Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times. In 1981, the Rand Corporation described it as “an urban disaster area.” In 2015, it was named among the worst cities in America, based on 22 measures of affordability, economics, education, health, and quality of life. In 2019, Business Insider ranked it near the bottom along with several other nearby cities. Founded as a largely agricultural community in 1948, the city eventually transformed itself into a manufacturing hub but was then devastated in the 1980s as aerospace and car companies exited.
Yet today, walking along Paramount Boulevard, one sees not broken-down storefronts but a thriving downtown, full of attractive restaurants and shops. The city has adopted a “broken windows” approach to policing. While crime rates remain above average for the state, they have been trending down. Homicides, down two-thirds from 1990s levels, are well below the L.A. city average and almost half of those in nearby South L.A. neighborhoods. Paramount has also gotten its city finances on a more solid footing than those of its peers. Whereas L.A. was flirting with huge deficits even before the wildfires, Paramount maintained budget surpluses over the past decade.
Perhaps even more remarkable, one sees no signs of the homelessness, graffiti, and urban disorder that’s so common throughout Southern California—a remarkable shift from conditions just a decade or two ago. “In places like Paramount people get things done because that’s where they live,” says former Paramount city manager Pat West. “In L.A., they have meetings.”
Much of Paramount’s relative success comes from paying attention to little things. The city has focused on parks, urban space, and landscaping, helping local neighborhoods improve their look by subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences to improve the curb appeal of homes.
Under its elected leadership, Paramount has seen job growth in the hospital, education, small industrial, and retail sectors. The city’s income levels are significantly higher, and unemployment lower, than the L.A. County average. Unlike the dysfunctional L.A. school system, Paramount’s independent school district has improved its graduation rate from 71 percent to over 90 percent in recent years, according to city manager John Moreno.
Much of this success stems from the city’s strong community spirit and close collaboration between local government, businesses, and schools. Moreno notes that Los Angeles operates in a more “siloed” manner. In contrast, Paramount’s tight-knit community—now increasingly led by young families, many of them homeowners or aspiring to be—has driven its turnaround. “We went from a place with shootings and murders to one that attracts young families who see this as an up-and-coming place,” Moreno says. “We had a lot of blight, but the citizens and churches brought it back. When I go to L.A., I’m amazed they’re not doing these basic things.”
The turnaround in Paramount and a host of other South L.A. cities may seem like an obscure data point in the vastness of the Los Angeles Basin. Spreading 1,200 square miles, the basin encapsulates an immense area stretching from Hollywood to Orange County. The area is home to roughly 10 million people and 80 cities, including some of the country’s best-known locales like the Hollywood hills, Santa Monica, downtown Los Angeles, Venice, Koreatown, and East Los Angeles. In the recent fires, several of these communities, notably in the Pacific Palisades and Hollywood, went up in flames.
The far less well-known archipelago of smaller cities, known collectively as the Gateway Cities, stretches south of L.A. all the way to Orange County. Los Angeles was designed to be what two historians have called “a classic non-city” that was “planned to be a non-city.” Its urban fabric was built around single-family houses, and its vital constellation of smaller cities—more than 88 of which had taken root by the 1940s—revealed a strong proclivity for decentralization.
Like Paramount, many of these communities arose first as major agricultural and later industrial areas but fell into disrepair in the 1970s. Some, notably Compton, remain notable for their crime, corruption, and poverty. Yet this same region also has many examples of well-run cities—Lakewood, Bellflower, Norwalk, Paramount, Cerritos, Southgate, and Downey, for example—with vibrant central cores, lower crime, and improving schools. Indeed, according to survey work by Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahlobo, the independent cities outperform the adjacent parts of Los Angeles, and often the city itself, by wide margins in everything from student achievement to lower crime and retail vacancy rates.
Many of these places benefit from being contract cities, which essentially buy services—especially policing—from L.A. County or private firms. Most are run by professional managers, with city councils dominated by long-term residents. “The secret sauce,” suggests 34-year-old Bellflower city councilman Victor Sanchez, is being able to pick and choose where services come from rather than trying to run everything from a centralized city hall. “Sometimes,” suggests Paramount’s Moreno, “the private sector does things better.”
It’s not hard to spot the differences between these areas and territories controlled by the progressive-dominated City of Los Angeles. If you drive along the surface streets from L.A.’s Wilshire Boulevard southward, you encounter roads in poor shape, vendors out on the sidewalk, and many vacant buildings. But when you cross the border to a small city like Southgate, ten miles south of downtown, the graffiti is gone, the retail sector is thriving, crime is down, and homelessness barely exists.
