If Los Angeles is going to rewrite its city charter, should everyday Angelenos take charge of the effort?

The people who run Los Angeles government are skeptical.

Mayor Karen Bass, City Council President Paul Krekorian, and other city leaders have called for reforming the city’s main governing document—a quasi-constitution that is called the charter—for the first time in a quarter-century.

The momentum for charter change has come from community groups, civic leaders and media who want to see changes to L.A.’s scandal-plagued city council. In recent years, there have been multiple indictments of top city staffers and of four city councilmembers, along with a leaked tape of three councilmembers and L.A.’s top labor leader making racially prejudiced comments.

With 15 members representing 4 million people, the L.A. council is simply too small to be representative of the city’s diversity, or to be close to everyday people, since each member represents more than 250,000 people. In fact, L.A.’s council is one of the smallest and least representative big-city councils in the world. (That of Seoul, which I recently visited, has 102 members.)

Changing the size or structure of the council requires amending the city charter. Bass, Krekorian, and other city leaders are developing plans for a November ballot measure that would create a charter reform commission.

But in preparing this ballot measure, they are moving toward giving themselves the power to appoint most of the charter reform commission members. The end result of this would likely be an establishment commission, mixing technocrats, lobbyists, and experts who are allied with the most powerful labor, corporate, and philanthropy groups in the city.

This approach is predictable. Elected officials and powerful institutions in L.A. have a longstanding unwillingness to cede power to regular people. But creating such a top-down commission makes it harder for Los Angeles to seize a historic opportunity to empower its people, incorporate promising 21st-century ideas into governance, and become a bigger player on the world stage.

A politician-appointed charter commission also badly misreads the current political moment in Los Angeles. If charter reform is led by political elites, it might be met with the same public disgust that started the call for reform in the first place.

There’s a better way forward—one that would have more political credibility and deliver more new ideas. Cities around the world have used “people’s assemblies” (also called citizens or civic assemblies) to tackle hard questions, incorporate the best local thinking, and implement reform.

Ireland, to take one example out of hundreds, used a people’s assembly to remake its constitution. Closer to L.A., in 2022, the Northern California city of Petaluma convened a lottery-based assembly to address a bitter controversy over land use.

The members of such civic assemblies are everyday people who are drawn by lot. The lotteries are managed with technology to assure that the resulting assembly represents its jurisdiction in terms of gender, race, neighborhood, and any other chosen factors. These assemblies are designed not merely to ensure representation, but to keep powerful people from dominating the debate. Studies of people’s assemblies also show that everyday people bring more diverse concerns and new ideas into governing processes. In Ireland’s constitution effort, for instance, the changes included legalizing abortion and same-sex marriage.

Using a people’s assembly to reform the Los Angeles charter would not freeze out politicians or powerful interest groups entirely. They could testify before the assembly. Nor would it leave mission-critical work to amateurs. Los Angeles’ commission, like others formed by sortition around the world, could have the power to hire experts and technocrats to answer questions and help with research.

When I’ve pressed key players in City Hall about this idea, they’ve deflected.

Many point to a measure on the November ballot that would create an independent redistricting commission. They note that that body would similarly consist of everyday Angelenos.

But they seem to regard a charter reform commission of everyday people as a bridge too far. They prefer a commission with city governance experts, major interest groups, and their own political allies. In short, elite Los Angeles has a narrow view of charter reform.

To be fair, the council president, Krekorian, has been a public voice for freeing the charter reform commission to take on whatever topics it wishes. He and other council members have also wisely proposed creating a new process for periodic reviews of the city charter that would allow for more frequent amendments and updates.

But picking a commission of political allies will likely limit the agenda to only obvious and pressing issues, like homelessness or public safety. An establishment commission has no need to advance novel ideas or change the fundamental governance structure, because those changes might make life harder for their political patrons.

Sticking to the status quo would be a missed opportunity. LA., like other American cities, retains the same outdated, 20th-century corporate structure—with separate departments for separate functions—that divides local government into bureaucratic fiefdoms.

This charter is an occasion to incorporate 21st-century practices into local democracy and to remake America’s most entertaining city for a faster, digital, more globalized age. A new L.A. charter should incorporate new democratic processes (including increased use of the lottery assemblies I propose for the commission) and digital environments that allow citizens to do more decision-making and governing.

More broadly, Los Angeles needs a governing structure that gives the city more power and flexibility to solve not just local problems, but to address planetary challenges that shape life here: the environment, health, the economy, and corruption.

