Why? Because all my ideas about giving citizens a voice in decision-making went against the grain of her training and outlook on how public life is supposed to work. As a highly competent administrator and expert, she was used to a system where citizens elect officials and get out of the way. Then, those elected officials hire managers and experts, and they get down to the business of governing.

I’ve spent my whole career helping cities, states, and countries engage citizens in more democratic ways. (By “citizens” I mean all of us, whatever passports we hold, and I use it to honor our contributions to democracy and civic life.) When I tell people about my work, most Americans expect that resistance to these practices comes mainly from conservatives.

It doesn’t. Some of the strongest opposition to democracy comes from progressives, particularly people in positions of influence and authority.

To succeed politically—and, more importantly, to make a greater contribution to American society—progressives should take a closer look at what democracy means, why it really matters, and how innovations in democracy offer a much more productive debate about our future as a country.

Why are progressives so uncomfortable with democracy? Because, from its beginnings, progressive philosophy didn’t give citizens a central role in public life.

The core ideals of progressivism were established in the early 20th century, as a reaction to the main challenges of the times. Back then, American cities and towns were beset with corruption, poverty, and illiteracy.

In response to those problems, Progressive-era reformers helped create a new set of public-facing professions, including city management, social work, and modern policing. Expertise in these areas promised to improve public health, end child labor, rein in organized crime, and solve many other problems. Free and fair elections, combined with transparency in public decision-making, helped combat the political “machines” that dominated the cities.

For the most part, it worked. Progressive expertise helped us survive the Great Depression. But it also isolated these experts, as well as elected officials, from the people they ultimately serve. Many professionals came to see citizens as rank amateurs at best, obstacles at worst.

Conservatives also put government above citizens. But progressives want officials to govern proactively, while conservatives believe they will “govern best by governing least.” Neither approach is satisfying to citizens today. Those early-20th-century institutions and professions have lost the trust of most Americans.

The reverse is also true. Progressive public officials and experts have become more mistrustful of their constituents—and thus more skeptical about democracy. One reason for this mistrust is that they hear only the loudest, angriest voices. This is true online and on social media, but it’s also true in most public meetings and hearings, which operate according to an old formula where people get a few minutes to speak at the microphone. Angry constituents dominate these meetings, and there is very little meaningful exchange. Many progressives associate these kinds of horrible public meetings with “democracy,” and it makes them less and less enthusiastic about interacting with citizens.

Political polarization makes this worse. Most progressives now think of conservatives as uneducated, racist, mindlessly anti-government, and manipulated by Fox News. Why give those people a meaningful say in public decisions?

Before 2016, many Democrats as well as Republicans were voicing frustration with politics and advocating systemic change. But since Donald Trump’s version of systemic change basically amounted to demolishing the system entirely, he provoked an understandable knee-jerk reaction from Democrats defending government.

Now, progressives are increasingly fearful—for good reason—that Trump and his allies are poised to make voting much harder and are even preparing to steal the next election. Progressives are urging us all to “save democracy”—but by democracy they mean voting, and only voting.

This is a weak vision of democracy, and it is a losing message for progressives.

These days, most people vote not out of enthusiasm for their preferred candidate, but out of fear, and a desire to keep the other side from causing harm. Some Americans think their votes aren’t being counted, others think that voting fails to produce the policy changes they support. Asking Americans to pin all their hopes for change on voting seems like a doomed strategy.

By putting all their emphasis on voting, progressives continue to push the idea that governance should be left entirely to the experts and elected officials. Progressives risk coming across as dismissive, condescending, and pedantic—a recipe for defeat.

Progressives are missing an opportunity. When citizens are presented with practices and reforms that would give them a more meaningful say in public decisions, they respond with enthusiasm. In one national opinion poll, Americans were asked about a list of possibilities for participatory democracy. There’s been strong support for these ideas—including participatory budgeting and citizen assemblies, which allow everyday people to contribute to policymaking—without significant differences between Republicans and Democrats. Giving power to citizens is a message that seems to translate well on the campaign trail.

There is no reason why progressives can’t advocate for a broader, more inclusive vision of democracy, one that actively engages people of different backgrounds in making decisions and solving problems together (and voting too).

Engaging citizens this way has another advantage: It works.

First of all, efforts at bridge-building and deliberation can succeed despite partisan polarization. Most of these efforts rely on paired or small-group discussions; they include the wave of participatory processes that emerged 25 years ago, the “Text Talk Act” discussions of the National Dialogue on Mental Health nearly 10 years ago, and the digital America Talks process of the last two years. When people meet in these kinds of settings, where they have the chance to share experiences and interact on a human level, they are more likely to empathize with one another, find common ground, and understand the reasons for their disagreements.

Second, these deliberative processes have a long track record in creating candid, productive discussions on issues of race and difference, the kinds of sincere conversations that don’t seem to happen inside the Democratic (or Republican) Party.

Third, engaging people taps into the skills and capacities of 21st-century citizens. Regular people, volunteering their time, improve their communities and country in all kinds of ways—they plant trees, mentor young people, share information online, raise money for important causes. Whether they are big or small, these actions matter: Confronting most of the daunting public challenges we face, from climate change to the pandemic, will require millions of people to make basic changes in their daily lives.

Fourth, democracy doesn’t threaten expertise, but strengthens it. As everyday people work with officials in more intensive ways, they gain greater respect for the expertise of the professionals. Citizens who work with city staff in participatory budgeting projects, parents who partner with teachers to improve schools, and patients who talk with their doctors all gain greater respect for those institutions. Giving citizens a say is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Most people want professionals to continue making most public decisions; they just want a voice in the ones that set the overall direction of governance, and that affect their lives most directly.

Finally, research from a range of fields shows what may be the most significant value of these citizen-centered forms of democracy: They strengthen community networks and connections, which has positive impacts on public health, economic development, racial equity, environmental resilience, and student success—all things progressives care about.

Peggy Merriss, the city manager I spoke with 25 years ago, just finished an illustrious career as one of the most innovative city managers in the country. Decatur, Georgia, the city she led, is firmly established as a participatory local democracy and steadily improving its quality of life. The Georgia Municipal Association inducted her into the Local Government Hall of Fame.

What changed for Merriss? She participated in projects like the Decatur Roundtables, which engaged residents in discussions about land use, race, and education. She was involved in Decatur Next, a large-scale community planning process. “I participated, but I had no more influence than anyone else,” she said. Her experience working directly with residents in these settings reassured her that citizens can, in fact, be reasonable, open-minded, and capable of compromise.

To govern more effectively, progressives should follow Merriss’ lead. This is an emotional transition as much as it is an intellectual one: People in positions of authority need to realize that they were not elected or appointed to make every decision and solve every problem. Creating situations that tap the collective intelligence and volunteer capacity of citizens would help them best serve their communities and their country.

The resulting policy debate, about what kind of democracy we want, would be far more meaningful than most of the campaign rhetoric we hear today. And progressives would be speaking to what voters actually want: not just the right to elect representatives but the right to have a voice.

