This has been a year of spectacular failure for the City of Los Angeles. Anyone who says otherwise is not being honest.
If you don't believe that this year has seen some of the greatest failures to come to LA since the early 1990s, try to come up with one of your own lists like this--our top ten civic stories--for 2011, and see if failure doesn't dominate it. Failure upon failure upon failure, barely relieved by incidental patches of success--successes that are far from clearcut. Even so, this is all useful to note. It demonstrates how much our City has declined in a single year.
The following are, as I saw it, the top ten things that happened to Los Angeles in 2011, in order of importance. Seven are bad, one is politically destabilizing, one is politically neutral, and one is halfway to favorable. Some were extensively covered by our increasingly failing mainstream media--others--like my second top story of the year, redistricting--I offer more as theory than as story. But this was, as far as I can see, a desperate year, rife with the aggregate consequences of civic irresponsibility of both the Mayor and Council, and these stories will mostly continue to scar our future even as they brought us to new depths this year.
The top ten stories of 2011 have been:
1. Brian Stow beatingComment follows.
2. La Raza Redistricting
3. The end of the fishwrap of record
4. Occupy LA
5. The end of the Mayor's machine
6. Garcetti, Andrea Alarcon cancel Sunset Junction
7. City scandals
8. Shocking political failures
9. LA River renaissance
10. Farmer's Field
1. Brian Stow beating
This sealed the fate of Frank McCourt forever, and it was a pivotal moment in local sports history--and undoubtedly the City's top moment of shame in 2011, and one of the most decisive ones as well. But beyond this, it was the top indicator that something was profoundly wrong in the City of Los Angeles.
The police weren't at Opening Day in adequate numbers--after all this time, we still don't know why not. The Dodgers weren't adequately interested in policing the crowd--after all this time, we still don't know why not, and nobody's been curious enough to ask, and civic leadership has actually stood by McCourt's side.
A senseless beating, a man damaged for life, certainly consigned to a hospital bed for months, a DA questioning the effectiveness of local police work, a baseball season of ignominy, a terrible first half for a team with tremendous talent, and a key economic furnace for Los Angeles rendered to a modest flicker of what it once had been, with profound questions about its ability to recover anytime soon. The gradual, then sudden implosion of one of the world's premiere sports franchises. And nobody says much at all, other than what bad guys the perps were--which is, of course, simply to state the obvious, and nothing more.
2. La Raza Redistricting
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| Change in an Echo Park census tract; pie charts rom LA Eastsider, March 9, 2011 |
The interests of balanced, affinity-based representation no longer carve up the City of Los Angeles, the County of Los Angeles, or the State of California after a census. This already legendary ProPublica piece, first published a scant few days ago, proves as much. Other such pieces are in the works.
But the truth is that affinity-based representation hasn't been a part of the view of most our best-known politicians for some time. Instead, the interests of a peculiar kind of redistricting not found elsewhere in America--call it La Raza Redistricting--dominates the local redistricting zeitgeist at State and City level within the bailiwick of Los Angeles. The practitioners, drawing mostly from partisan, agenda-driven materials provided to them by MALDEF and the William C. Velasquez Institute, are by no means exclusively Latino; but they do use shopworn, outmoded Latino political and demographic myths to advance their cause, which is closely wed to Democratic Party gaming of the process in the City and the State.
The myths the La Raza Redistricters use to advance their cause are two: they insist that the City of Los Angeles is growing, and they insist that as it grows, it is becoming more Latino-multicultural all the time.
Neither premise is true at our civic level. The City is not growing in any appreciable way whatsoever, in fact; it is more like a kaleidoscope, shifting patterns but not colors, and generally displacing low rentals for pricey ones, while giving lip-service to affordable housing efforts that are more of a lottery for the remaining poor than a policy for all. The City's ethnic saturation point has long ago been reached--likely around 2003 and 2004. But the La Raza Redistricters at MALDEF and WCVI who ply and play the redistricting appointments at both the City and State level pretend these things are true for the sake of extending Latino-tilting Democratic power.
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| LAUSD Enrollments by year |
Consider this: even with more Mexicans here than any city outside of Mexico City, with more Salvadorans here than in any city outside of El Salvador, &c., Los Angeles still didn't appreciably grow in population in any way over the past decade. Two and six-tenths percent growth over the past decade is almost exactly a quarter of one percent a year. Of course, had the Mayor not pushed the census count up so aggressively with a big PR campaign in 2009--which was, in fact, cheating--LA would have actually shown population loss from 2000 to 2010.
And the institutions that most widely services all these people who are not arriving--the LAUSD--has been shrinking in enrollment numbers since 2003--this year dropping to 1999 levels--despite building 160 new schools over the past decade.
So where's all this Latino growth in this pueblo? If the City isn't growing in population--and if the local public school district is shrinking in size--where are all these booming Latino communities?
Despite all this, top Democratic Party officials and the La Raza Redistricters continue to dominate the process of drawing our lines, as they did in 2001 with tools provided them by WCVI and MALDEF in hand. They're able to do this in part because every other Democratic group from Labor to local chambers of commerce hopes to meld the Latinos into whatever they're selling themselves, and hand them half the keys to their own shrinking pueblos for the sake of hanging onto majority party power.