Industrial jobs still exist here, accounting for as many as one in three positions. Economic growth over the past decade outpaced that of the big city. Compare that with downtown L.A., where the office vacancy rate is almost three times that of the independent cities nearby, and abandoned towers are now draped in graffiti. Even Santa Monica, a seemingly ideal location, suffers both high vacancies in retail and office space.
“Cities need to realize they can’t allow physical blight,” notes Southgate city manager John Hudson.
The key here is not urban form or ethnic succession, but governance and a strong local focus. “It’s about leadership,” suggests Caren Spilsbury, CEO of the Norwalk Chamber of Commerce. “It’s the businesses, the churches and the city. We are all connected.”
One crucial difference between Los Angeles’s sprawl and the even wider sprawl around New York lies in the relative irrelevance of downtown, which represents only a small proportion of employment—less than 3 percent, compared with 20 percent in Greater New York. For a generation, L.A. mayors have targeted downtown, as well as Hollywood, for development, but the effort has largely failed, despite billions of dollars in investment.
Governance in L.A. has been in decline since the reformist mayoralty of Richard Riordan ended in 2001, with city and county politics moving aggressively to the left. Current mayor Karen Bass, a career radical, travelled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba as a member of the so-called Venceremos brigade. In 2016, to mark the dictator’s death, she issued a praise-filled obituary to the man she called the “Comandante.” Her hapless performance during the wildfires—at the outset of which, despite ample warning, she was out of the country on a junket—made clear that the city’s leadership gap has not been filled.
Like most progressives, Bass invokes the usual bromides about helping the poor and the homeless, but she resists shutting down homeless encampments, even after a recent Supreme Court ruling empowered cities under the jurisdiction of the Ninth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to enforce anti-camping laws. Rather than improve daily life, city leaders treat Angelenos to extra helpings of racialized identity politics, as recently revealed in audio recordings of a city council meeting. Meantime, the city neglects basic infrastructure, particularly related to public safety, as the devastating wildfires made painfully evident.
Los Angeles politics seems in no rush to return to realism. Though voters recently voted local Soros-funded district attorney George Gascón out of office, they also elected a new councilperson, Ysabel Jurado, who favors not just defunding but abolishing the police. The ascendant political force in the city remains the Marxist Democratic Socialists of America. And nothing underscores the dysfunction of the city’s politics more than this: the city’s deputy mayor for public safety was recently suspended, as the fires raged, for sending bomb threats to City Hall late last year.
Los Angeles epitomizes the dilemma of the politically correct city, where the homeless remain widely visible and almost all city institutions, along with the city’s financial prospects, have deteriorated. L.A. parks often in a state of disrepair, particularly compared with those of nearby suburbs. The Los Angeles Unified School District consistently underperforms the state, regional, and national averages, failing its predominantly Hispanic student body. Since 2019, more than 80,000 students have dropped out of the school system, which also suffers from chronic absenteeism and high levels of violence. The City of Angels builds far fewer new homes per capita than almost every other large U.S. metropolitan area.
Yet the failures of Los Angeles do not spell the doom of urbanism in Southern California. Get away from the L.A. core and you see revived downtowns, even in exurban areas like Riverside, in the heart of the fast-growing Inland Empire, as well as numerous “town centers” getting built from scratch in new peripheral developments. In Orange County, Laguna Beach, Fullerton, and Orange all have seen extensive development of their urban centers.
For the most part, these improvements don’t fit the long-standing pattern of gentrification, as these cities remain overwhelmingly Hispanic and working class. “It’s replenishment, not gentrification,” notes Hector De La Torre, executive director of the Gateway Cities Council of Governments and former California State Assembly member. “Second and third generation does not use Spanish so much.” Shopping thoroughfares like Bellflower Boulevard, once largely deserted, have revived. Steelcraft, an outdoor eatery, offers Mexican as well as Korean, Filipino, and Argentinian cuisines, including gourmet burgers.
These urban turnarounds are bottom-up, locally led efforts. Many of these cities were in terrible shape in the 1990s. Some became nationally known for corruption and for politicians who enriched themselves as their cities deteriorated. Gambling, junk processing, and car dealerships dominated the economy, notes urban analyst Bill Fulton.
For many years, whites controlled these areas, and even accommodated housing covenants aimed at excluding racial minorities. Many of these cities were “devastated” by factory layoffs in the 1970s, recalls De La Torre. “Their economic base was torn from them, but these places figured out how to adjust.”
