Paradise Lost - The City Of Angels Going To The Devil
The Age
Saturday January 22, 1994
The LA riots, and this week's earthquakes, are apt symbols for a city that is turning into a polluted junkyard, dysfunctional, crime- afflicted and racially ill at ease. Christopher Reed reports from Los Angeles.
PALMS, beloved by cartoonists, photographers, and property developers as instant shorthand for Los Angeles, become a more telling symbol for this troubled city when you learn two things about them. They harbor rats and they are not indigenous.
The metaphor summarises the city's schizophrenia: the menacing, sinister side of life in the sunshine _ crime, drugs, gangs, poverty and a pervasive fear _ and demographic changes, in which foreign immigrants will eventually dominate the City of Angels. It is sometimes called a ``reconquista", because of the number of Mexicans now living as documented workers or illicitly, but LA will not be turned over entirely to the people who owned it before statehood in 1848.
It is almost a cliche now that more Mexicans live in Los Angeles other than in Mexico City, but so do more Koreans other than in Seoul, more Iranians other than in Teheran, and more Louisiana Creoles other than in New Orleans. In LA's school district, which educates 600,000 pupils, 83 languages are spoken and the second language at Beverly Hills high school is Farsi.
The ``browning" of LA _ by 2010, Hispanics will be the majority in the region _ is the driving force behind the metamorphosis of the city's character. It is this sense of decisive change that exacerbates the increasing tribal rivalries and intensifies political difficulties.
The earthquake on Monday, with its 40-odd death toll and damage and repairs estimated at up to $US30 billion, will deepen LA's difficulties, because the economy will be further damaged.
In the last four years, LA has suffered through drought, floods, fires, an economic recession worse than the national one, the divisive racial beating of Rodney King and the resulting riots in 1992 (the worst urban disturbances in America this century), and now the earthquake, the worst since 1971.
Murders, about 1100 a year, have doubled in 20 years, and drug use has quadrupled. The poorest congressional district in America, formerly in Mississippi, switched to the 33rd in south-east LA county when it was created in 1991. In contrast, Beverly Hills has more Rolls-Royces per capita than anywhere in the world.
More than 100,000 jobs have been lost in LA since the late 1980s, because of cutbacks in the aerospace and defence industries and the closure of tyre, car and other highly paid manufacturing plants. The city is close to bankruptcy.
Most great world cities have either a navigable river, a natural harbor, are a trade cross-roads or are adjacent to rich agricultural soil or on land of great beauty. None of these apply to the City of Angels, thrown up at the end of a railway in the desert, and sold by largely crooked real estate agents for its ``Mediterranean" climate.
They didn't mention the mud slides, fires, arid climate, or the blistering Santa Ana winds.
The huge wave of settlers came between the wars, white people from America's mid-West, bringing prudish social views and a complete misunderstanding of the geography (they insisted on growing lawns in an area where annual rainfall compares with Tangiers).
The boosters and developers knew water was a premium, so Los Angeles stole it from the Owens Valley, 560 kilometres away, and piped it in.
It was then stolen again by fraudulent entrepreneurs who diverted it to their purchased plots north of LA in the San Fernando Valley _ the epicentre of Monday's quake. The valley is now the world's biggest suburban dormitory, although it, too, is becoming increasingly Hispanic.
The mid-Westerners created the Puritan paradise of LA in the half- century up to 1960, a time still fixed in the popular imagination as quintessential LA lotus land: barbecuing by the pool under a cobalt sky at the back of a ranch-style bungalow in a tranquil suburb where the worst crime is walking a dog without a lead.
This vision is vanishing forever. The new LA is turning into a dystopia, a Third World capital, a polluted junkyard of abandoned buildings and rampant gang crime where the backyard barbecue is more likely to be bullet-riddled. Or at least that is the criticism. But parts are like that.
With the economic crisis and the neglect of vast ghetto areas, the city has become almost ungovernable. But then it has never experienced proper politics since the 1920s, when the transplanted mid-Westerners deliberately created a weak mayoralty, an unwieldy bureaucracy of unaccountable paper-shufflers, and a strong council that was apolitical so it would respond not to a party line, but the people who mattered: bankers, property developers, affluent home owners.
The whites have become increasingly isolated from city affairs. ``The upper-middle-class simply buys its way out of the public sector, sending its children to private schools, hiring private security guards for its own protection (but still feeling unsafe. These are private solutions _ like the mass purchase of hand guns _ that aren't real solutions at all," says Harold Meyerson of `LA Weekly' journal, and the city's most astute critic.
Another private addiction is the car and LA's famous freeways. LA has only had a suburban train network since 1992 and it is still regarded as an exotic novelty. A pre-war light-rail system, one of the most extensive in the world, was dismembered in the 1950s by a secret cabal of car, tyre and bus manufacturers and an oil company. They were convicted of conspiracy in court, but fined only derisory sums.
The bus system is actually one of America's most densely used, which surprises many (white) Angelenos and visitors because it is almost exclusively used by poor blacks and Hispanics. The latter use them to travel to the prosperous (white) Westside _ the ``three B" wealthy enclaves of Brentwood, Beverly Hills and Bel-Air, where they are gardeners and maids.
This is LA's nastiest little secret, its servant class of Hispanics.
Clusters can be seen on various street corners where passing motorists pick them up for ``yard work", or quality craftsmanship like laying bricks or carpentry, for a pittance. Many are illegal and dare not demand a fair wage. If these street scenes remind one of prostitution, the analogy fits, except these folk are exploited for less money.
The very people whose gardens bloom from their work, now rant about illegal immigration, the ``hot button" issue for conservative politics this year. They are egged on by Governor Pete Wilson, a conservative whose ratings in the opinion polls are below 30 per cent.
LA's foreign immigrants have been used as scapegoats every time the economy falters. Yet a survey by the University of California shows that Hispanics embody the vaunted ``family values" and are the least drain on welfare. Here are the percentages for blacks, whites, and Hispanics for the following: Population: 11 per cent, 41 per cent, and 38 per cent. A household of two parents and children: 14, 16, and 43. On welfare: 35, 12, and six.
Working males in household: 66, 76, and 80. In every category, Hispanics represent the most desirable citizens _ according to the precepts of those who criticise them most.
Can it be fun in the sun again? Of course it still is and always has been _ if you're rich. Even the earthquake-spared Bel-Air.
Hollywood loves a happy ending too, but that does not necessarily apply to the city that gave it a home. LA is reality; grim reality.
© 1994 The Age