The post Why Progressives (and Conservatives) Don’t Get Democracy—And Why They Should appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Politics is full of high-stakes battles and strategies concocted behind closed doors. But that’s no excuse for the level of venality, toxicity, self-aggrandizement, condescension, hubris, and racism exposed in the leaked recording on redistricting that recently shook the Los Angeles City Council.

Nothing about the conversation—in which councilmembers Gilbert Cedillo and Kevin de León listened quietly as then-council president Nury Martinez spewed hate—was blatantly illegal. But it was shocking. It revealed deep hypocrisy among leaders who, in a public setting, would be the first to claim that they condemn racism and embrace the city’s diversity. It also violated an unwritten rule requiring a minimal level of decency in the way people treat one another.

Cynical observers might opine that decency can’t be expected from politicians. But treating others with respect (in private and in public) isn’t asking too much. As I learned during my own career on the council, basic decency is a requirement for getting things done in the public sphere. And today, new realities dictate new approaches to doing this unpredictable, messy, sometimes delicate, and wholly essential work.

Embracing diversity has been a constant in L.A.’s public discourse for the last 50 years, ever since Tom Bradley beat back incumbent mayor Sam Yorty’s efforts to use Bradley’s race as a divisive tactic in the 1973 mayoral race. Bradley was L.A.’s Black mayor, but he was never the mayor only for Black people. His rise to power represented a turning point in the city’s tortured race relations because it demonstrated that the people of Los Angeles were ready to transcend the politics of racial division—moving from “me” to “we.”

I came of age politically during the Bradley era. Growing up in the cities of L.A. and Monterey Park, I never experienced much in the way of overt anti-Asian bias except for the occasional unintentionally condescending comment about my lack of a foreign accent. (I’m a native Angeleno.) I became a candidate for the first time in 1981, running for L.A. City Council in a district where students at the local school, Hollywood High, spoke more than 40 languages and dialects.

I thought my background as the son of an immigrant would be seen as a plus. Instead, I observed my opponent, an incumbent councilwoman, use my ethnic identity to raise suspicions about my ability to represent a diverse constituency. I learned the bitter lesson that race can be a devastatingly divisive political weapon—even among liberal, sophisticated voters in a big city—especially when racial fears are linked to a receding majority’s economic insecurity.

I lost that first council race. But I came back four years later and defeated the same opponent, winning decisively with 58% of the final vote. I had learned a crucial lesson about the necessity of building multi-interest coalitions in a diverse city. Support from Asian Americans had provided me with a potent political base. But if I wanted to win in a diverse district, I had to reach far beyond the 10% of the population (and only 5% of the electorate) comprised of Asian Americans. I studied the intricacies of U.S.-Israel relations, spoke Armenian phonetically for a cable TV commercial, and learned why owners and patrons of gay bars in Silver Lake felt they were being harassed by LAPD officers.

It’s difficult to legislate decency—to require a minimal level of respect for other groups or individuals—because decency depends on having shared values that tell us how to act toward others, and that predict how others will act toward us. I learned, the hard way, that decency can’t be written into the legal verbiage of an ordinance or a charter amendment.

But I also learned to listen respectfully, and to talk respectfully, and I became comfortable crossing conventional boundaries. It served me well during my council years, when I sometimes became an unexpected messenger, speaking out on behalf of Central American political refugees seeking sanctuary, Latino street vendors trying to earn a living, and African Americans demanding justice and accountability in the face of police misconduct. During a very uncomfortable period when the city’s elected leaders were struggling to respond to the LAPD’s brutal beating of Rodney King, an unarmed African American motorist, I became the first voice in City Hall to publicly call for the resignation of the chief of police.

The fact that I was neither Black nor white made a difference because it meant that police misconduct was more than a Black versus white issue. It sent the message that doing the right thing was more than a matter of which tribe was in control or had the power to dictate the outcome.

Today, the rules of engagement I learned over decades in politics are in a state of flux. New rules apply.

First, the rise of micro voice recorders in mobile phones and watches, and instant dissemination of information through 24-hour TV news and social media, mean that the old boundaries between public and private no longer exist. A politician shouldn’t say or write anything, even in a private meeting or an email message to trusted associates, that they wouldn’t want to see splashed across the front of a newspaper, creeping across the bottom of a television screen, or retweeted.

The end of privacy comes at a cost. But it also may be the best guarantor of accountability, especially in an environment such as City Hall, where insiders tend to cover for each other and maintain a code of silence.

A second new rule applies to “bystanders” such as Cedillo and de León, who listened quietly to their colleague’s racist remarks. For those in the political arena, silence in the face of crude, demeaning, racist words is equivalent to concurrence. If someone says something deeply objectionable in your presence, even in a private meeting, you must express your disapproval, walk out, or otherwise end the discussion—immediately. This may be difficult, especially when it means confronting an ally in a position of power. But the current uproar shows that failure to object will be condemned later.

Los Angeles also needs to develop a new set of “ethics for ethnics,” rules of engagement for interactions between the emerging Latino majority and everybody else: African Americans (who maintain a substantial power base despite their declining population); Asian Americans (still underrepresented despite being the fastest-growing ethnic group in California); Jews; Armenians; other Middle Easterners; and whites, who retain a large share of power, influence, and resources.

Latinos make up nearly 50% of the city’s population but until last month held only four seats on the council. Their leaders today must define their obligations to themselves and to other groups. As they work to achieve better representation, what is appropriate for Latinos to acquire or aspire to as a political bloc? How do they address diversity among themselves? What is their obligation to other ethnic groups who are not as numerous but have real unmet needs? Can the city survive if the brutal, old school, winner-take-all, “grab-as-much-as-you-can-for-yourself-while-you-have-the-power” approach to leadership exemplified in the redistricting discussion prevails?

Arturo Vargas, longtime CEO of the National Association of Latino Elected Officials, recently called on Latinos to recruit a more diverse range of candidates for public office, going beyond the Mexican American and Cuban American core. This could go a long way toward addressing the intra-Latino rivalries (embodied in Nury Martinez’s crass comments about the stature and skin color of Oaxacans) that indigenous communities view as the default ploy of Mexican Americans striving to maintain their power.

But diversity in and of itself is not a solution. An underlying question remains about the quality of political leadership in Los Angeles: Does public office attract the best members of a community to seek leadership—and if not, how can we change that?

Perhaps aspiring leaders need better training, mentoring, and apprenticeships, or a wider range of career and life experience paths, to prepare themselves for the grueling demands of leadership roles. We also might consider whether there could be better ways to choose our leaders, so that those among us who actually believe in the fundamental values of our community can rise to the top.

The post Can Los Angeles Elect a City Council That Reflects Our Values? 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.

With so many big issues looming—from the homelessness crisis to racial and economic inequality to climate-related disaster preparedness—the panelists agreed that this mayoral election will be pivotal for Los Angeles.