Some of the best thinking on how to do this comes from Angelenos. In their forthcoming book, Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman of Los Angeles’ Berggruen Institute argue for linking the governance of different cities to better address planetary concerns. They envision more powerful municipalities working in collaboration with each other and world institutions to address the problems our faltering nation-states have failed to resolve.

“National states should give up many of their governance functions, tasks, and decision rights: planetary functions should move to planetary institutions, while many other functions should move to local institutions,” Blake and Gilman write.

A new charter could translate such ideas into reality. It could grant broad new authority to the city’s well-managed international affairs office, commit the city to solving planetary challenges, and outline a governing process for the city to form and join new global policy-making bodies with other local governments.

These and other novel ideas are more likely to emerge from a charter reform commission consisting of everyday people who represent the diversity and madcap thinking of this city. New ideas are more likely to gain traction if they come from our neighbors.

So, let’s make the new charter a do-it-ourselves project.

The post Let’s Make L.A.’s New Charter a DIY Project appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

To govern a divided city, you need to balance your remembering with some forgetting.

That was my takeaway after moderating a recent public event that used Zoom to link live audiences in two famously divided cities, on opposite sides of the world.

One city, Belfast, is a place so full of physical divisions that the differences between people can feel inescapable. The other, Los Angeles, lacks a shared historical memory and thus manages to forget the depth and persistence of its divides.

Of course, these are two very different places. The city of L.A., with a population of 4 million, has 10 times as many people as Belfast and twice as many as all of Northern Ireland. But both are fast-paced, aggressive places that produce a lot of art. L.A. is Hollywood, and Belfast is a UNESCO City of Music (thanks, Van Morrison), and a center of literature (from C.S. Lewis to Sinéad Morrissey) and TV/film production (Game of Thrones).

And they face similar predicaments.

Both cities are defined, locally and internationally, by long histories of internal unrest and violence. The whole world watched L.A.’s riots in 1965 and 1992 (the latter the largest urban riot in U.S. history). And the whole world followed news of the Troubles, one of the 20th century’s most violent and longest conflicts, between pro-United Kingdom Protestants and pro-secession Catholics.

Over the past generation, both cities have celebrated progress in bridging divides. L.A. rebuilt South L.A. after the 1992 riots, and the city has seen greater diversity among its political elites. Meanwhile in Belfast, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement ended the Troubles, disarming violent groups and creating power-sharing between Protestants and Catholics.

But in the past decade, and especially during the pandemic, both cities experienced renewed divisions—racial and ethnic in Los Angeles, sectarian in Belfast. And those divisions have paralyzed governments in both cities.

Trying to understand how each city got to this point, our event began by turning the clock back a decade, to 2013, when both cities had more hope—at least, officially. That was when departing Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared that his city had gotten past its bigger problems, with “the old Los Angeles is fading in the rear-view mirror.”

That same year, leaders in Northern Ireland pledged to remove all of the physical walls and barriers separating Protestant and Catholic communities in Belfast within a decade—by the year 2023. They also promised to desegregate a city divided by religion.

Triumphalism in L.A. and Belfast did not wear well. Divisions have proved more durable than either city’s leadership anticipated.

In Belfast, stability and optimism waned after 2016’s Brexit, when Northern Ireland voted narrowly to remain in the European Union, but Britain as a whole voted to leave. A 2017 energy scandal then forced new elections, which produced a split result between the leading Protestant and Catholic parties causing persistent governmental dysfunction and inoperation. Since the 2022 elections, Northern Ireland has not had a government.

That lack, combined with Brexit-related cuts, has diminished government services, including vital health programs. And amidst the political turmoil, polls show rising sectarian divisions. This is true especially among the young, who were already too divided; less than 10% of Belfast children attend religiously integrated schools.

No wonder the walls dividing communities did not come down as promised this year, as people continue clinging to separation and the promise of security. Indeed, as I saw firsthand during a visit last year, Belfast has erected new divides—most of the “peace walls” now in place were constructed after the Good Friday Agreement.

A world away, Los Angeles also has gone backward. Racial, ethnic, and generational divisions grew more pronounced during the Trump presidency and in the pandemic, which saw more attention to high-profile local cases of police violence, as well as the Minneapolis murder of George Floyd.

Last year, a Loyola Marymount University survey found big increases in the percentage of Angelenos who say race relations are getting worse. Over two-thirds of Angelenos told pollsters that they expect to see new racial unrest, like what the city experienced in 1992.

