Postcard from the Edge

LOS ANGELES IS FOREVER fracturing and piecing itself back together—only to find itself on the verge of a fresh crack-up. Semiregularly, the disasters arrive in the form of earthquakes or fires, a pattern that led Richard G. Lillard, in his 1966 book Eden in Jeopardy, to call Los Angeles “the pacesetter in catastrophe.” The scene depicted in Isle of California, the post-apocalyptic mural that the Los Angeles Fine Arts Squad painted on a wall facing an otherwise nondescript Westside parking lot in 1972, showing the rubble end of a freeway overpass perched atop a chunk of land marooned precariously in the Pacific, might as well be added to the city seal.

Not infrequently, though, Angelenos hurl the bricks themselves. A select list of uprisings, riots, and other expressions of civic unrest over the last century would include the years 1943 (Zoot Suit Riots), 1965 (Watts), 1992 (Rodney King), 2020 (George Floyd), and of course 2025 (Donald J. Trump). Every generation, more or less, a consequential number of Angeleno neighborhoods decide that they want to tear it all down, typically in response to pressure, often violent, exerted by the LAPD, National Guard, or some other armed or occupying force. And unlike superficially similar events in other cities, in LA, the American capital of existential wobble, there always seems to be at least a sliver of a chance they’ll succeed. What’s more, as is true with fires and floods fueled by climate change, the uprisings seem to be showing up more frequently these days.

Many of us who love the city wish this dicey routine would resolve itself into something more productive and less precarious, maybe even while providing fewer reasons for widespread despair among residents. Alas, I don’t think that is in the offing anytime soon. Thanks to ICE raids and the latest deployment of the National Guard, January’s massive firestorms in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, a deepening budget crisis, and a mayor’s race next year that is shaping up to be a battle of retrograde visions—to say nothing of growing calls for the city to bow out of hosting the 2028 Olympics—the balance of the decade may find Los Angeles navigating one of its most treacherous straits yet, a real Scylla-and-Charybdis-south-of-the-Tehachapis scenario.

WHEN I LEFT LA Mayor Eric Garcetti’s office near the end of 2022 to take a job at Yale—after a nearly five-year stint as the city’s first chief design officer, following thirteen-plus years as the Los Angeles Times architecture critic—there was certainly no shortage of pressing civic challenges. The housing affordability and homelessness crisis had grown extreme enough to match any in the country. A corruption scandal within the city council would see four current or former members indicted, with two (so far) serving time in prison. Garcetti’s appointment as US ambassador to India was held up for months by accusations that a key adviser to the mayor had sexually harassed several city staffers. But the larger trajectory was toward heartening progress. It wouldn’t have been unreasonable to suggest that LA was ready to shake off for good the title William Fulton gave it in a 1997 book, The Reluctant Metropolis, and fully embrace a denser and less car-dependent postsuburban identity.

Housing production of all types—emergency shelters, permanent supportive housing, affordable housing, and market-rate apartment buildings—soared in the last two years of the Garcetti administration and the first two years under his successor, Karen Bass. (In 2012, the last full year before Garcetti took office, the city added fewer than 5,000 housing units. Last year that number was roughly 22,000—not quite Texas-level Abundance™ but a robust figure for a California city by any measure.) A major transit expansion fueled by a pair of ballot measures and led by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority extended a new subway line under Wilshire Boulevard and added light rail along Crenshaw.

Whatever one made of the city’s pursuit of the 2028 Olympics, the International Olympic Committee’s decision, in 2017, to award the Summer Games to LA for the third time did provide the kind of civic deadline that tends to galvanize major civic improvements. This was certainly the effect in 1932, for LA’s first Olympics, the run-up to which saw the city add stately public architecture, systematically plant its first grand allées of palm trees (whatever we think of them now!), and, to mark the tenth modern Olympiad, rename Tenth Street “Olympic Boulevard.” The record for 1984 was mixed. The brilliant and telegenic design strategy for those Games, led by Jon Jerde and Deborah Sussman, saw LA for the first time embrace its identity as a Pacific Rim capital reinvigorated by immigration from Asia and Latin America. But the larger focus was on making those the first privatized, corporatized, and profitable Olympics, and they unleashed a wave of aggressive policing under the direction of notorious LAPD chief Daryl Gates whose scars, in certain parts of the city, have yet to fully heal.

In our most hopeful moments, which given intervening events now look pretty naive, we thought that the 2028 Games might be the coming-out party for this confidently urban version of the city, which I have elsewhere called the Third Los Angeles. This follows the First Los Angeles of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which embraced ambitious civic architecture and forged institutions including USC, UCLA, the Huntington Library, and the Los Angeles Times, and the Second Los Angeles of the postwar era, the diverse if increasingly atomized and car-dependent city that produced the outdated LA tropes—of freeways, lawns and swimming pools, and celebrity—which remain familiar around the world.