By the 2010s, many of these communities elected board members to replace the corrupt old guard, both Anglo and Hispanic. “We used to be a bastion for corruption,” recalls Raul Salinas, a Southgate native and the city attorney. “Good governance can save you just as corruption almost killed us.”
The key, notes both Sanchez and De La Torre, was the election of often younger, reform-oriented city councils. “The people who turned the city around come from here,” notes Sanchez as we walked together down Bellflower Boulevard. The goal, he says, was not to duplicate the already existing array of malls but to spark new businesses, from furniture- and upholstery-making to comedy clubs, coffee shops, and unique eateries. Some of these businesses are housed in 1930s-era buildings.
The people who turned Bellflower around focused on the critical basics of urban life. “What we needed was to create something local and special,” Sanchez notes. “Local businesses and residents knew what we were doing before was not working. We are taking control of the city and getting stuff done.”
Clean-ups and graffiti removal have spurred new developments, as in Norwalk. Cities like Paramount, Bellflower, and Downey have done so by sprucing up their traditional downtowns. Most have programs that allow citizens to report graffiti, which is then quickly removed. “We want it gone now,” notes Sanchez. “We want the taggers to know it’s a waste of time and no one will see it.”
Critically, the residents of these cities decided not to become passive spectators in their community’s decline but to make the place attractive to business and investors. Numerous accounts of the South L.A. revival focus on the typical themes of urban planners: sports stadiums, public housing, and new transit-based development. These communities generally ignore the planners, however, who favor accepting dependence on transfer payments, slums, and poverty over promoting social mobility. Neither willing to be victims nor succumb to decline, these smaller cities have focused on substantive improvements. “The key is not to have to go to Sacramento,” says De La Torre with a wry grin.
The late Marxist theorist Mike Davis, often a favorite of progressive urbanites, believed the South L.A. cities would inevitably be absorbed into the city’s existing ghettos. Similarly, a recent Atlantic article pictures older suburbs as places where minorities are left “holding the bag.” But it’s precisely these areas, populated by immigrants and their offspring, where urbanism is emerging in new forms. As economist Robert Lucas has observed, people want to be “near other people.”
The success of South L.A.’s independent cities tells us something about the new urban future—one characterized by dispersed, economically robust cities. This approach differs from the prevailing view of cities found among the denizens of L.A.’s nonprofits, academic institutions, and regional political centers, which focus almost entirely on political advocacy and getting more from the state and federal government.
Notions like electrifying the Port of Los Angeles and promoting electric vehicles or focusing economic development on redistribution and “equity” may be popular among L.A. politicians, but these ideas have delivered little benefit to citizens. The region’s smaller cities are showing what can be done when leaders focus not on wealth-redistribution schemes but on basics like clean, safe streets and public spaces.
Residents of these cities, notes Victor Sanchez, now serving a second term on Bellflower’s City Council, did not accept their political fate. Perhaps the most successful of these cities, Downey—puckishly called “the Latino Beverly Hills”—attracts a somewhat more affluent middle-class population. Its main street, Downey Avenue, is filled not just with family taquerias but high-end restaurants and clubs that cater to local young people. Like other South L.A. cities, Downey suffered through de-industrialization but has managed to bounce back, notes Chamber of Commerce executive director Michael Calvert. The streets are well-landscaped, the schools have improved, and the city boasts events such as its Christmas Parade and a street fair. “We have managed as a town of 114,000 to create a kind of small town feeling that people like,” Calvert suggests. “People have a pride of ownership.”
Downey may be 75 percent Hispanic, but it does not look remotely like a traditional barrio. Few vendors work its streets, and the main street, Downey Avenue, hosts many upscale shops and eateries. Its politics, too, are less radical than those of East Los Angeles. Perhaps most revealing is the cooperation between old guard Republicans, like long-time councilman Mario Guerra, who served for almost a decade, and the city’s gay, left-leaning mayor Mario Trujillo.
“We had to reinvent ourselves,” Guerra recalls. “But we don’t let partisan politics get in the way. People here back each other up. We all want the streets clean, and the graffiti gone.” Downey is proud of its status as the home of the world’s oldest McDonald’s and a manufacturer of Space Shuttle, parts of which were built here. A low homicide rate, well below that of L.A., and of the adjacent South L.A., is critical factor. “People come here because they feel safe,” suggests Trujillo. “People migrated from east L.A., Boyle Heights, and Chavez Ravine. It’s a ‘move up’ place that we have made for ourselves.”
Top Photo by Jeff Gritchen/MediaNews Group/Orange County Register via Getty Images