Then came the leaked tape of Los Angeles County’s top labor official and three L.A. city councilmembers saying bigoted things about almost every major racial or ethnic group in the city—a recording that all but brought the L.A. city government to a standstill for months. Unrelated federal corruption investigations have ensnared a third of the city council, adding to the difficulty of getting anything done. Meanwhile, public anger grows at the city’s inability to handle increasing crime and homelessness.

A recent event linked the struggles of the two cities, organized by Imagine! Belfast (a democracy and ideas festival) and the Huntington Institute on California and the West at the University of Southern California. Panelists and audiences in both cities (one audience sat in Belfast’s Accidental Theater, the other at a USC library) lamented their divides but also offered ideas for progress that involved leaving some parts of the past behind but keeping those that might serve communities in the future.

Belfast’s many walls make divisions seems permanent and unchangeable, said Duncan Morrow, a lecturer and conflict mediator at Ulster University. But how can Belfast remove barriers that some people believe keep them safe? Perhaps, if walls can’t be removed, new integrated spaces and institutions can be built on top of them, Morrow suggested.

Los Angeles panelist Joumana Silyan-Saba, director of policy and enforcement at L.A. Civil Rights, said that divisions in L.A. are usually covert, and not confronted, until they “manifest as intercommunal divides, intracommunal divides, and—in the worst forms—they also manifest in civil unrest and violence.”

That argues for memorializing more of the city’s past conflicts, and making L.A. divisions more visible so that Angelenos must reckon more directly with them. Forgetting divisions in the name of getting along can sometimes make it harder to get things done. Silyan-Saba recounted how many conversations it took to gain widespread community support for the Expo Line through South L.A. and the large, ongoing expansion of L.A.’s Metro rail system.

Panelists and audience members in both Belfast and Los Angeles seemed most pessimistic about the ability of local governments to transcend divides (though Southern Californians were upbeat about L.A.’s new mayor Karen Bass and her devotion to getting Angelenos to “lock arms together”).

To a remarkable degree, Belfast and Los Angeles participants agreed that making progress in divided cities is unlikely to come from politicians. Instead, people themselves, through their institutions and organizations and movements, must lead the change. Belfast artist and photographer Stephen Wilson said that it was still important for divided governments to provide long-term resources to neighborhoods and promising individuals. “You don’t know who will turn into leaders in the future,” he said.

“The greatest power that we have is our civil society,” said USC sociologist Jody Agius Vallejo. “These dividing lines are created. They’re created over time. They’re created historically. They’re created to make advantages for some. And because they aren’t natural, we can change them.”

The post What L.A. and Belfast Have in Common appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The Los Angeles mayoral campaign has become an exercise in misinformation, clouding the public’s muddled perceptions of how municipal government actually works in this state.

The problem emanates from the upside-down narrative that has developed around the top two contenders: U.S. Rep. Karen Bass, who is framed as the race’s establishment insider, and billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso, who is considered the businessman outsider.

This widespread public misunderstanding of the mayor’s race is largely the product of the candidates’ own campaigns.

Bass has relied on a slew of endorsements from Democratic figures, inside and outside the city, who emphasize what a safe, seasoned choice she is. “I have never seen someone with such depth of experience, clear vision, and relentless work ethic,” longtime L.A. civic leader Steve Soboroff says in a typical endorsement.

Meanwhile, Caruso has used his own money to produce an onslaught of inescapable ads (my children complain they can’t watch YouTube without seeing his ultra-tan face) that suggest he is an outsider to local politics, with plans to sweep Los Angeles clean.

This narrative is the very opposite of reality—for two reasons that reflect fundamental misconceptions of how local democracy works here.

The first misconception influences perceptions of Bass. Federal and state legislators like Bass may be familiar to Angelenos and other Californians as political figures—and thus seem like local insiders—but their work lives have very little to do with local government. Bass has spent the past two decades in Sacramento, where she was Assembly speaker, and in Washington, D.C., where she was part of the Democratic Congressional leadership.

Bass has been very good at these legislative jobs—doing difficult work during state budget crises in Sacramento, and finding ways to make progress on criminal justice reform and defend democracy during the Trump years in D.C. But that does not make her an L.A. insider.

While she founded and ran an important community organization decades ago, she has never served in local elected office. She is admired in City Hall but she isn’t particularly well-known there. And her campaign’s rocky rollouts of key policies on public safety and homelessness suggest that she is still familiarizing herself with the peculiarities of local government in California’s largest city.

