Joel Kotkin, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Irvine, asserts that Los Angeles should continue to be a city of primarily single family homes and that Mayor Villaraigosa’s attempt to create denser residential development along public transport routes is wrong.
In a LA Times opinion piece, he writes, “But what sets L.A. apart from other great cities — and what makes it so attractive — has traditionally been exactly the opposite: its pattern of dispersion and its strong attachment to the single-family home. Assault that basic form and you will turn L.A. not into Paris but something more like an unruly, congested, dense Third World city. A Tehran, if you will, or a Mexico City.”
Isn’t most of LA already like Mexico City or Tehran? You can’t walk down Westwood Boulevard or stop into a Tarz-ino Starbucks without hearing Farsi… and Mexico City has already transplanted itself here. Denser building hasn’t done anything that immigration hasn’t done already.
He also claims: “Virtually everywhere in the advanced industrial world — from Tokyo to Toronto and Paris to Buenos Aires — the bulk of metropolitan job and population growth is occurring in places that look more like Manhattan Beach than Manhattan. Meanwhile, many celebrated older cities, including Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Tokyo, are losing population.” Rather than comparing population statistics, he might ask about the civic health of the inhabitants. Do Tokyo, Hamburg, Paris and Frankfurt have nightly drive-by shootings, uninsured and illiterate residents and more guns than people?
He also asks: “Do we really want to be like Chicago, New York or San Francisco? These are all expensive cities with economies that have been creating fewer jobs and opportunities than Los Angeles. They also have fewer children per capita.” Yes, yes, yes! I want to live in a city with less children, because Mexico City , Tehran and any other underdeveloped city has a higher percentage of young people because poorer people have more children. New York, San Francisco and Chicago are attracting young professionals who have invigorated once decrepit industrial neighborhoods and revitalized older ethnic ones. Where in Los Angeles do you find a neighborhood like Soho in New York or Pacific Heights in San Francisco?
As far as building a denser city, Mr. Kotkin should look at the unplanned and car centered, gilded skyscrapers along Wilshire Boulevard in Westwood. Here is development gone awry without any regard for the pedestrian or public transportation. It is a freeway of speeding SUV’s amidst a cacophony of architectural mediocrity and pretentious grandiosity. There are no parks, stores or benches—only a speedway of steel bouncing off marble facades.
Density is here to stay, the single family house is for multi-millionaires. We have to find a way to house LA, and Mayor Villaraigosa is right to explore new options and ways of building.
Here in Van Nuys 
Coupla things…
First off, Pacific Heights is not a redeveloped or gentrified area of San Francisco. Since the city’s inception it has been the residential center of the city’s wealthy political and business families. Second..yeah, we don’t have a ton of kids up here but that is because even middle class families can’t afford to stay in the city when they are looking to have kids and buy a home. All of the yuppies who aren’t making a couple hundred K a year either don’t have kids or own a home (or even a modest sized condo) or are forced to move out to the miserable suburbs (or to LA) to do this. The densest areas of SF are the ones with the highest #s of children. In fact the city’s children are to a large degree the children of poor and immigrant families from the “Third World” which you so xenophobically fear. So San Francisco’s experience has been one of flight for middle class families while only the very rich (minority) and very poor (majority) families with children stay leading to a third worldization of SFs family structure that is not revealed by the low-child statistic. Third…I don’t see how density or sprawl will have the slightest effect on economic inequality or the # of children living in LA. These are issues that will be decided by low-income housing policy (dense or not), availablilty of social services, and the basis of the regional economy. SF’s density is not related to the crunch that has pushed (and continues to push) out working and middle class people.
And the bottom line is that if the USA keeps treating the rest of the world like a dumping ground and using the global economic framework to send all of the misery a class-based system creates abroad, the people who are effected negatively by those policies will continue to come to the USA to escape the poor conditions the US-favored model is creating everywhere else. Sorry it disturbs your movie-viewing experince but its a fact thath isn’t going away.
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Well, this guy is from Irvine, where low density development has become the well revered and accoladed achievment for the past 20 years in the nation. For that, he MUST act as an apologist of those communities and against the potential backlash against the people, culture, biz, politics…etc which have been built upon that middle American, pastoral suburban landscapes since the 50’s.
And it’s not that he was entirely wrong (about the few charms of the ‘burbs), and I believe many here would agree. It’s really that L.A. has already out-grown itself as a “big town”. It is time that it must face the fact growing up like a true city is its destiny, which, is really not that scary after all.
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“Where in Los Angeles do you find a neighborhood like Soho in New York or Pacific Heights in San Francisco?”
Silver Lake, Eagle Rock and even my neck of the woods, Koreatown. That’s just within L.A. proper. Hollywood is also getting there, as you step over fewer junkies on the Walk of Fame. 😉
It’s hard to believe that Santa Monica was once a down-on-its-heels community. There were a lot of low-income families, starving artists and beach bums before it revitalized in the ’80s. There’s still remnants of the lower income residents near the 10 freeway and around Pico and Ocean Park boulevard.
Another quote:
“Isn’t most of LA already like Mexico City or Tehran? You can’t walk down Westwood Boulevard or stop into a Tarz-ino Starbucks without hearing Farsi… and Mexico City has already transplanted itself here. Denser building hasn’t done anything that immigration hasn’t done already.”
That is not, in and of itself, a bad thing. Immigration means that there are still some kind of economic opportunities for immigrants to pursue. Immigrants come here because their prospects for economic mobility are better here than in their homelands.
Is it up to those nations’ governments to provide for their own citizens? Yes, but they can’t, won’t or both.
The U.S. is stuck in a stalemate between nativism and the need for cheap labor. Australia and New Zealand have a unique situation where they have a lot of educated natives who leave for the U.S. and Europe and need to import immigrants to maintain their middle class, so their immigration policies are more accommodating. We have a lot of illegal immigration because the legal process is unreliable.
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Thank you. I will look up the Sherman Oaks Sun.
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There is one main point that no one is addressing about Kotkin’s piece. It’s one thing to outline the need to reinvent Los Angeles, etc., it’s another thing to fail to include in every single dialog, article, etc. the fact that there is absolutely no mention about the City’s failing infrastruture (roads, water pipes, etc.). Instead, we all react to the visions of the future, instead of forcing our politicans to deal with today’s reality. Then, again, with a revenue starved City, the promise of 46 new major downtown buildings/construction projects makes little complaints like broken sidewalks so trival, don’t they!!!
Thanks for keeping the dialog going…
(Take a look at http://www.shermanoakssun.com about the Best Buy project in Sherman Oaks for some more insight).
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And he also states in his LA Times piece, “As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the average American.”
But in the 1920’s Los Angeles was only a city of half a million spread over 500 square miles. It was also completely served by a massive street car system and a national railroad system. People didn’t need to drive everywhere–they chose to drive.
In looking back at our history, Los Angeles is constantly changing. The 1920s were different from the 1940’s and the 1960s has given way to new realities today. We have to adopt, not reconcile ourselves to self-destructive modes of living that are ultimately going to destory this planet.
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Kotkin also posits that one of the main reasons the city has developed as it has was due to the great reach of the Pacific Electric Railway throughout the region. (True enough: at over 1000 miles of track, it was the largest mass transit system in THE USA, ever.) But, if such a system was instrumental in our city’s development, why should we be at all surprised that when the massive system was unceremoniously RIPPED OUT, then development stalled also and the freeways turned into parking lots?
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