Los Angeles is being investigated, pilloried and derided over the horrific loss of life and property in the 2025 fires. Certainly, Mayor Karen Bass, the City Council and the county Board of Supervisors, and many of their recent predecessors, have not convinced the world that L.A. is a governable city.
Fire preparedness isn’t the only problem. In recent years, Los Angeles has been losing residents right and left. Census data show that its poverty rate is among the highest in the state, and that it’s in the top 10 nationwide. South L.A., roughly the area between the 10 Freeway south to the city boundary, locale of two of the worst riots in U.S. history, is now poorer in relation to the rest of Los Angeles than it was before those upheavals — the Watts riots, in 1965, and the Rodney King unrest in 1992. The city and county of Los Angeles has the second-highest unhoused population in the U.S., behind New York, and yet L.A. builds far less new housing than almost every other large “metro.” It has a deepening budget hole.
The news is far better if you look at smaller cities in the county: Downey, Lakewood, South Gate, Cerritos, Bellflower and Paramount. As you drive through downtown neighborhoods toward these southeastern suburbs, you’re likely to encounter broken pavement, battered buildings, empty storefronts and sidewalks crowded with vendors and food stalls reminiscent of the developing world. But just past the city limits, the reality changes.
In South Gate, for example, the main streets are well-maintained and landscaped, and there’s a dearth of the graffiti and homeless camps that scar so much of Los Angeles. A study by Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahlobo — to be published later this year — found that these cities generally outperform the city in many important economic, social and educational markers.
The overall office vacancy rate in downtown L.A., 31.5% in mid-2024, is more than three times higher than in the smaller cities to the south. Mahlobo’s comparisons show that the unemployment rate and poverty rate are lower in Bellflower, Cerritos, South Gate, Paramount, Lakewood and Downey than in adjacent parts of Los Angeles. All have violent crime rates below Los Angeles as a whole, and less than half of that endured in adjacent city neighborhoods.
These suburbs’ livability has been hard-won. Two decades ago, Paramount was written off as among the worst suburbs in the country. Rand described it as an “urban disaster area.” Many were “devastated” by factory layoffs and plant shutdowns in the 1970s, recalls Hector De La Torre, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments, a joint-powers authority of 27 cities and several unincorporated areas. “Their economic base was torn from them,” he added, “but these places figured how to adjust.”
Size matters, De La Torre suggests — being small, between 50,000 and 100,000 people — is a “sweet spot,” and the successful cities in Mahlobo’s study were basically in that range. Although some suffered from corruption in the past, most have built on the close connections between voters and the elected officials: “These cities compete with each other, which is very helpful,” De La Torre told me, “and they are small enough that officeholders get a lot of feedback.”
The city of L.A. isn’t suddenly going to shrink from 3.8 million people to 100,000, but it could take some lessons from the best-performing smaller cities. They govern within themselves; they are hyperlocal in their focus. “These communities are held together by a sense of pride more than anything,” notes Lakewood City Manager Thaddeus McCormick. “It’s about accomplishing things in the here and now.”
“Here and now” refers to taking care of basics, especially public safety and infrastructure. Los Angeles expends time, money and political capital on massive problems — social justice overall, climate change, even foreign policy — with a large helping of blue tribe ideology. The City Council made a show of refusing to cooperate with federal immigration policies right after President Trump’s reelection. In March, Bass signed a climate agreement with Finland, and in August, she released proposals for paying slavery reparations to its residents.
Caring about big issues is fine, but it is hardly as important or appropriate for city government as the here and now. In the aftermath of the 1994 Northridge earthquake, then-Mayor Richard Riordan repeatedly questioned and overcame bureaucratic roadblocks that would slow recovery. With the help of then-Gov. Pete Wilson, he managed to get a critical section of the 10 Freeway near downtown rebuilt in a remarkable 66 days. Under Riordan, much of the city, including sections that burned in the 1992 riots, was rebuilt.
L.A.’s government is technically nonpartisan, but it was no secret that Riordan was a center-right Republican. When he was elected, notes his campaign strategist, Arnold Steinberg, registered Democrats outnumbered Republicans 2 to 1; today he estimates the ratio as 4 to 1. If the city and county can be fixed, it will have to be largely by Democrats.
The good news is that even before the fires, Angelenos’ patience with ineffective government was wearing thin. They voted out L.A. County Dist. Atty. George Gascón, a champion of progressive criminal justice reform, amid a backlash against his alleged “soft on crime” policies. Now the devastating Palisades and Eaton fires are fueling a recall push against Bass, whose junket to Ghana as extreme fire danger loomed exacerbates the view that she didn’t take firefighting budgets and infrastructure seriously enough.
Until the fires, Los Angeles seemed to be itching to fight Trump on national issue after national issue. Now it has to look inward and rekindle pragmatism at City Hall and at the Board of Supervisors. L.A. needs to trade its ideological posturing for what’s really needed — more water pressure in hillside fire hydrants, building permits that speed rebuilding rather than hinder it, and keeping the hills and the flats, the beaches and the mountains, and the people who live there, safe.
Joel Kotkin is a contributing writer to Opinion, the presidential fellow for urban futures at Chapman University and senior research fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas, Austin.