This doesn't work, is not working, hasn't worked, will not work for the city, as now people of all cultures leave Los Angeles in parallel numbers. Not only that, the maps generate the kind of representation that prioritizes government services over job creation--hurting us all.
At the heart of the sleight-of-hand is the fuzziness surrounding the definition of "Latino" itself. All the studies WCVI and MALDEF issue suggest that Latino populations are exploding everywhere. It's good for Democrats and it's good for Univision--but is it true?
Defining what constitutes a "Latino" or a "Hispanic" is not even reliably done by the U.S. Census--and there is no other measure.
The 2010 Census lists "Persons of Hispanic or Latino origin" and "White persons" and "White persons not Hispanic" categories. Simply trying to identify the "difference" between ethnicities (Filipino? German-Mexican? Mestizo-American?) let alone track reliable numbers in a city that offers sanctuary to immigrants is all but impossible.
But our hardcore myth panderers continue to herd people by their likelihood to vote for people with diacritical marks in their surnames rather than the affinities found in their neighborhoods.
As a consequence, we're not even losing white-flight Anglo talent to Seattle and Portland and Irvine anymore; those middle managers have mostly long gone pursuing their opportunities elsewhere. With a crop of legislators more interested in baseline services than securing better jobs, now we're losing top Latino talent too--to Colorado, North Carolina and Massachusetts--even as La Raza Redistricters continue to promote the false case that Latinos form a consistent, amorphous, ever-growing underclass here.
La Raza Redistricters do not only include the Mayor, his cousin John Perez, Richard Alarcon, Maria Elena Durazo, Monica Garcia, Jose Huizar, &c. They include Nancy Pelosi, Eric Garcetti, Madeline Janis, Julie Butcher, Janice Hahn.
These redistricters are, in short, devoting all of LA's potentially transformational redistricting energy to planning for a more Latino-dominated, more multicultural future--a future that gives no demographic evidence of ever arriving.
3. The End of the Fishwrap of Record
The LA Times is no longer a newspaper that serves local civic life in an estimable way or a way that is even relevant to most local lives. Perhaps best exemplified by some harmless local endorsements it has made in recent years--as Councilmembers Ron Galperin and Gordon Teuber can testify--the former fishwrap of record now routinely publishes advertorials on its former op-ed pages--sometimes even on behalf of our public utilities or CRA commissioners.
Perhaps its callowness was best exemplified by the firing of a 39-year-vet a few months before a natural retirement and a couple of weeks before Xmas.
There is journalistic awfulness all through the paper, but as an opinion writer I especially watch the editorial board. Jim Newton, Sue Horton, Nick Goldberg--these are the weaklings who turned states evidence as soon as they hit the Times board. Robert Greene tried to bail them out at year's end, after persistent exposure here to what they were not doing for so long--and the following list just grew and grew throughout the year--but while this is a welcome change, it comes far too late, and now the Times will get to learn how truly ineffectual it is as it deals with the candidates and also with the voters first hand rather than from behind a curain. This was the year they all jumped the shark for good, The End, please just go away, goodbye.
The following list: (just click randomly for fun) The Maharaja Jim Newton now wants DWP rate hikes Jim Newton: Doubling down on incompetence Jim Newton as moderator tony's wild years Who reads the LA Times these days? Jim Newton disorder spreads virally to Times newsroom Newton hypes Janis, LAANE yet again Madeline Janis "tight as ticks" with Times, Newton Why Jim Newton must go Madeline Janis in the headlights Patrick McDonnell almost wakes up in time to bury CD 12 race Note to Jim Rainey: Nobody cares The LA Times: A poor joke on local democracy
Morning Eye Opener
4. Occupy LA
I visited Occupy LA a few times. This was my experience of it: protesters with iPhones (Apple--Nasdaq 100 and the next Dow 30 company) using Google (Google--Nasdaq 100 company) and showing up in their Nikes (Nike--global conglomerate) while blaming Wells, BofA, Citi and Chase for the sins of Countrywide, IndyMac, Washington Mutual and Wachovia, railing about banks and corporations, all the while encouraged by our own Mayor and City Council (real unemployment rate in LA: 20%) to do so.
But in the end, Occupy LA embarrassed city government. It demonstrated (yet again) how out of step the City Attorney was with the City. Initial mainstream media reports stating that the LAPD had used restraint when dealing with the protesters later proved to be false. A captive MSM did everything they were told to do, even suffering the indignity of a lottery for the right to be embedded with the Police Department.
Social media forced mainstream media coverage of a quixotic movement that probably should have probably stayed social media based. One of the movement's many mistakes was valuing mainstream media's attention in the first place.
5. The End of the Mayor's Machine
Some birthday party clown named Carmen Trutanich won the race for City Attorney a couple of years back (oh yeah, the Times endorsed him, too), and that was the first blow. Then, a year ago, Chris Essel lost--that was the second. But this year: a throwback from the early seventies who comes up a little lame, Bennett Kayser, beats the heavily-backed Luis Sanchez for a school board seat. Now the Mayor's man in San Pedro Warren Furutani has already thrown in the towel as Parke Skelton can't hit his ass with a paddle anymore. And you know what? The end of the Mayor's machine is a good thing--but it's made for some frightful fragmentation at the governing level, and it's also given the Democratic County machine more power than it deserves or can handle. It all led me to wonder if Parke Skelton is simply out of touch.
