A Municipal Perfect Storm

Not long after my son began busing to a magnet school in the San Fernando Valley, he came up against the vast psychic gulf that divides Los Angeles’ premier bedroom communities from the rest of the city. My son’s chorale group was invited to sing at a downtown hotel convention, not far from our Echo Park home. The concert was a success, but as we drove away, he wasn’t smiling.

“Why didn’t you tell me we lived in the ghetto?” he demanded, glowering.

“What?” I asked, blindsided.

It seemed that when the performers got off the freeway--at the same exit my son’s school bus took each day--several of the Valley kids yelled. “We’re in the ghetto!” Some slid down in their sticky plastic seats so their heads wouldn’t show in the bus windows; others got on their cell phones, nervously describing what they saw as a perilous vista to their parents back home.

“Look! There’s a gangster!” exclaimed one kid, pointing at what my son described as a nondescript Latino man, conspicuously free of thug-style jewelry or clothing.

My son eventually learned to shrug off the students’ ignorance about his more urban neighborhood, which after all was just a reflection of what they had heard from adults and the media. But now, that same ignorance threatens to blow the city apart.

A proposal for Valley secession is heading for the November ballot, and many people in both the Valley and the rest of the city, who also have a vote, apparently support it. The plan is to make the Valley into a new city of 1.35 million people, the sixth-largest in the United States; the remaining Los Angeles, at 2.35 million, would slip from No. 2 to No. 3.

Astonishingly, secessionists are billing the breakup as a bid for smaller, more efficient and responsive government. I keep waiting for this howler to show up on “The Tonight Show” monologue--only in Los Angeles could you sell a city of 1.35 million as small and responsive. Has anybody talked to Phoenix, the current No. 6, about small and responsive? How about No. 7, Detroit? Is that the kind of cozy little town hall meeting, Welcome Wagon kind of place they envision becoming?

Even the Local Agency Formation Commission (LAFCO), which is overseeing the secession process, noted in its report that small-government efficiencies tend to vanish at the 20,000-to-50,000-population watermark. So what is really going on here? Let us put aside for the moment the motives of secession organizers, the termed-out politicians looking for somewhere--anywhere--to get elected, the local businesses grasping at a financial windfall. Let’s look at the story line secessionists are trying to sell.

The basic theme is that Los Angeles is a burnt-out shell, sucking wealth from the gleaming suburbs over the hill. With some kind of weird “Green Acres” mentality, secessionists tar all us big-city folk with the same brush. Whenever I hear pro-secession forces talk about Los Angeles, I picture a cartoon thought bubble above their heads containing a sunken ship, its crumbling bones crawling with poisonous sea slugs and ink-squirting giant squid. Secessionists see themselves as winners and us as losers. Secession opponents haven’t done anyone any favors by acting like a Valley breakaway would be a disaster for the remaining city. That just reinforces the idea that we’re dead weight.

Before you accuse me of being an anti-Valley snob, let me say I grew up in North Hollywood--or as the Valley, with unintended irony, now dubs my neighborhood, Valley Village. I’ve been called a Valley Girl more times than I can count. I shop in the Valley, hike there, go to movies and visit friends.

During my childhood, we had our over-the-hill prejudices. The only time I remember visiting South-Central Los Angeles was to see the Watts Towers. But visit the Watts Towers we did. And the Miracle Mile, downtown Los Angeles, Olvera Street, the Farmers Market, the Fairfax district and Hollywood. My parents were from a small Midwestern city. In the Valley, they found a nice place to raise a family, but it was important to them that they were part of the city as well. Otherwise, why leave Missouri? I can still remember my mother’s contempt when salesmen would try to get her to switch her newspaper subscription to the suburban paper.

Most Valley people today rarely sally forth into the other Los Angeles, unless they work here. Of course, the Valley has evolved, economically, culturally and in every other way. I have no doubt one can live a perfectly delightful life without ever venturing south on the 101 Freeway.

But the Valley’s insularity renders its voters ill-equipped to decide the secession question. I presume secession backers realize they’ll be losing Bel-Air, Pacific Palisades and Brentwood. But what about Beverlywood, a shady mid-city enclave that resembles nothing so much as the Valley? Or West Adams, a tightknit neighborhood of classic Craftsman-style homes that have been renovated into little gems? Or Silver Lake, a hillside hideaway that shields the doctors’ mansions of Pill Hill and landmark architecture by Richard Nuetra? The Baldwin Hills? Do they even know these neighborhoods exist--and contribute to the tax base as generously as Encino and Tarzana, maybe more so?

Sure, we have our urban blight, but so does the Valley. Our highs and lows may be more spectacular, but we are not that different. It’s a sign of how deep misconceptions run that this point must be made, but here it is: We are truly one city. The Economic Roundtable, in a 1999 study of the Los Angeles labor market, described how employment and commerce zones ride roughshod across the L.A./ Valley divide.

“We can think of the ‘space economy’ of the City of Los Angeles as divided into (a) service areas that extend westward from downtown Los Angeles on either side of the Hollywood Hills and Santa Monica Mountains, to Westside Los Angeles and the south San Fernando Valley, and (b) manufacturing areas that extend south of downtown Los Angeles to the Harbor, and northwest of downtown into the north San Fernando Valley,” the report said.

Contrary to popular perception, the LAFCO secession report concluded nothing about the long-term economic viability of either the new Valley municipality or the city that would be left behind. Nor does it analyze the impact--good or bad--of secession on the local economy. Its only real topic is how to split the city’s booty.

“The LAFCO report made only a cursory analysis of impact on Los Angeles,” says Raphael Sonenshein, a Cal State Fullerton political scientist. “I don’t think anybody really knows what it will be.”

So who is the winner if the city divorces? No one, it turns out.

“Economically, the two cities would be about the same, to be quite frank,” Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., says of the entities that would be created by secession. “The remaining city would be very, very viable. Some areas are seeing a renaissance--the Fairfax district, the Grove at the Farmers Market, a lot of new projects downtown.... People look at the Valley and flash back to the old myths that it’s all suburbia, but in fact the Valley is very, very diverse. There are very lovely residential areas, but in the northeast parts of Van Nuys, there is economic decay.”

Secession supporters have seized on the similarities between the Valley and the rest of Los Angeles to argue that, unlike every other secession movement that ever was, they are not rich white suburbanites fleeing a decaying, multiethnic inner city. But their argument is not only disingenuous, it misses the point. Why secede at all? It’s easy to think of reasons not to. Los Angeles stands to lose in its sure grip on Pacific Rim and global economic leadership. Bereft of a major airport, port, research universities, water, sewer and utilities infrastructure--the list goes on--it’s hard to see how the Valley would be perceived as anything more than another suburban sprawl.

And what’s the good part again? Where are the economic advantages, either in the Valley or beyond? Secessionists have failed to make any sustainable economic case for secession, relying on our ignorance to win the day.

Before we let that happen, let’s take a good look at one another. This weekend, I promise to drive to Northridge if someone in the Valley will come to Koreatown. Or Carthay Circle. Or View Park. Let’s see if we can’t find some common ground. Otherwise, we risk marching in a state of perfect ignorance into a municipal perfect storm.