a robust, minority-rich entrepreneurial class. Nor is every California town like Los Angeles. In many smaller cities, controlled by moderate Democrats and even some Republicans, the California dream is alive and kicking. Drive just ten miles from downtown Los Angeles, towards predominantly Latino cities like Southgate, and you’ll quickly find that the streets are paved, businesses are thriving, and homelessness is virtually nonexistent. Compare that with downtown LA, where the office vacancy rate is almost three times that of the independent cities nearby.
No less important, the fiasco in Los Angeles could yet impact the entire country. Though she speaks about poverty and racial discrimination, after all, Kamala Harris is ultimately the product of the same system as Bass: one that puts progressive rhetoric and ethnic voting blocs ahead of improving society as a whole. Abandoning the approach of old-school progressives such as Fiorello LaGuardia — one predicated on investment and practical successes from bridge-building to education — Harris seems happier putting day-to-day governance aside in favour of abstract crusades around climate change.
All the while, LA’s population continues to fall, with younger Angelenosapparently even more dissatisfied than their parents. Residents of other blue cities feel similarly: barely 30% of New Yorkers think conditions in the Big Apple are excellent or good, down from 50% just six years ago. For their part, around half of New Jerseyites would rather live elsewhere. And as bad as all this is for the urban fabric, it could soon have a dire electoral impact for liberals everywhere. For while the exodus from places like LA doubtless benefit even incompetent Democratic mayors, the influx of voters into conservative areas equally bolsters the Republicans in Congress. Since 1990, for example, Texas has gained eight seats, Florida five and Arizona three. In contrast, New York has lost five and Pennsylvania four. California, which now suffers higher out-migration than many rustbelt states, recently lost a Congressional seat for the first time ever.
To put it differently, then, the Democrats have political as well as ethical reasons to up their game — but the resistance from progressives will be formidable. For while non-progressive Democrats have scored some victoriesin local elections, even in deep blue strongholds such as San Francisco and Seattle, and appear positioned to unseat Soros-backed District Attorney George Gascon, the pressures to change course fade as companies and the middle classes flee. In urban regions dominated by mobilised government workers, and a dependent population, Peron-style welfarism is all you need. Even with California’s sunny climate, that doesn’t sound like an appealing future.
(Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin. This article was first featured in UnHerd.com).