But what are we talking about when we say Los Angeles? KCRW’s Janaya Williams, who moderated the conversation began by getting a sense of which Los Angeles the panelists know. She began, sharing her journey, which began north of the city in Santa Clarita. She came of age in Santa Monica during the L.A. uprisings, and just returned back to Los Angeles after logging more than two decades on the East Coast. That history, she said, informs what she wants from the next mayor.

USC political scientist Ange-Marie Hancock Alfaro, came to L.A. after her sister moved out here, and then the rest of her family followed.

“The sense of Los Angeles that I’ve had is that it is a town of neighborhoods,” said Hancock Alfaro, “and a place where there are a lot of people who are committed to Los Angeles but committed to a lot of other things.” The need to balance the local with a sense of global issues is paramount for any leader of L.A.

Fellow panelist Rafael De La Rosa, who is from Ventura—“the 805”—has spent the last five years at California State University, Northridge, where he is the government and community relations assistant vice president. De La Rosa agreed that L.A. is made up of distinct communities, but he also insisted on its cohesion: “All the issues in the Valley are the same issues in Los Angeles. There is no longer this ‘over-the-hill,’ Valley-centric view.”

Taylor Bazley is CEO and co-founder of Green Qween, a cannabis retail space that prides itself as an incubator for ideas of social justice. Bazley said he followed the 405 North to L.A., coming up originally from San Diego. “I’m really steeped in the LGBT political world of Los Angeles, and that perspective is something that has really colored my relationship with L.A.”

Williams then turned to the issues, asking Bazley as a business owner what he’s looking for in the next mayor when it comes to balancing budget priorities alongside social justice. They shouldn’t be separate, said Bazley, pointing out that “a budget is a statement of your values as a city.” Take one of the biggest stories in Los Angeles and across the country: police funding. “That will be a litmus test” for the next budget, said Bazley—it will tell the story of how the city’s thinking around policing has or has not changed.

By Soobin Kim.

What issues have been overlooked in the mayoral campaign so far? Williams asked the panelists.

Their responses ranged from transportation—De La Rosa citing the mayor’s power to appoint seats to LA Metro’s board, whose Sepulveda Transit Corridor Project is the largest infrastructure project since the Hoover Dam—to issues that don’t have large and active stakeholder groups, like aging water pipes.

All the panelists agreed that Los Angeles hosting the 2028 Summer Olympics poses an opportunity to get things done under the spotlight. Hancock Alfaro pointed to a project she is working on with different neighborhood councils to alleviate some of the biggest racial equity issues around housing, education, transit access, and public safety. She said she would like to see the candidates address how they would approach these issues so that “we’re not just sweeping it under the rug like we did at the Super Bowl … that we’re actually making a difference.”

Prompted by an online audience question on mayoral power, Hancock Alfaro described L.A.’s weak mayoral system relative to the City Council, and said that a stronger mayor could have more leverage when it comes to issues from homelessness to transportation. They could say “not on my watch,” she said. However, the risk with a stronger mayor is that one person from one part of L.A. can “lose sight” of issues impacting parts of L.A. that they’re less beholden to.

The conversation, then, turned to the voters. When it comes to voter registration and turnout, everyone agreed that universal vote-by-mail, 11-day vote centers, and newer voting machines have all made a difference. When it comes to making a change outside of voting itself, De La Rosa called attention to community town halls and council meetings to give voters a more direct forum to participate and effect change on the issues they care most about.

The penultimate question of the night came from a student participant of Creating Our Next LA:

What is one piece of advice you’d give to someone voting for the first time to help them choose the right candidate?

The panelists agreed that it comes down to values. “Decide which candidate speaks to your particular values and inspires you,” said De La Rosa.

The post Not Your Average L.A. Mayor Voter Guide appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Angelenos may complain about state and national government like other Californians, but we also have a practice of using Sacramento and D.C. as training grounds for our local politicians. Only after they’ve proven themselves in the state legislature or Congress (or really, anywhere but here) do we feel comfortable elevating them to higher office.

The habit is holding this year, as Los Angeles chooses a new mayor and fills other top elected jobs amidst a continuing pandemic emergency and homeless crisis.

In the city of Los Angeles, for months, polls have shown former Assembly Speaker Karen Bass, now a member of Congress, leading or tied for the leader of the mayor’s race. City Councilman Kevin De León, who is better known for his four-year leadership of the state Senate during his 12 years in Sacramento, has been a strong contender, though recent polling suggests he is struggling to add support. Trailing them is former Assemblyman Mike Feuer, now city attorney, whose policy-focused campaign makes him an intriguing dark horse.

As for L.A. County, former Assembly Speaker and current State Senator Bob Hertzberg and State Senator Henry Stern are both seeking a seat on a board of supervisors that now includes Sheila Kuehl and Holly Mitchell (both former members of the Assembly and state Senate), Janice Hahn (a former member of Congress), and Hilda Solis (who served in the state legislature, Congress, and the Obama cabinet).

Of course, transitions from state to local office happen in other California places, in large part because of the games of political musical chairs term limits produce. Assembly Speaker Willie Brown became Da Mayor in San Francisco, and former State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg is chief executive of the city of Sacramento.

But most of the time, California’s ambitious pols work their way up from the local to state level, as in Gavin Newsom’s rise from the San Francisco Board of Supervisors to mayor to statewide office. Indeed, the last four San Francisco mayors came to the job from other local offices.

What makes Los Angeles different?

The answer to that question lies in our peculiar mix of ego and insecurity.

We see ourselves as a city of stars, drawn from across the universe to L.A.’s sunshine and spotlight. We see excellence as an import, and so we honor foreign film directors at the Oscars and celebrate the Lakers picking up LeBron or the Dodgers signing a free-agent first baseman.

This dynamic can be maddening for locals. It’s why, in the film La La Land, Ryan Gosling’s character, an underappreciated jazz musician, complains of his fellow Angelenos, “They worship everything, and they value nothing.”

The even darker side of this devotion to global stars is that it reveals a profound insecurity about ourselves. Los Angeles locals don’t trust our ability to produce greatness in our local communities.

Unfortunately, self-pessimism makes a certain sense, when you consider the poor quality of our schools and our lack of economic mobility. Given the high cost of living, this is no longer the place to come to make your fortune; moving to L.A., and to much of California, has become a luxury, possible mostly for those who have already made it elsewhere.

L.A.’s weak political scene doesn’t inspire confidence either. It’s true that the departing mayor, Eric Garcetti, came up through the city council (though he built his image on elite educational credentials acquired elsewhere, like his Rhodes scholarship). But today he is so unpopular that he’s trying to leave office early (to become ambassador to India). The most local of the mayoral candidates, councilman and former LAPD cop Joe Buscaino, is a heavy underdog. (Angelenos seem to have forgotten that L.A.’s late, great mayor Tom Bradley was also a cop-turned-councilman.)

In this year’s race, Bass seems to be the favorite in part because of the status she gained elsewhere—as a consensus-building Assembly speaker in Sacramento, and as a member of Congress influential enough to make President Biden’s short list for vice president. De León’s case for leadership is similarly grounded not in his recent work on the city council, but in historic labor, environmental, and pro-immigrant legislation he got passed in Sacramento.