In election after election over the last two decades, after all, voters at the city and county level have communicated unmistakable and unwavering support for, in short, less suburbanism and more urbanism—more affordable housing construction, taller and denser development, more funding for parks and open space, and more public transit. This in certain ways represented a return to the civic priorities of the First LA, which despite the overriding stereotypes of the city as eternally car- and house-pilled had a dense and walkable downtown, a rich supply of handsome multifamily residential buildings and a mass-transit system, in the form of electric streetcars, that was the most extensive in the United States by a large margin.

Two ballot measures came before county voters, in 2008 and 2016, seeking to raise sales tax rates to fund new bus and (especially) rail lines. Each required a supermajority, or two-thirds approval, to pass. This is a high bar. The first prevailed with 68 percent of the vote. The second won with 71.5 percent. Meanwhile a city ballot measure seeking to limit high-density development and protect single-family areas, originally called the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative and backed by Michael Weinstein, an effective fundraiser for AIDS research who has branched disastrously into NIMBY activism, was rejected 70.4 percent to 29.6 percent. Taken together, these results and several others represented an unmistakable public mandate for the Third Los Angeles—although building that city in brick, mortar, and effective policy, as opposed to the easy-to-conjure imaginings of an architecture critic, has been, to put it mildly, an uneven affair.

AT FIRST, THE EMERGENCE of Karen Bass as Garcetti’s likely successor in the mayor’s office seemed to bode well for the forces of civic maturation. As a longtime Democratic Party stalwart with deep connections in Washington, where she served in Congress for more than a decade; in Sacramento, where she rose to become Speaker of the State Assembly; and in Los Angeles, where she began her career as a community organizer and activist, she struck many voters as an ideal candidate, if mostly in pragmatic as opposed to visionary terms. With Joe Biden, who had put Bass on his short list for vice president, promising to funnel significant funding to state and cities to build out green infrastructure, for example, Bass would be well positioned to make sure LA got its share.

Some cracks in this façade began to show in the spring of 2022, as Bass faced off with Rick Caruso, the real estate developer responsible for the Grove, the Americana at Brand, and other upscale alfresco shopping destinations, in a June mayoral primary and, neither having surpassed 50 percent of the vote, in a runoff in November. Caruso, a longtime Republican who switched his party affiliation repeatedly as he mulled a mayoral run, from the GOP to independent, back to the GOP, and finally to the Democratic Party, the only presumed path to election in deep-blue Los Angeles, proved a slick and energetic campaigner, preaching a sort of MAGA-lite philosophy of crime prevention and tough-love sweeps of homeless encampments. But many differences between the candidates proved illusory; on key issues, especially the production of new housing, Bass and Caruso both tacked toward the NIMBY end of the spectrum, catering to wealthy homeowners in particular in their shared opposition to new state laws allowing multifamily construction in single-family neighborhoods.

Bass’s major blunder so far, or series of blunders, came during and immediately following the January fires. She had traveled to Ghana just after New Year’s at the invitation of the Biden administration, despite predictions that hot and dry conditions in LA would significantly ratchet up the wildfire risk. She flew home after hearing how quickly the first of the two fires, Palisades, was beginning to spread. After landing, she was confronted on a jet bridge by David Blevins, a TV news reporter from the UK who coincidentally was a passenger on her flight to LAX. This was on January 8, with the Palisades fire now joined by another major blaze, the Eaton fire, threatening Altadena and Pasadena.

“Do you owe the citizens an apology for being absent while their homes were burning?” Blevins asked, as Bass remained silent and stone faced, refusing even to face him. “Have you nothing to say today?”

Given that debacle (which could have been mitigated had the mayor managed even the most meager expression of concern about the fires) and the slow pace of rebuilding efforts in Pacific Palisades, which unlike Altadena is part of the city of Los Angeles proper, Bass found herself very much on the back foot until Trump, following a June speech at Fort Bragg in which he called protesters in Los Angeles “animals” and the city a “trash heap,” decided, following weeks of ICE raids by masked agents in unmarked cars, to send more than 4,000 National Guard troops to patrol the city. Bass found some rhetorical life in repeatedly decrying those moves. Her chances in an anticipated 2026 rematch against Caruso, which seemed very slim in late winter, have improved a bit, even as Caruso himself, reportedly pondering a run for governor now that Kamala Harris has bowed out of that contest, has yet to commit to the mayoral race. Caruso faced his own wave of criticism after it emerged that his Palisades Village shopping center survived the firestorm only because it was protected by the developer’s private firefighting brigade, whose members literally turned their backs on surrounding churches, schools, and houses as they burned in order to keep hosing down the Golden Goose and Brandy Melville storefronts.

