I was born in Los Angeles, lived there until age 7, and grew up 50-60 miles northwest of LA. I'm old enough to remember when "smog" was first talked about; it got bad soon after we moved but still went back on weekends to visit relatives - coughing, stinging eyes and skies the color of phlegm.
LA was becoming a city on wheels as World War II ended and gasoline became available once more. Ironically, the thing that mostly caused the smog was why we moved. They built a freeway right over our house, which stood about 6 blocks from the fabled "Hollywood and Vine" intersection.
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That's my LA history. Spiked has a column by Joel Kotkin about the more recent decline and fall of once-great Los Angeles. As is his wont, it is filled with data about population loss, the headquarters of important firms moving elsewhere, and the loss of well-paying manufacturing jobs.
According to Chapman Business School professor Marshall Toplansky, even the strongest parts of the LA economy, like entertainment, are slowly declining, as companies seek cheaper and safer locales.
Forty per cent of the jobs in Los Angeles County – of which the city constitutes roughly half – pay under $40,000. As Toplansky notes, in a high-cost city like LA, this represents a poverty wage. LA’s rate of working poverty is far higher than in San Francisco’s Bay Area and in neighbouring Orange County.
Critically, the city is also losing its appeal to families and the young. Over the past 20 years, Los Angeles County has lost nearly 700,000 people under 25 – the biggest per capita decline in youth among all large US counties. In contrast, its elderly population has surged by 500,000. The Los Angeles Unified School District, which is mostly inside the city boundaries, has lost over 40 per cent of its student body in just 20 years.
Even immigrants, who have restored much of the city’s vitality in the past few decades, are no longer coming. Between the 2010 and 2020 censuses, the number of foreign-born residents in Los Angeles County fell.
If you read Kotkin and Victor Davis Hanson, you could believe CA is in its death throes, which isn't completely true yet, but certainly seems where it is headed. Kotkin's description of public employee union control of political outcomes in the state is frighteningly accurate.
As I often remind our readers, if you want to see where LA is headed, view the Matt Damon film Elysium. The plot is ho-hum but the depiction of future LA is mind-boggling, it looks like the barios in Ensenada or Nogales. And as Kotkin describes LA politics, that's its likely future.
Editorial note: Demographer/Social Commentator Joel Kotkin is so prolific I swear he has a stable of researchers and assistants supporting him, he must average nearly a long, fact-filled column per day! True enough, many cover related stretches of metaphorical ground but still he is a publishing phenomenon.