But does this Angeleno bias for electing state legislative leaders (Antonio Villaraigosa was also Assembly speaker before becoming mayor) still make sense? Because, right now, L.A.’s biggest public need isn’t for legislative dealmakers but for excellent public administrators, who can re-engineer outdated departments and make faltering homelessness programs work better.

Unfortunately, the L.A. mayor’s race doesn’t seem to have such an administrator. The developer Rick Caruso, who has a high-profiled and self-funded campaign that has been gaining in the polls, is pitching himself as a managerial expert who can clean things up. But the reality is that developers are mostly promoters and dealmakers rather than tough administrators. And so for all Caruso’s savvy, his skill set is closer to that of his ex-legislator opponents than his ubiquitous ads might lead you to believe.

Caruso is making gains by talking about crime as an issue. But does his experience fit L.A.? His personal pitch to voters centers around his success in creating popular Southern California shopping-and-entertainment developments, like the Grove, next to the Original Farmers Market, and the Americana, in Glendale. That may prove to be a mistake, since such local successes seem unlikely to impress Angelenos.

After all, what has he ever done in Sacramento and Washington?

The post A ‘Peculiar Mix of Ego and Insecurity’ Drives the Race for L.A. Mayor appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

This scenario seems to be playing out in Atlanta, where acolytes of former president Donald Trump are calling for the affluent, predominantly white enclave of Buckhead to secede from the city.

Proponents of secession say the timing of their effort simply reflects concern about a recent spike in crime in the area, but it also serves a broader strategic purpose, as part of the national Republican Party’s efforts to regain its footing in Georgia after its surprising stumble in the state’s 2020 presidential and senatorial elections. GOP leaders have already pushed through legislation calculated to suppress minority voting in this year’s gubernatorial and congressional midterm contests in Georgia. Yet they also face a need to rekindle the partisan loyalties of traditionally Republican metropolitan whites, which appeared to lapse nationwide in 2020—especially in places like Buckhead, where Donald Trump claimed only four precincts in 2020, compared to nine in 2016.

The stated case for Buckhead’s breakaway is not wholly lacking in substance. For some time, residents of the area have expressed concern about how much safety their substantial tax payments really buy them. The outcry has intensified in recent months. Buckhead secessionists point to a 44 percent jump in homicides in 2021, with all shooting incidents up by 31 percent and aggravated assaults up by 20 percent. Meanwhile, the city of Atlanta’s efforts to combat a citywide surge in violent crime have suffered from the departure of roughly 1 in 5 of its police officers over the last year in the face of former mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms’ hard-nosed response to incidents in which police appeared to use excessive force. Predictably, the key plank in the Buckhead Cityhood Committee’s (BCC) secessionist platform is the promise of the highest-paid and most carefully screened police force in Georgia—including 175 active patrolmen, which would purportedly quadruple the number of officers on duty per shift.

Although the percentage increases in Buckhead’s crime rate seem striking, the 44 percent rise in homicides reflects an absolute increase from 8 in 2020 to 13 in 2021, while the area’s police zone recorded substantially fewer violent offenses than the average in Atlanta’s other zones last year. Even so, secession proponents have declared Buckhead a “war zone,” where “the killing never stops.” Such calculated hyperbole is a favorite device of career political subversives like longtime Trump advisor Steve Bannon, who rely on it to shock their followers into actions whose consequences they may not fully comprehend. In this sense, the Buckhead secession movement seems like something straight out of Bannon’s playbook, which envisions hard-right voters seizing control of the Republican Party “village by village, precinct by precinct.”

A great many Buckhead residents are against secession, including the two Democrats who represent the area in the state legislature. In both houses of that body, the sponsors of bills to enable the withdrawal vote are Republicans whose districts lie in other counties, one 50 miles away, and another 100. Not all of the state’s prominent Republicans have openly endorsed the measure, but one who has is former U.S. Senator David Perdue—another non-Buckheader who, with Trump’s endorsement, is now challenging incumbent Brian Kemp in their party’s upcoming gubernatorial primary. Far-right Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, a frequent guest on Bannon’s podcast, has also praised the efforts of the Buckhead Cityhood Committee (BCC) and its CEO, Bill White. Greene doesn’t represent Buckhead either. But she has found a kindred spirit in White, a fellow conspiracy theorist who has raised copious sums for Donald Trump, rallied support for the “Stop the Steal” movement, and lauded the “patriots’” who stormed the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Further evidence of the partisan allegiances at work in the secession campaign emerged from a BCC poll showing 86 percent of Buckhead’s Republicans favoring the pullout, compared to only 38 percent of its Democrats. The presumptive Democratic nominee for governor, Stacey Abrams, has declared her opposition, as has the newly elected Democratic mayor of Atlanta, Andre Dickens. Proponents of the secession initiative insist that their campaign is colorblind. Still, the number of Black leaders who have lined up with Abrams and Dickens to denounce the effort, combined with BCC-er Bill White’s re-tweet of disparaging comments about Black-majority cities from a white nationalist website, attest to the pronounced racial overtones of the secession campaign. Some 74 percent of the proposed new city’s population, estimated to be in the neighborhood of 100,000, would be white. Without Buckhead, the black share of Atlanta’s population would rise from just over 50 percent to just under 60 percent.

This aspect of Buckhead’s departure is particularly ironic in view of the circumstances that led to it becoming part of Atlanta in the first place. Historian Matthew Lassiter has explained how Buckhead became a strategic pawn in Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield’s plan to sustain both his city’s post-World War II economic boom and its reputation for racial stability.

A pragmatist of the first order, Hartsfield prided himself on maintaining a close working relationship with the conservative leaders of the city’s well-established Black middle class. Yet population trends in the mid-20th century suggested Black people would soon outnumber whites in Atlanta, and Hartsfield believed that the prospect of dealing with a Black governing majority would discourage corporate managers from making major investments in his town. Warning that Atlanta was “finished” as a city if it could not expand, he managed in 1952 to push through a legislative annexation plan that tripled its geographic area while adding some 100,000 whites from the Buckhead community lying just to its northeast. The infusion immediately reduced the Black share of the city’s population from 41 to 31 percent.

Hartsfield meant to maintain Black-white relations through moderation, rather than sheer strength of numbers, however, lest he put the lie to his own claim that Atlanta was “Too Busy to Hate.” The prosperous, self-assured, racially tolerant, pro-business white denizens of Buckhead proved critical to this mission. They backed him in 1960, when, with Atlanta schools facing court-ordered desegregation, Hartsfield and allies like prominent attorney and Buckhead resident Griffin Bell thwarted demands to cut state funding for any public school system complying with integration efforts.

In return, Hartsfield’s strategy for school integration in Atlanta minimized its impact on his well-heeled white supporters in Buckhead. The small, carefully selected cadre of Black students assigned to transfer into schools in their neighborhoods in 1963 boasted higher average test scores than their new white classmates, while the numerical brunt of integration fell on the white working-class neighborhoods south and west of downtown.