Even if Bass and Caruso do wind up facing one another again next June, despite their clashes of late over fire recovery and how exactly to manage threats from Trump, the race would likely settle into the same narrow battle over middle-of-the-road voters—an effort, as it were, to wring the last bits of life from the Second LA. Far from showing any signs of moderating her pro-homeowner positions when it comes to housing and density, she has doubled down on them, backing Governor Gavin Newsom’s move—a sop to wealthy and well-connected Palisades donors—to make sure that recently passed state laws allowing multifamily apartment construction of up to ten units in single-family areas won’t apply in the fire zones.

The one event that would shake up that dynamic would be a decision by a leading member of LA’s growing progressive bloc of elected officials to challenge Bass from the left, hoping to match the success of New York’s Zohran Mamdani. Even as Bass and Caruso, together with a governor who is increasingly shifting to the right as he eyes a possible White House run, have moved in the opposite direction, that left bloc has been gaining increasing power and visibility, and exhibiting more political savvy, in the last couple of years. The current city council president, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, is now the leader of a voting alliance that was able to pull together twelve votes, out of fifteen, to pass a budget that called for cutting police hiring in half, among other eye-opening challenges to politics as usual. For my former Los Angeles Times colleague David Zahniser, now the dean of City Hall reporters, the vote and Harris-Dawson’s growing boldness on other issues suggested that the council, consolidating its recent electoral gains on the left, “might even be undergoing a permanent realignment.”

BUT THE LEFT in Los Angeles, as the cliché goes, is not a monolith. The most likely mayoral challenger among Democrats is Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, a moderate who has been unusually willing to criticize Bass publicly, particularly as it relates to the fires, and stands to her right on more than a few issues. Meanwhile if a leading progressive figure were to join the race—the possibilities would seem to include, along with Harris-Dawson, his fellow councilmembers Eunisses Hernandez and Nithya Raman—it might further expose some longstanding rifts on that end of the political spectrum, many of them having to do with housing policy.

The depth of these splits has been highlighted in recent squabbles over the future of Measure ULA, the so-called Mansion Tax. Passed in 2022, it mandates a 4 percent tax on the sales of properties of all kinds (not just houses) over $5 million, with the levy rising to 5.5 percent on sales over $10 million; the proceeds subsidize rental assistance and the construction of low-income housing. The measure so far has raised an annual average of about $288 million in revenue, far lower than the projected range of $600 million to $1.1 billion.

In response to those disappointing figures, UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies released a pair of studies in April concluding that the measure, on top of the meager revenue numbers, was dampening multifamily housing production; the fix, the authors said, was for the state legislature to amend it. (Such reforms are not unusual for newish housing laws; the state’s accessory dwelling unit policy, now almost universally hailed as a success, had to be tweaked a few times by Sacramento lawmakers before homeowners, in LA and elsewhere, started taking advantage of it in large numbers.) Specifically, the studies called for ULA to be limited to single-family house sales and for using marginal rates to smooth out what they called the “cliffs” between one tax bracket and the next. The idea, reflecting the Lewis Center’s supply-side thinking, is that the likely drop in ULA revenue due to these amendments would be made up for by an increase in property and sales taxes as housing production rebounds.

Mayor Bass asked Bob Hertzberg, a former State Assembly Speaker, to help craft a bill in Sacramento to reform ULA. On September 4, a group of well-known progressive faculty and researchers affiliated with Occidental College’s Urban and Environment Policy Department (where, for the record, I used to teach) released its own report defending ULA and identifying what it called “flaws” in the UCLA analysis. Michael Manville, an author of one of the Lewis Center ULA studies, fired back with a long and pointed thread on X on September 9 that accused the Occidental group of producing a “really dumb” analysis filled with “ad hominem” attacks on the center’s work. On September 11, Mayor Bass surprised everybody by announcing that she was pulling her support for the bill in Sacramento that Hertzberg had helped produce, promising to bring it back next year. I’m doubtful.

And so the old-school progressives had outflanked the Abundance liberals. Left in the cold, as is so often the case in Los Angeles, are the city’s renters, who make up a wide, sensible middle on housing policy, tending to support more and denser housing construction, at least when they have a say at the ballot box, but also some progressive policies that the supply-siders disdain, such as rent control or limits on short-term rentals. Despite its lingering reputation as the world capital of single-family home ownership, Los Angeles in fact has one of the highest proportions of rental households in the country, 64 percent, among large cities trailing only Newark, Jersey City, Miami, New York, and Boston.