The second misconception involves Caruso. While he is a real estate developer and not an elected official, in California developers often function as the most important leaders in municipalities. They are the true insiders.

This is not a matter of corruption or money. It’s the structure that California voters have created over many decades. Californians have consistently voted to make their local elected officials very weak; most notably, Prop 13 and successor measures have stripped local officials of much of their power to tax. And state open meetings rules, which limit the ability of local official to talk with each other, make governance and planning more difficult.

This creates a void in local governments that developers fill—they actually have more freedom and opportunity to talk to different officials, connect interests, and come up with plans to raise revenues than elected officials do. The best California cities are often run by developers who embrace their public responsibilities. Caruso has been one of the better ones. To his credit, he has jumped into public roles involving police oversight, the Coliseum, and the Department of Water and Power.

This, of course, makes him an insider. Caruso probably knows as much about how L.A.’s City Hall works as anyone. He would take office with far more intimate knowledge of, and better contacts in, local government than Bass.

Of course, Angelenos wouldn’t understand any of this from watching ads, attending debates, or reading accounts of the race. And that’s the candidates’ own faults.

Bass, whose campaign has seen personnel turnover, has sabotaged herself by not developing a clear message of how she would change L.A. And Caruso has cynically played on the confusion; one recent ad accuses Bass of not acting on L.A.’s homelessness crisis “on her watch”—though she’s never been in charge of homelessness in Los Angeles, nor in charge of anything else for that matter. She’s a legislator.

For the record, I think either candidate could be an excellent mayor. But the strongest arguments for Bass and Caruso are entirely at odds with their campaign narratives.

Bass appeals not just because she is a thoughtful, wise, and experienced public official—but also because she is new to City Hall. She has the ability to bring new perspectives and new people, and more change. She might be a higher-risk candidate than Caruso, but also offers the higher upside. She is a potentially transformational mayor.

The strongest case for Caruso is that he is likely to be a steady hand, after the breakdowns and drift of Eric Garcetti’s unfocused mayoralty. Caruso knows where bodies are buried, in part because he buried some himself. He knows how L.A. works and knows the people within local government who can get things done. The city is in crisis, and he would take office with a head start on a City Hall outsider like Bass.

What’s maddening about this campaign is that these two distinguished, public-spirited people are not making reality-based arguments about their real advantages. They are instead basing their campaigns on our misperceptions and ignorance about how L.A. and California work.

That’s a problem for local democracy across our state. And in Los Angeles, it will be a big problem for whichever of these two contenders ultimately wins. Whether it’s Bass or Caruso, the next mayor is destined to disappoint, because she or he will be a different sort of leader than who they promised to be.

The post Why Are L.A. Mayoral Campaigns Getting the Candidates So Wrong? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You’ve complained publicly that you’re overwhelmed with texts and calls, and I understand why. With the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, you must appoint someone to fill the final two years of her United States Senate term. Everyone in politics wants this gig, and that’s a lot of pressure.

So let me take this burden off your hands. You don’t have to make the excruciating decision to elevate one of your politician buddies over all the others. The right candidate is no politician, and is hereby making himself available.

That perfect candidate is me.

You may find the idea absurd at first. You might ask: Why in heaven’s name would I bestow a U.S. Senate seat on some smart-ass columnist who makes fun of me publicly, has no government experience, and currently occupies the esteemed elected office of School Site Council chair at his local elementary school?

The answer to your question lies in that absurdity. Only a crazy choice for the open seat is capable of meeting this crazy moment for you and for California.

Let’s start with your own political interests. Our state offers literally thousands of highly accomplished people, many of them your donors, who could see themselves in the Senate. Dozens of smart, honest Democratic politicians—from U.S. House representatives like Karen Bass or Katie Porter to mayors like London Breed or Robert Garcia to statewide elected officials like Xavier Becerra or Betty Yee—are desperate to rise to higher office, too, after decades of waiting for the Feinstein-Pelosi generation to get out of the way.

You’re in a terrible position because there is no obvious best choice, and since you can pick only one, your choice is guaranteed to breed resentment. There’s a real risk that some terrific Democrat you reject will end up running against you for governor in 2022! Right now you don’t need any more enemies, with all the unpopular choices you face in dealing with COVID, a recession, and the budget.

So don’t fall into the no-win trap of picking a highly qualified, highly ambitious Democrat! Instead, pick me, an unqualified journalist who is not a member of any political party and has zero political ambitions!