And much as the mayor had promised, after annexation Buckhead became an economic dynamo, awash in high-income consumers and free-flowing investment capital. When Buckhead’s gleaming, futuristic Lenox Square opened in 1959, it was billed as the South’s largest shopping mall. There would soon be other, smaller, but no less fashionable shopping plazas, as well as a proliferation of steadily higher-rising office towers and a bustling restaurant and bar scene. A Buckhead address, residential or commercial, became synonymous with wealth and power. Not by chance did Tom Wolfe make Charlie Croker, the hard-charging, relentlessly entrepreneurial protagonist of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, a resident of Buckhead.

Today’s Buckheaders who trumpet secession the loudest don’t seem to have spent much time pondering the practicalities of getting what they say they want. Funding an expanded police presence in an independent Buckhead today shouldn’t be a problem, the BCC insists, citing a feasibility study that foresees the new city’s massive tax base generating a budget surplus in the neighborhood of $114 million annually. But this figure fails to account either for standard municipal expenditures like waste removal and street maintenance or for Buckhead’s substantial portion of Atlanta’s billions in bond and employee pension obligations. A December city council move means nearly $200 million in bond repayment would come due in full 12 months after Buckhead’s official departure.

Another loose end the secession proponents don’t seem keen to discuss is the fate of some 5,500 Buckhead pupils currently enrolled in the Atlanta Public Schools system. While Georgia law is friendly to the creation of new cities, the state’s constitution forbids the creation of new independent public school systems. Who would educate the Buckhead students whose parents can’t afford or don’t choose to send them to one of its ritzy private schools?

Broader fiscal consequences of Buckhead’s withdrawal would be unavoidable. The proposed boundaries of the new city contain all or part of three of the four richest zip codes in Georgia. The richest, 30327, boasts an average household income of $285,000, with 40 percent of its homes valued above $1 million. With its high-dollar commercial properties thrown in, Buckhead’s departure would strip Atlanta of some 40 percent of the total assessed value of its taxable property, and more than half of the budgeted revenue for its public schools. So much for the city’s credit rating—and ultimately, perhaps, that of other Georgia cities that might see their tax bases decimated by similar desertions should Buckhead’s come to pass. (There are already copycat movements in places like Athens, where there is talk of the upscale Five Points neighborhood withdrawing from the city.)

For some supporters, the secession drive seems to be more about wounding Atlanta than benefiting Buckhead.  Fox News host Tucker Carlson was so taken with the prospect of punishing “woke” leaders of a Black majority city that when the BCC’s Bill White appeared on his show, he grew animated in urging White and his cohort to “leave immediately. That’ll be a lesson to the rest of the country.”

The substance of that lesson may prove less to their liking than Carlson and other Buckhead Cityhood proponents envision. Efforts by white conservatives to hold Atlanta’s political influence in check have been a fixture in Georgia politics for more than 150 years. But pushing the city that accounts for roughly two-thirds of the state’s GDP to the brink of receivership hardly promises to sit well with executives of the 29 Fortune 1,000 companies who currently call it home, or other mega-investors who might now think twice about joining them.

There are indications that enthusiasm for what some Atlantans call “Buckxit” is on the wane, but even if the deeply partisan venture ultimately fizzles, it has already shown that the same political mentality that stirs vindictiveness and division in national affairs stands to be no less toxic when it surfaces in matters of more local concern.

The post Who Benefits From ‘Buckxit’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The incident itself was ugly enough, but the subsequent debate proved just as bad. Many Ventura residents expressed disgust with the city’s inability to deal with people they regarded as vagrants, while many others expressed disgust that their friends and neighbors could dehumanize homeless people as part of the debate.

In the middle of this nasty fight sat seven people doing their best to make Ventura a better place to live: the members of the Ventura City Council. Sitting on the dais in the council chambers in the city’s historic 105-year-old city hall was not a comfortable place to be. Governing at the local level in California is always fraught with peril because people often have contradictory moral visions about what their city government should do—a fact that is obvious in most city council chambers every week. “We’re mad as hell. We’re not going to take anymore,” one resident told the councilmembers in a room packed full of angry folks.

The Ventura homelessness debate may yet work out—there’s a growing consensus to move forward with a new shelter—but the sense of being under fire will continue for local elected officials. It is inescapable: You’re elected by the small minority of residents who bother to vote in local elections. You devote yourself to a 24/7 job that pays a few thousand dollars a year. You try to do the right thing. But whatever you do, lots of your longtime friends and neighbors will be angry with you—and will express that anger to you in deeply personal terms in the supermarket, at parks and schools and churches, and even in parking lots.

I used to be a member of the Ventura City Council, and four of my former colleagues still serve there. They had to weather the recent controversy over the homeless. In my view, there’s no question that serving as a local elected official in California has gotten a lot harder over the past decade or two.

Just like our national conversation, our local debates have gotten harsher and uglier. Increasingly, we have seen deep divisions not only over local issues but also over national issues that manifest themselves locally, such as the recent debate about providing sanctuary for undocumented immigrants.

And, mirroring what’s happening at the national level, the ability to get things done locally has gotten much more difficult. Local politics is getting more ideological and the divisions in every city are getting starker. I called my recent book—an account of my time on the Ventura City Council—Talk City because sometimes it seemed to me like that’s all we ever did. And over time I felt we drifted away from productive talk that moved us toward action and instead spent more time talking past each other without taking any action.

Partly, this inability to get things done is the result of the growing disconnect between the expectations of our voters and their willingness to pay for those expectations. In California, that is a disconnect that goes back 40 years to the passage of Proposition 13.

On the one hand, people expect our city to do everything. Ventura is an old-fashioned “full service” city, which must provide police, fire, parks, water, sewer and more. Very often the city is the only local institution with the scale and revenue to initiate any large-scale undertaking.

On the other hand, most people don’t vote in local elections; turnout in off-year local elections typically runs between 25 percent and 35 percent. The voters are deeply skeptical of the city government’s competence; and during my terms they regularly voted down tax increases and tied the city’s hands on policy decisions via other ballot initiatives.

At a May 7, 2018 meeting at Ventura City Hall, supporters of more programs for homeless citizens held blue placards while those asking for more police enforcement held orange ones. Photo courtesy of Tim Nafziger.

Sometimes we couldn’t even agree on what to call our city. The official name is “San Buenaventura,” named for our mission, which was in turn named for St. Bonaventure, the 13th-century Catholic saint. (St. Bonaventure was a Franciscan, as was St. Junipero Serra, father of the California mission system.) That name had been shortened to “Ventura” in the 19th century, supposedly because the full name was too long to fit on the railroad schedules. Yet we never quite decided what to call ourselves—even our wayfinding signs said Ventura in some locations and San Buenaventura in others. In the middle of a heated debate on this topic one night, one of our longtime city councilmembers said, “We should use San Buenaventura on all of our signs so everybody knows they’re in Ventura.”

Luck of the draw made me mayor of Ventura during the depths of the last recession. I was the guy who closed a library and a fire station. We couldn’t meet expectations, and that, frankly, is when local politics got uglier than it had been before.