6. Garcetti, Andrea Alarcon cancel Sunset Junction
By no means did I attend every Sunset Junction Street Fair since 1980. But I did attend most of them, and I did watch the festival emerge as a gay and lesbian outfest to something bordering on Mardi Gras--but for a fee in recent years, and one that was inching upwards. And therein was the rub. It was crippled by Eric Garcetti, in whose district the festival resided, and also the LA Weekly, an increasingly slimy organization that sells cultural advertising the way a mafia don sells insurance. Sunset Junction didn't need to pay the LA Weekly to attract enough attention (as other cultural advertisers will find out soon enough), so it took it lumps there too.
What the City did to Sunset Junction was a civic disgrace--and it introduced us to Andrea Alarcon, the Mayor's designated killjoy. It also exposed the situational ethics practice of allowing City staffers like Paul Michael Neuman to game Neighborhood Councils--even while under the influence of their bosses--as usual business for Garcetti, Koretz & Co.
As it happened, I wrote quite a bit on this as it was happening. I'll not bother you with it.
Oh...maybe I will.
In Re: City Staffers on Neighborhood Councils Paul Michael Neuman, a staffer in Paul Koretz's office, plays a key citizen role in killing Sunset Junction, inviting concerns.
Final Thoughts on Sunset Junction The media and the City are on the same page, proving it's pretty easy to vilify promoters.
KPCC presents one side of Sunset Junction Departing from usual practice, David Lazarus presents one side of the Sunset Junction dispute, and one side only.
Garcetti, Alarcon flimflam Sunset Junction into obvlivion The City kills the Sunset Junction Street Fair and rewrites some history while doing so.
Alarcon asserts her authority over Sunset Junction The daughter of Richard Alarcon, a Villaraigosa appointment, wags her finger at Sunset Junction.
Will 219 NIMBYs kill Sunset Junction? The Silver Lake Neighborhood Council, dominated by a small Chamber of Commerce, took actions to kill its headlining annual event.
"All we need is a loan for a week" Sunset Junction promoters plead with City government; the City turns a deaf ear.
Despite legacy, board hijacks Sunset Junction Andrea Alarcon kills Sunset Junction over an amount that doesn't keep the City running for half an hour.
7. City Scandals
[Mayor's freebies and ethics fines, Housing Department, Building & Safety scandals, Gold Card scandal, Richard Alarcon, Kinde Durkee...&c. &c. and don't forget Al Abrams]
The scandals to hit City Hall and local politics in general this year were also spectacular. Most resulted in stiff fines and some resulted in criminal charges. The scandals need their own top ten, so thick and fast did they come. Feds, ethics commissions, the DA, everyone was crawling all over LA this year--it was a MayorSam fantasy come to life.
But for all this wrongdoing, nobody outside of about 500 people who follow City politics has noticed. Nobody cares, even now, even in aggregate. Everyone's too busy with their own lives. Everything to see here...but move along anyway.
8. Shocking political failures
Pat McOsker, Debra Bowen, Luis Sanchez, Tom LaBonge, Stephen Box all got about half or even a quarter as many votes as they were projected to at the start of their respective races. Take a quick look at that list--who was in charge of their campaigns? Nobody under forty-five in any case.
9. LA River Renaissance
Is this the one silver lining to 2011? Sort of. Maybe.
Tens of millions of dollars have thus far bought a 500-yard canoe track and some quality time with a few bulldozers, rearranging the gravel on the strip of damp concrete behind Echo Park. But it's a start, and it might bring the LA River up to actual river status by 2025.
10. Farmer's Field
The real axes in play in bringing Farmer's Field to Los Angeles are largely undiscussed. Every green light is an inconclusive one. Every word uttered in mainstream media is a bought-off one. And every team from Buffalo from San Diego has been portrayed as the one that's certainly coming. And even after all this, it's still...an imaginary stadium for an imaginary team.
° ° ° ° °
So what to do? Sell? Here's what to do: for starters, quit complaining, start observing. Make it a point to follow a local political blog (if you can find one) once a week, and to share what you see there with others.
The local tepid media? Start tuning 'em out . Those weak-kneed, ever hopeful to cash in, commercial-blog news aggregators out there--the ones that are actually afraid of writers and opinions? Forget 'em. After all these years, CityWatch, MayorsSam, RonKayeLA and this blog are still the best local opinion and news analysis sites--and they all persistently fly below the radar of our tonguetied mainstream media.
That should not be, btw. It's time for new blood to step up, too. Alice has been a little crankier and more circumspect lately--that's a good thing.
Start demanding of the media that you read that they start looking at what's going on in this city with an honest eye, and not with an eye only to retail and ad dollars.
Don't let anyone filter your city for you. Find it out for yourself. Have an interest in how your town works.
I don't ask you to agree with me about our city. I only ask you to know about it.
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