I would fill the seat for two years while those Democrats battle amongst themselves to take the seat in 2022. The voters would decide, not you. Maybe I would develop Potomac fever and try to run myself, but you could kill off my candidacy just by quoting my past columns.

Now, your political advisors will tell you that appointing me would make you look bad, because I would be seen as a joke. But that perception would be the central virtue of my appointment. By sending me to Washington, you’d be standing up for California, and sending an unmistakable message to the country:

Yes, our new senator is a joke—but nowhere near as big a joke as the U.S. Senate, or American pretensions of democracy.

In other words, you’d be saying that California—facing a deadly pandemic, deep societal divisions, and the existential threat of climate change—can no longer tolerate a federal system that cancels our best efforts to protect our people and save the world.

The Senate is the embodiment of that undemocratic system.

It’s indefensible that California and its 40 million people get the same two Senate seats as Wyoming, Vermont, Alaska, Delaware, or the Dakotas, even though each of those states has fewer people than Fresno County.

It’s intolerable that a party hostile to California holds majority control of the Senate, even though that party represents only a minority of the voters, and of the people.

It’s insufferable for California to receive the most unequal representation of any province in any federal system outside South America.

It’s been unbearable to watch this democratically fraudulent Senate back a president who lost California and the popular vote—even as he violated the rights of our residents, sabotaged the census, and lied about everything from our elections to our forests.

And it’s impossible not to feel rage that the Senate approved three of that president’s Supreme Court nominees—one of whom faced credible testimony that he assaulted a California psychologist, and another who was rushed through in record time, even as the Senate refused to send aid to California’s collapsing cities and schools.

Governor, there is no way that California should do anything that makes the U.S. Senate look good. But that’s exactly what you’d be doing if you appointed a great public servant.

Just imagine if you picked Secretary of State Alex Padilla. He would bring MIT-trained brilliance and a record of improving California’s voting system to a body that insults our democratic intelligence. Padilla, whose parents emigrated from Mexico, also would bestow California’s attractive diversity on a Senate that, extensive studies show, favors white people in smaller states and contributes to the systemic racism that plagues our country.

Should we really be sending the Senate our best?

Padilla would be wasting his time and talents in a Senate controlled by U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, who will spend the next two years blocking the new president’s priorities. Even in the face of such obstructionism, Padilla would remain his polite and diplomatic self, embracing the “unity” now championed by President-elect Biden. But don’t forget that Biden, a former senator from tiny Delaware, benefited from the anti-democratic system that oppresses the Golden State.

We Californians would all be better off if I—or another unserious choice, like a comedian with a great anti-Senate set, or one of those clowns up in Blue Lake—were dispatched to the Capitol as a human middle finger to this anti-democratic monstrosity.

If that middle finger were me, I’d be happy to vote how you like on whatever scraps of legislation McConnell lets through. I could even report back to you discreetly on Dianne’s health. Beyond that, I would put all my writerly energies into attacking the Senate in which I would sit.

I wouldn’t deliver a speech without calling for the dismantling of the body. I would constantly quote the late, long-serving congressman John Dingell, who argued for the Senate’s abolition, and Alexander Hamilton, who criticized the Senate because it represented states, not people.

“As states are a collection of individual men, which ought we to respect most, the rights of the people composing them, or the artificial beings resulting from their composition?” Hamilton said. “Nothing could be more preposterous or absurd than to sacrifice the former to the latter.”

And if nothing is more preposterous than the U.S. Senate, then your appointee for that open seat can’t be too preposterous. Governor, you know all too well that fighting fire requires fire. Why not fight the absurdity of the American system by sending an absurdity to Washington?

Your fellow Californian,

Joe Mathews

The post Make Me California’s Next Senator appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That’s the promising question behind the news that Karen Bass is a top contender to be the Democratic vice-presidential nominee.

Bass is best known as a consensus-building and uncommonly kind politician who has served South L.A. in the State Assembly (including time as speaker) and in Congress over the past two decades. But far more important than her political career is Bass’ role in a larger story about South L.A.’s transformation over the past 30 years—and about what true leadership looks like in the 21st century.

South L.A., with 850,000 people covering 50 square miles, is the size of San Francisco; it’s also the last great working-class place in coastal California. And at the heart of its complicated story of improvement is Community Coalition.

Bass and other neighborhood activists helped start Community Coalition in 1990 amid the crack-cocaine epidemic. Since then, CoCo’s staff and many members have built it—through painstaking, block-to-block work that rarely gets media notice—into one of California’s most successful institutions.