During the recession, I had conversations with constituents almost every day who told me that we shouldn’t cut their library service/fire station/park/senior citizen program. When I would ask them what we should cut instead, their typical reaction was: “I don’t know. That’s your job.”

In my experience, I am sorry to say, I now see the beginnings of the coarse, cynical, and occasionally cruel way that even ordinary people approach politics today.

One early manifestation of this was the Tea Party, which emerged in 2009 just when I began my stint as mayor. As the city contemplated a ban on single-use plastic bags, I was inundated by emails from members of the then-new Tea Party—some longtime friends, some out-of-towners I did not know—claiming that we were going to strip our residents of a precious freedom. A disagreement on policy is one thing, but one correspondent declared—in the subject line of his email—“Give me plastic bags or give me death!”

Not long afterward, the Tea Party and some other similarly minded folks came out in force to oppose our decision to install paid parking in some parts of downtown Ventura. I viewed this move as a market-oriented solution to a serious problem: Too many people parked on Main Street, while not enough people parked in the parking lots a half-block away. But the Tea Party folks viewed it as an unconstitutional exercise in double taxation. John and Ken—conservative shock-jock radio hosts in Southern California—spent an hour excoriating “the stupid city of Ventura and their dumbass mayor Bill Fulton.”

The budget situation is better now and my former colleagues have been able to do some good things as a result. But the tinge of meanness has remained, just as it has at the national level. John and Ken were back in Ventura broadcasting from the Promenade after the recent homeless/murder incident.

Those are the kinds of experiences that make you wonder why anybody would run for office. Indeed, whenever anybody asks me whether I think they should run for their local city council, the first thing I always ask is, “Are you crazy enough to do it?”

It’s not surprising under these circumstances that not many good people want to run for office in California these days—and I’m not sure there are many systemic changes that could improve the situation. A recent state law that will switch many local elections from odd to even years will at least increase turnout—which may help people feel more invested in their elected officials. Better pay might help, so that people don’t have to retire or go bankrupt to serve. But maybe the most important thing is simply to help people see political and civic life in their town as a shared effort that includes not just the elected officials but everybody else as well.

As mayor I used to attend a different church service every Sunday, and at one social hour after a service I was approached by a man in his 30s wearing all black with several tattoos. He was accompanied by his wife and daughter, both of whom were dressed in all black with heavy dark makeup.

“Mayor Fulton,” he said, “I just wanted to say we love what you’re doing. We are so excited about where Ventura is going.”

I thanked him in a perfunctory way, and he added: “We were wondering—how can the Goth community get more involved?”

I’m not sure we ever got the Goth community deeply involved in Ventura’s political life. But that’s where the hope lies: When ordinary people from various backgrounds are inspired to step out of their own world and into the wider world of civic involvement.

The post The National Partisan Nastiness Is Now Poisoning Local Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

At last estimate, Los Angeles’ population topped 3.9 million. In 1850, when the city was first incorporated, approximately 1,600 people lived here. In the last 165 years L.A.’s size and population have changed in almost every conceivable way.

But this growth hasn’t been accompanied by growth in our aspirations for being represented by public officials who know us and our concerns firsthand. Indeed, our aspirations in this political arena—our aspirations to be fairly represented and to prevent the concentration of power—may have atrophied. Los Angeles, through so much change, stubbornly remains a place designed to defeat those who might accumulate power and wield it.

Since the city’s first charter was put into effect in 1889, Angelenos have set up a system of government based on the desire to contain and diffuse power, and to protect ourselves from officeholders. The result is that it has long been hard to tell who is in charge. Power is purposefully spread out between the mayor, the city attorney and the city controller, and the 15-member city council.

Los Angeles first created a council and office of the mayor in 1850. Decades later, the 1889 charter established the practice of electing a city councilmember to each of nine wards. 1909 marked the beginning of at-large elections in Los Angeles and of non-partisan elections, in which candidates are elected without regard to their party preference. Both changes were largely reactions to widespread corruption and distrust of party politics, two sentiments that persist more than a century later. At-large elections, in which officials were elected to represent the entire city, not one district, continued for 16 years and non-partisan elections continue to this day.

Voters approved significant changes to the charter in 1925; the charter did away with at-large elections for the nine city council members and created a 15-member city council in which each member is elected to represent one district. Ninety years and 3 million more people later, today’s government still resembles that 1925 version. At the time, approximately 600,000 people lived in the city of Los Angeles, and each councilmember represented about 40,000 residents. Today, each councilmember represents 260,000 Angelenos—about 6 ½ times the number a councilmember represented in 1925.

The city council attempted to make bold changes to the charter in the early 1970s, but all they succeeded in doing was adding power for one group of officials and taking it away for others.

In 1999, at the end of a decade in which city government seemed powerless in response to riots and the San Fernando Valley sought to secede from the city, L.A. city voters approved a charter that strengthened the power of the mayor and created a system of neighborhood councils in an effort to increase civic participation across the city. It was largely an acknowledgment of L.A.’s size and diversity. It was also a concession that 15 city councilmembers could not be appropriately responsive to the needs of such a large city.

At the time, city councilmembers each had approximately 240,000 residents in their districts. But the voters rejected measures to give themselves more representation and enlarge the size of the city council. Angelenos were apparently united in their desire not to increase the number of our elected officials, a desire that remains firmly in place today, 16 years after we comprehensively reformed the charter.

It’s enough to make one ask whether Angelenos have any aspiration for political representation at all. Los Angeles currently has the highest councilmember-to-resident ratio in the country and one of the lowest percentages of voter turnout in local elections. In our most recent city elections, approximately 9 percent of those registered to vote did so. In the election prior to that, in 2013, just over 20 percent of registered voters showed up to the polls despite a competitive mayoral election.

And less than half of eligible voters bother to register. That means a city councilmember can be elected with about 13,000 votes—just 5 percent of their district.

Angelenos have created a “voting class” which picks our representatives for us. Ironically, a city built and structured on a distrust of power is ceding an enormous amount of power to those few people who choose to weigh in on local elections.

Many Angelenos may say they want elected officials to represent us fairly and be responsive to our needs. But how can they do this well when each member represents over a quarter million residents? And why should they when they know only a small segment of those residents will determine whether they can keep their jobs?

As we created and later reformed our system of city government, we worried about putting too much power in any one individual or governing body. Now, as a result of our own apathy, we have put too much power in a select few.

It’s past time for Los Angeles to put a new aspiration on the agenda—more and better representation in the life of the city. And that requires increasing the number of politicians in local government. It may also require looking at other ways to increase voter turnout, like automatic voter registration (which was just passed on the state level), implementing early voting, and creating voter centers that are open for weeks before an election. It is time for at least a few of the people in office to know our names.

