The Urban Crisis: Everybody's Fall Guy

By Jordan Bonfante/Los Angeles

Los Angelization: 1) The process in which rapid population growth, uncontrolled development, increasing congestion, rampant crime and environmental damage combine to make other cities in the Western U.S. resemble Los Angeles. 2) A descent into urban hell.

Sniping at Los Angeles for its smog, sprawl and gridlocked freeways is a time-honored pastime in the West. Traditionally, the gibing has been mixed with an abiding envy of the California megalopolis' trend-setting dynamism. But lately no amount of envy -- or imitation -- seems enough to offset the vitriol that is being aimed at L.A. from every direction. Los Angeles has become the butt of abject opprobrium -- the "villain" of the West.

In cities from Tucson to Tacoma, the term Los Angelization has become shorthand for the complex of urban problems that spring from trying to absorb huge influxes of new people. As residents of fast-growing Western cities contemplate the noxious haze descending on their skylines, the cookie-cutter subdivisions springing up on previously untrammeled hillsides and in pristine deserts, the freeway-choking traffic jams and the youth gangs dealing crack on their street corners, they fear that L.A.'s present could be their future, and the prospect throws them. When people in San Diego conjure up a Boschian vision of a solid urban corridor stretching 130 miles from Los Angeles south to the Mexican border, they call their nightmare "Los Diego." Consider these other examples:

-- This week in Santa Barbara, citizens will vote on a special bond issue to link the city to the state water system. The choice is difficult because while state-supplied water would help relieve severe drought conditions, it might also encourage a burst of unwanted new development that many residents fear could turn the exclusive coastal enclave into a Los Angeles suburb.

-- In the past four years, market towns like Fresno and once sleepy agricultural centers like Visalia in California's San Joaquin Valley have become some of the fastest-growing cities in the West. In the process, the & pristine air has been fouled by smog. And what does that make many residents think of? Answers a banner headline in the San Francisco Chronicle: SAN JOAQUIN HAS SEEN THE FUTURE -- AND IT LOOKS LIKE L.A.

-- In Seattle, Los Angeles bashing has become a marketing tool. Radio commercials for the Puget Sound Bank emphasize the popularity of Seattle-built Boeings over Southern California-built McDonnell Douglas aircraft. TV commercials for Rainier Brewing Co. contrast Beverly Hills-style poodles, prissy food and gold lame leotards with the manifest Northwest manliness of Rainier Light Beer.

-- In Phoenix, whose population soared from 1.5 million to 2.1 million during the past 10 years, Los Angeles is regularly held up as a disfiguring pox to be avoided at all costs. Two fatal shootings on local freeways last month were quickly characterized by commuters as "L.A.-style freeway killings."

-- Even the haze at the Grand Canyon, 400 miles away in the Arizona desert, is being blamed on Los Angeles. An air-quality study conducted since 1987 found traces of methyl chloroform, a chemical used in L.A.-based aerospace and electronics industries, in the canyon's atmosphere. Says Washington University chemist Warren White, one of the report's authors: "Even when you've left L.A., you can't escape L.A. air."

The anti-Los Angeles trend has gone far beyond mere carping to affect local elections all over the region. The influence grows in direct proportion to a city's proximity to L.A. In San Diego (pop. 1.1 million, vs. 875,000 in 1980), Los Angeles is regarded as the Wicked Witch of the North, just 120 miles away. "San Diego has never been sure of what it wanted to be when it grew up," remarks San Diego Tribune editor Neil Morgan. "What it did know was that it did not want to become L.A."

To that end, San Diego has a grass-roots political organization with 5,000 dues-paying members that calls itself Prevent Los Angelization Now! It is collecting signatures for a ballot initiative to impose a comprehensive "managed growth" plan on San Diego's city government. On the strength of polls showing that as many as 80% of voters favor slower growth, organizer Peter Navarro, a public-policy professor at the University of California at Irvine, believes that a new political alliance is forming that confounds old party lines.

"On the right you've got the fiscal conservatives, who ever since Proposition 13 ((which launched the tax revolt in 1978 by cutting property taxes)) have said, 'We don't want to pay for growth,' " he says. "On the left you've got the liberal environmentalists. And then you've got everybody in between, who are simply sick and tired of traffic congestion, overcrowded schools, crime and beaches that are polluted by sewage spills."

San Luis Obispo, a scenic town of 42,000 on California's central coast, until recently displayed a road sign with a happy face urging people to SMILE, YOU ARE 192 MILES FROM L.A. Mounting antigrowth pressure is aimed not only at Los Angeles as the symbol of overdevelopment but also at the increasing number of escapees from L.A., whose arrival is regarded as a threat to small-town ways. When Cornelius Deasy, 72, left L.A. to retire there and applied for water-drawing rights to irrigate his new popcorn farm, his neighbors were enraged. "We were the Ugly Americans," he recalls with a smile. When the newcomers themselves join the slow-growth movement -- as they increasingly tend to do -- they wind up getting rapped by both sides in disputes. Long-term residents resent them for coming in the first place, and the pro-growth camp, made up largely of local businessmen and tourism promoters, castigates them for wanting to shut the gate behind them after they get there. Complains Edward Biaggini, a hotelier and pro-growth advocate in nearby Morro Bay: "The people who come up to buy houses -- they're the ones who scream loudest about 'No growth!' "

That is not the only irony. The anti-Los Angeles mood, in fact, is profoundly ambivalent. Many inhabitants of secondary cities would dearly like to have the opportunities and higher wage scales that exist in Los Angeles, but without the tensions of expansion. As a result, the political consequences of the growth debate are frequently contradictory. In San Luis Obispo last spring, voters defeated a ballot measure that would have restricted new development one-third, to the statewide growth level of 2.4% a year. But just five months later, the same voters opted for a slow-growth majority on the board of supervisors.

One explanation for the contradictory voting patterns is that controlling growth has become a motherhood issue for political candidates: no one dare oppose it. "Nobody in his right mind stands up and says, 'I'm the pro-growth candidate,' even when he is," notes San Diego campaign consultant Thomas Shepard. Voters themselves are of two minds about development. "We're schizophrenic about growth," admits Peggy Rubach, the mayor of Mesa, Ariz., a Phoenix suburb whose population has nearly doubled, to 290,000, in the past 10 years. "We want the jobs, but we don't want the problems that come with them."

And what is Los Angeles doing to counter the antagonism? For one thing, a recently reorganized convention and visitors bureau will soon start an aggressive $10 million-a-year campaign to "market" the city. Civic leaders led by Mayor Tom Bradley have stepped up their travel abroad to promote the Los Angeles area's position as the country's busiest port, second largest financial center (after New York City) and gateway to the Pacific Rim. Mainly, though, L.A.'s boosters are counting on the very factor that makes the city an object of scorn: the expansive growth that makes it possible for businesses to thrive.

Even with the closing of a Lockheed manufacturing plant in Burbank last year and the loss of other industries to other Western cities, forecasters predict a net increase of new businesses in the five-county Los Angeles area in 1991. During the decade of the 1980s, in fact, 40% more businesses flocked to or were started up in L.A. than ran away, a burst of enterprise that covetous rival cities rarely match. Such economic success makes it easier for Los Angeles to endure its vile reputation. Says Mesa's Mayor Rubach with a shrug: "If we didn't also want what L.A. has, we wouldn't try to lure it away, would we?"