From afar, CoCo might seem unfocused. It works on an incredibly broad array of issues, from trash clean-up to college access to drug treatment. But that’s because it organizes around the varied concerns of South L.A.’s diverse residents, not a poll-tested political agenda. The wonderful paradox of CoCo is that its focus on street-level organizing has made the organization extraordinarily successful in developing leaders for the city, the region, and the nation.

CoCo’s leadership development philosophy seems contrarian these days: You rise not via self-promotion and sloganeering, but by empowering your neighbors, and learning how to follow their lead. Bass and her unflashy, collaborative style embody this approach, but she is just one of hundreds of CoCo alumni in Southern California governments, non-profits, civic institutions, and business organizations. Among these leaders are Marqueece Harris-Dawson, now a powerful L.A. city councilmember, and Alberto Retana, a CoCo organizer who, after a stint in the Obama administration, returned to serve as CoCo’s president and CEO.

“Regardless of who’s in office and regardless of the conditions that oppress us,” Retana said in an online commemoration of CoCo’s 30th birthday this year, “we too must step up for South L.A. and keep fighting!”

Bass was a physician’s assistant and clinical instructor at USC’s medical school when she gathered neighborhood activists in a living room 30 years ago. These South L.A. residents were desperate to address crack cocaine’s toll on their community, from addiction to police abuse. So they started CoCo—originally Community Coalition for Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment—in the belief that the people of South L.A. needed to be involved in creating solutions for such problems.

That premise still defines Community Coalition’s mission to “elevate the voices of our members, shift power to the community, and tackle the root causes of poverty, crime and violence.” And it informs CoCo’s three main methods—organizing, advocacy, and providing community services.

Flexibility and practicality distinguish CoCo among local institutions old and new. In its early efforts with the crack epidemic, CoCo tried multiple tactics before identifying liquor stores as the nexus of crime and drugs. After the 1992 Civil Unrest, which caused historic damage in South L.A., CoCo worked to prevent more than 150 liquor stores that had been destroyed from being rebuilt; many were replaced with housing, grocery stores, or laundromats.

From there, CoCo branched out—to almost everything. CoCo developed a successful youth organizing program, led efforts to help children stay with families instead of being forced into foster care, and originated the model for youth services that is now called “Summer Night Lights.” And CoCo was integral in successful battles to build more schools and provide more college prep classes in South L.A. and across California.

CoCo’s work often builds on itself. After CoCo started to organize the King Estates neighborhood with a focus on changing city nuisance abatement policy, residents also suggested revitalizing Martin Luther King Jr. Park. So CoCo started an Easter egg hunt in the park, which evolved into a music festival, Power Fest, a popular South L.A. event.

After Bass departed CoCo leadership in 2004 to enter politics, the group formed even more coalitions and further increased its reach. CoCo has sought to remake the justice system, protect immigrants, address structural racism, and enhance neighborhood power over land use and economic development.

Such work led CoCo into ballot measure politics, both locally and statewide. The organization was a major supporter of Proposition 30, a statewide tax hike in 2012. It organized to pass the criminal justice reform measures Propositions 47 and 57—and for the even more difficult work of implementing them. More recently, CoCo has gone national as a training resource for community work, with a new center to bring people from all over America to L.A. for fellowships in organizing.

In all of this, CoCo has been operating in a South L.A. that is undergoing rapid demographic change, with Black people leaving and Latinos arriving. The organization has taken great care to balance Black and Latino representation among its leaders, organizers, and even attendees at community meetings. USC sociologist Manuel Pastor has credited CoCo as one of the local multi-racial organizations making South L.A. a model of “ethnic sedimentation,” where racial and ethnic groups collaborate and build productively on each other’s histories, rather than of “ethnic succession,” where conflict arises as a new group replaces an old one.

The notion of South L.A. as a national model may surprise Americans who still associate the area with gangs and riots. But no place could be more relevant to a country that finds itself near rock bottom. Over the past 30 years, crime in South L.A. declined by more than two-thirds, health care access expanded, education improved, and transportation, arts, and food options exploded. Is there any doubt that the United States could benefit right now from emulating Community Coalition’s devotion to cultivating new leaders and building unity from the ground up?

If Joe Biden picks Bass as his running mate, CoCo organizers, past and present, could well be leaders in a new administration. Given their track record, the prospect of a South L.A. vice presidency might offer Americans something that is hard to find these days:

Hope.

The post Why South L.A. Has Earned the Vice Presidency appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.