The post Angelenos Never Much Cared About Local Politics appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In the last century, Southern Californians dreamed so big and global that the size of our aspirations came to define this place. We created a 20th century cosmopolitan metropolis, extending from the mountains to the sea, a cultural and commercial trendsetter. We shaped the city into the entertainment capital of the world, and sought to be the sunniest, wealthiest, best educated, most sports-friendly, most entrepreneurial, most beautiful (in terms of people and landscape), and coolest region anywhere. L.A. was a place where the lives of poor and middle-class people would be transformed, where—in the words of Mayor Tom Bradley—“the only thing that will stop you from fulfilling your dreams is you.”

“People cut themselves off from their ties of the old life when they come to Los Angeles,” said Bradley, who served as mayor from 1973 to 1993. “They are looking for a place where they can be free, where they can do things they couldn’t do anywhere else.”

Today, ambition has given way to trepidation. Our most powerful aspirations are no longer about growing the city or its global footprint, but about splitting it into pieces, shrinking it into smaller communities. With our working class squeezed and the number of children in decline, we dream not of economic advance—but of finding a grip on some small ledge of L.A. that we can make our own, and hold onto as we age.

Our region’s current visionaries have convinced many of us that the best way to cope is to turn L.A. into a group of small villages, self-contained and sustainable—on the scale of the sorts of places previous generations fled to come to the big city.

We no longer want to attend big school systems (reformers are busy creating charter schools), work in big industries (we’d prefer one of those downtown or Playa Vista start-ups), or drive on big roads (we’re narrowing them to fit in bike lanes and new rail lines). We don’t even want a sprawling regional Olympics; our bid for the 2024 Games envisions a sporting festival divided up into five tight clusters in different parts of town.

And when it comes to the innovation and creativity that shape the future, we’re content to cede leadership to Silicon Valley. Hollywood now goes to great lengths to do much of its creative work elsewhere, at least when it isn’t cashing in its state subsidies.

We’re told a splintered L.A. will be a better L.A. because it will run at a slower and more human pace, organized around everyday needs, not unrealistic global ambitions. We will live narrower lives on narrower streets that discourage driving, but those lives will be healthier and more comfortable, and we will feel a sense of belonging in these small places.

It’s worth noting that the words Southern Californians use to describe their aspirations haven’t changed—L.A. was always driven by visions of efficiency, health, and coolness. But the meanings of those words are different now. Cool was once big and fast and loud; it’s now intimate and slow and quiet. Efficiency once meant building great highways and waterworks across great distances; now the height of efficiency is to retrofit and redesign existing infrastructure, as we aspire to do with the L.A. River.

We once defined health by what we did—to be healthy was to do it all and see it all and eat it all, to not be tied down to one place. In today’s L.A., health is defined by our ability to deny ourselves. Health is to not smoke or eat too much, to not drive or spend too much time away from the familiar—our families, our homes, our neighborhoods.

But there is something hollow about this new aspiration of health. It’s health as an absence—of risk, of pain, of conflict. Get your kid into the charter school that suits her perfectly, that won’t cause her any distress. The city of Los Angeles’ highly touted Mobility Plan even suggests we regulate the city’s recreational trails so that bicyclists, hikers, and horseback riders aren’t in the same place; “The first priority is keeping trail users safe and preventing conflicts between various users,” the plan reads.

Are we becoming The Agoraphobic City? There are risks to mitigating risk. Great cities, the urban theorist William H. Whyte argued, are about the unexpected collisions between strangers. And a city can’t be great when its people are keeping their distance, glued to their smartphones, and staying at home in their respective enclaves.

We know all too well the dangers and unintended consequences of our sprawling, car-centric, hyper-diverse, globally ambitious metropolis. But there are obvious threats in our desire to split apart into smaller like-minded enclaves—to our diversity, to our economies of scale, and to the very idea of Southern California as a single entity itself.

The biggest threat is to our already frayed commitments to equality and democracy.

It’s disturbing that so many of our grand planning exercises amount to democratic dodges. For example, the Los Angeles 2020 Commission was created by the city council during the 2013 mayoral election explicitly to push big questions about our future beyond the election season. You will not find the word “democracy” anywhere in the 200 pages of the Mobility Plan, nor will you see democracy discussed in school reform or economic plans for the city. Los Angeles’ leaders may have big plans to confine us to smaller communities. But they have no plans to let these communities govern themselves.

In some ways, today’s L.A. elites are even more self-confident and self-righteous than those who came before. They are more diverse (though not as diverse as L.A. itself) and better educated. In this city of cool, the nerds are now ascendant, led by Eric Garcetti, Rhodes scholar and nerdiest mayor in our history.

These elites revere systems and data and technology, and they have a bad habit of talking about L.A. as if it were a controlled test lab, not a wondrously chaotic home to millions of independent-minded people. Our elites talk endlessly about using the city as a stage for creating “models”—business models, education models, technological models, innovation models, water conservation models—that they can export elsewhere.

Take the Broad Foundation’s plan for charter schools, which states that Los Angeles offers “an opportunity to create a national proof point for other states and cities.” Or look at the Mobility Plan, which suggests we should all be planning every trip we take outside our front doors, calculating all the costs and benefits of our multiple transportation options. Serendipity? Bury her next to Grandpa at Forest Lawn.

Much of what passes as visionary planning for L.A.’s future amounts to small think, answering the challenges of a giant metropolis with plans to create small towns.

If our thinking were bigger, our aspirations would not be to create small models, but to create a shared sense of community and citizenship across the entire metropolis. We should be working to attract new industries and new families and new immigrants to renew our region and its culture. We should be building on our regional progress (in areas like trade infrastructure, smog reduction, and transit) and working to break down the barriers of class, distance, and governance. Why, for example, does L.A. County still have 88 separate (and often poorly run) cities?

The good news is we are building bridges—particularly public transit—to try to connect ourselves better. The bad news is that we’re not building nearly enough. California’s dysfunctional governance and 2/3 vote requirements are huge obstacles to creating sufficient transit, housing, parks, and other improvements to fulfill the aspiration for more separate neighborhoods.

Our abstemious culture also works against investment and transformation. In today’s California, we have tragically married the essential fight for environmental protection to a crippling obsession with government frugality—and fashioned the combination into a club for saying no to just about anything not backed by a billionaire. And so it’s a safe bet that—without much deeper and more democratic integration across the region—we will leave the transit job half-finished at best, our enclaves still too cut-off from each other.

There’s another problem: In a big metro area, connections can’t be made just through transportation. They come through shared culture and experience. We already have too little of this. Many of the institutions that connect us—from the waterworks to the news media—are decaying. Most of us can’t even watch the Dodgers on TV anymore. Will splitting us up into separate neighborhoods and schools really simplify our lives and give us time to connect in other ways? Or will these aspirations for smaller L.A.s merely add to the complexity of navigating this complex place?

Los Angeles is already too separated, its places walled-off, its culture and politics too top-down. We can’t manage to unify our two ports, sitting side by side, a failure that comes with significant costs to our global competitiveness. As several scholars show in the new book The Rise and Fall of Urban Economies: Lessons From San Francisco and L.A., the Bay Area surpassed L.A. economically over the past 40 years by adopting a far more open and democratic culture, with less hierarchy and more exchange of ideas and capital between people, companies, and academia. The Bay Area, in other words, built networks. L.A. remains too much a land of separate empires.

