Future Shock.

To Keep on the Cutting Edge, L.A. Should Consider Massive Breakup

FOR a hundred years, Los Angeles has been the city of the future," Los Angeles historian Gregory Hise said at a forum at the L.A. Central Library in downtown last weekend. But that's not the case anymore, he added. "Other cities are now ahead."

Hise's comments reflect a growing disenchantment about the city's present and loss of faith in its future. This process has been fed by the recent disintegration of the city's institutions -- the LAPD's demise being the most recent -- and the steady exodus of major corporations from the city, Times Minor's demise being the most devastating.

If the issue is not met with bold innovation, Hise's assertion may also prove on target. Once the paragon of what he calls "progressive" government, Los Angeles in its current form is an unholy amalgam of giantism and incompetence, a bureaucratic nightmare that needs not only to be tamed but also exorcised.

How is this to be done? First, by keeping L.A. in its own context.

Forget about trying to become another New York, the dream of the Bradley era. L.A. will never be the financial capital of the world and is so remote from the centers of media power that it is unlikely to "dethrone" its self-interested rival. Nor should we want to emulate Gotham's hierarchical living and social structures.

Given its diverse and growing population, Los Angeles also cannot become another Portland, a new urbanist playground battling growth and setting up tree-lined boundaries. We left small-city status a long time ago and will never get it back.

Instead, Los Angeles must find its own way by doing what it did in the past -- taking the best ideas of the private sector and incorporating them in the public. Back at the turn of the century, this meant that Los Angeles followed the patterns of the industrial era, using economies of scale and "professional" management to build a city that became a metropolitan empire.

Today; in the digital age, learning from enterprise means something quite different, like developing a flat municipal structure that extends across old boundaries and instead seeks out the most advantageous arrangements. It also, for the most part, means trying to keep decision-making, wherever possible, in the hands of those most directly impacted.

Because this approach has at its core an embrace of secession, this implies a vote for breaking up the city -- not into just two entities, but into 20 or more separate jurisdictions. As much as possible, these new "cities" would follow identifiable areas like Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, San Pedro or Highland Park.

To some, this approach reflects little more than the old "small is beautiful" ideology popularized nearly a quarter century ago. But it is actually more pragmatic and flexible than that.

In this call for reorganizing Los Angeles, I adopt some ideas from my old friend Alvin Toffler, himself a local resident. In the new economy, the key is not whether an organization is large or small, but at what level it works best. "Today," Toffler observes, "we are beginning to realize that neither big nor small is beautiful, but that appropriate meshing of both big and small is most beautiful of all."

Future effective communities and regions, Toffler suggests, need to look not to industrial-age structures, but to the more innovative and flexible networks already found in cutting-edge industries such as computer software and entertainment.

On the local level, this means keeping land use and most basic public services under the control of definable, accessible and relatively small-scale communities. The effectiveness of smaller governments has been adequately demonstrated by the success of smaller-scale cities such as Burbank, West Hollywood, Culver City and Calabasas.

Of course, the defenders of mega-government -- most notably left-leaning academics and their public-employee allies -- will no doubt say that breaking the city into smaller towns will benefit only the affluent and take from the poor. Yet I would argue that the relative success of, say, Huntington Park or the city of San Fernando, as opposed to contiguous working-class regions of Los Angeles, belies this claim.

Secession of this sort is not anti-democratic, but is the essence of democracy. It offers a unique opportunity for grassroots democracy for every one of the varied communities of Los Angeles. With limited taxing and revenue-gathering powers, these communities would be incentivized to promote some forms of development -- something that seldom benefits poor communities now because the tax revenues from development don't go to the community, they go to the giant city of Los Angeles.

Of course, a city of Sherman Oaks or even a city of Hollywood could not adequately control every function. Indeed, there may be a strong case for a series of ad-hoc arrangements in such complex and widely needed services as transportation, water, power, airports and ports. These arrangements already exist in the form of such jurisdictions as the Metropolitan Water District.

Finally, the creation of an archipelago of smaller cities would also require the rationalization of the county government, which, by default and logic, should be transformed into a more responsible, representative body. A county legislature, preferably serving a limited term and restricted to a few key areas such as health and welfare, should be set up with multiple districts to reflect regional diversity. In some key areas, such as police and fire, there could even be some consolidation between now-redundant county and city functions.

At the top of this new structure would be a county mayor. This figure would answer the "grandeur" question that bothers some civic boosters who think L.A.'s status in the outside world might be diminished if it were split apart. As chief executive of a county of some 10 million, this mayor would be more powerful and important than any in the nation.

But more importantly, this mayor would be part of a kind of reorganization that will make Los Angeles, once again, a model of progressive government. And in the process, L.A. could reemerge as a symbol not of the failed urban past, but a reinvented urban future.

Business Journal Columnist Joel Kotkin is a senior fellow with the Pepperdine Institute for Public Policy and a research fellow at the Reason Public Policy Institute.