These days, there is a strange nostalgia among governing elites for early 20th-century Los Angeles, a smaller, dense, and segregated city with streetcars. According to this revisionist history, Southern California’s departure from the straight and narrow came in the second half of the 20th century, when we sprawled and built too many freeways and unsustainable infrastructure. What’s forgotten is that the late 20th century also made L.A.—through great struggle and pain—a more diverse and international, safer and less polluted place. Southern California needs a revival of that spirit of breaking boundaries, not plans to erect new ones.

The return to a smaller L.A. is not an inspiring dream. It reflects an understandable weariness with all our earlier growth and ambition, but it isn’t a recalibration for a new century. It’s more of an abdication.

The post The Downsizing of the City of Outsized Dreams appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Maybe you think of Santa Monica as a place of sea breezes and ocean beaches, of suntans and surf. But for me the core of Santa Monica is the apartment. Over 60 percent of the residents are renters, and many are combatants in a miniature class war that never stops. They are haunted by one question: Will someone try and take my apartment away? If you understand that simple fact, you’ll appreciate a lot of what makes the town tick.

When I first moved to Santa Monica, the year was 1973, and Santa Monica was not yet a bedroom community for the rich. It was still “Oshkosh by the Sea,” a town without traffic jams or movie stars. Third Street had no fancy Promenade, and the old downtown had a single department store, Henshey’s, which was owned by a local family that was as civic-minded as could be. Main Street was shopworn and tired.

The Chamber of Commerce and local newspaper, The Evening Outlook, ran the place. The seven-member at-large city council was an unabashed bastion of conservatism. They had grand ideas and visions for the city—most of which were terrible, and all of which set off firestorms of protest. One plan was to tear down the Santa Monica Pier and build an Island in the Bay with a freeway out across the Pacific leading to Malibu. (Don’t ask why this was supposed to be a good idea.) It failed. But other plans succeeded. One brought the shopping center now known as Santa Monica Place to the southern end of the Third Street Promenade. Another brought high rises to Ocean Park.

People who lived in Santa Monica loved their neighborhoods, loved their Pier, and generally picked up that the city council was trying to benefit special interests instead of ordinary voters. But the majority, the renters, didn’t exercise their power. Only 15 percent voted in local elections, and most didn’t even know who their mayor was. (Many thought the mayor of L.A. was their mayor.) My mission, as a full-time organizer in Ocean Park, was to help change all of that.

My first apartment in Santa Monica was a one-bedroom maid’s quarters facing a front yard on Third Street in Ocean Park. Rent was $90 a month. Jim Conn, the minister of the Church in Ocean Park, had found it for me. I was coming off several years as an organizer with the farmworkers movement, most recently with a stint on the East Coast. I returned to California in early 1973, and Jim hired me as a community organizer to assist in the fight against the Ocean Park Redevelopment Project. Meanwhile, he put together a congregation at the Church in Ocean Park, a traditional Methodist church building at Second Street and Hill Street.

Ocean Park is a neighborhood located right along the beach in the southern part of Santa Monica. It was and is an area known for its creative types. It was also, for many years, one of the poorest parts of town. The City Fathers hoped to evict the low-income people there and, with help from Washington’s newly created Department of Housing and Urban Development, replace the homes with luxury high-rise apartments. This was to happen on a 25-acre section right along the beach in the southernmost section of town, a community of low-income seniors and Latino families. It was called the Ocean Park Redevelopment Project.

By the time I arrived, half of this plan had already been achieved. Two giant apartment complexes had gone up by the water. (They remain today.) A second phase that was moving forward called for two more high-rises, 14 stories each, and not an inch of parkland nor a single unit for any of the low-income families and seniors moved out of their homes against their will. As an organizer at the Church in Ocean Park, my job was helping people to mobilize against Phase Two.

Bad as things looked, we felt a sense of momentum. Activists had already banded together in 1971 to save the Santa Monica Pier, a grassroots campaign that was so powerful it led to the removal of three council members and the city manager. After a long fight, one that finally involved the brand new California Coastal Commission, we came to a deal that lowered the density of the project, created 100 units of senior housing, and forced the construction of a six-acre public park and of two access-ways through the project to the beach. It was a major victory for the neighborhood, and it heralded a shifting of power in Santa Monica.

One hotspot for reformists in those days was Al’s Kitchen on the Pier. Al’s was a hole-in-the-wall hamburger and fish place owned by a woman named Joan Crown and managed by Jack Sikking, who would hold court at a corner table on a patio behind the restaurant. Jack, a reserved, good-hearted man in his 40s, was a straight-up political genius. Without any formal training in politics, he’d figured out where the real centers of political power in the city were, what their vulnerabilities were, and how to tap the best instincts and energy of citizen activists. Activists gathered there for breakfast, lunch, and dinner to discuss how to take power away from developers, The Evening Outlook, and the banking and real-estate interests.

The other primary locus for us reformers was the Church in Ocean Park. Two years after Jim Conn’s arrival, the place was buzzing with a childcare center, a community center, a women’s center, a low-income legal center, and a community organizer (me). The church had its own improv group (known as Public Works), which would do shows every Friday and Saturday night. Artists brought their work to the church. Poets read to audiences large and small. It was a place of innovation.

I remained an organizer at Jim’s church for a little over three years. Then I began to work on other issues in the city and went on to a career as an organizer and an advocate. Those years in the mid-1970s gave me not only the tools to do this work but also the inspiration to know that social change and social justice are possible and real. And the power shift we set in motion led to the most dramatic change of all in Santa Monica: rent control, enacted amid runaway inflation in 1979.

Santa Monica in the old days—the days I knew from 1973 through the ’90s—was, to be frank, a hell of a lot more fun than it seems to be today. We activists lived in Ocean Park and never went north of Montana because that was “north of the people.” Tuesday evenings meant city council meetings and then talk, talk, talking at Zucky’s Deli (now long gone) on Wilshire and Fifth Street. Mornings meant a long breakfast, often at the Omelet Parlor on Main Street. There were telephones in each booth, because so many unemployed actors and political organizers came in for breakfast. Unlike most places, it looked down on smokers: you had to get up and fetch an ashtray.

There is a great temptation to simplify and make cute what Santa Monica was in those days. But the fights were serious, and passing rent control ultimately brought stability and peace to thousands of renters. All of this emerged from a citizen’s movement that had a vision of cities as more than simply eminent domain for well-connected developers with bulldozers. Cities are places where people live, and those people deserve some security in their homes.

So if you drop by for an overpriced latte along the Promenade, you can rest assured that somewhere nearby is an apartment with a senior citizen who is living without fear of removal. And if you enjoy a walk to the end of the Pier or along the coastline, you can credit the successful fights to enhance coastal access for everyone. Santa Monica is a complex little city where the experiment of democracy led to wonderful results. It isn’t perfect, but it is much better than others would have made it.

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