The other split currently deepening on the LA left has to do with the 2028 Olympics. In the face of the National Guard deployment and Trump’s growing attacks on the city—which now include an effort to shake down UCLA, where the Olympic Village is supposed to be located, for a cool $1 billion—hosting the Games as planned looks entirely untenable to many Angelenos. Some kind of Rubicon was crossed in midsummer when two of LA’s most respected political writers, Gustavo Arellano of the Los Angeles Times and Joe Mathews, whose syndicated column is carried by several other California dailies, published pieces arguing that it was time to pull the plug on the Games. (Neither writer is an alarmist or even a traditional leftist.) As Mathews wrote, “Hosting an Olympic Games requires Los Angeles to work together with a lawless U.S. regime—and its rights-violating security apparatus—as they openly wage war against our city and state.”

The LA establishment, liberal and otherwise, quickly circled the wagons, with the Metro section of the Los Angeles Times publishing an article by reporter Thuc Nhi Nguyen that carried this headline: “It’s too late for buyer’s remorse. Why LA can’t back out of hosting 2028 Olympics.” The piece argued with stubborn literal-mindedness that only the IOC can cancel its agreement with LA, not the city itself. Bass, for her part, seems stuck carrying, um, the torch for the Games. But if Trump keeps up the pressure while turning the Olympics into a stage set for his own authoritarian ambitions, as he made clear he hopes to do during a White House ceremony with LA’s Olympic planners in August, it’s simply impossible to imagine the citizens of LA going along with it.

As Mathews put it in a roundtable I arranged for my newsletter, Punch List:

In terms of wriggling free of the Olympics, LA’s own institutions possess a good deal more leverage than Nguyen’s article acknowledged. What is to stop UCLA, for example, from simply declining to open its campus to the Games? The threat of being taken to court? By whom? The university is already being openly extorted by the federal government, in the person of the president himself. It seems to me that the more significant complications will be between the private group running the Olympic planning, known as LA2028 and run by Casey Wasserman, grandson of legendary talent agency head Lew Wasserman, and the big sponsors it has painstakingly signed up (work that has largely come, it must be said, in lieu of building meaningful connections between LA2028 leaders and Angelenos themselves). But residents owe more to one another other than to Honda, Comcast, or Airbnb.

Better to get out now and to make a clean break of it.

IT HAS BECOME CLEAR that 2026 will be one of the most pivotal, and perhaps tumultuous, years in the modern history of Los Angeles, which, as we’ve seen, is saying a good deal. In addition to debates over the Olympics and the mayoral election, it will see ongoing rebuilding efforts in the fire zones; the first attempt to reform the city charter in more than twenty years; the opening of a pair of major (and controversial) works of architecture, Peter Zumthor’s David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art, by Ma Yansong and MAD Architects; construction progress on another group of high-profile projects, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s Broad Museum expansion and, just down Bunker Hill, Frank Gehry’s new arts annex for the Colburn School; key matches in the men’s World Cup, which the US is hosting with Canada and Mexico; the debut of a major new stretch of the Wilshire subway as well as the final piece, in the form of an automated people mover, of a long-awaited full-fledged transit connection to LAX; and what is sure to be further chaos sown by Trump and various federal agencies.

The looming question is whether this annum of flux and churn might be shaped into anything resembling a coherent way forward for the city as a whole. In general, Los Angeles has been a brilliant place to advance individual ambition and a dismal arena for fostering the collective variety. Part of this has to do with geography, with the practical complications of pulling people together in physical space in a city so big, and with so much traffic and so many remaining gaps, however many have lately or will soon be filled, in the public transit network. But if anything LA’s historically anemic collection of platforms for civic discussion—for thinking and talking about the city’s shared future, to say nothing of shaping policy—has grown over the last decade more anemic still.

This is certainly true in the realm of architecture and planning. Los Angeles has no Regional Plan Association, no Van Alen Institute, no Graham Foundation, no San Francisco Bay Area Planning and Urban Research Association (aka SPUR), no Architectural League. It has wealthy and well-established cultural centers such as the Getty Center, with its Getty Research Institute, and the Huntington Library and on the other end of the spectrum the much smaller MAK Center for Art and Architecture, based at the Schindler House in West Hollywood, and the LA Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. But these organizations, for all their worthwhile programming and research, have never felt like a central or overarching gathering place for conversations about the future of the city. The schools of architecture, too, have for the most part been content to fill their particular niches, from the earnest professionalism of USC to the eternal techno-optimism of SCI-Arc, without much interest in taking on larger urban or civic questions. (One heartening exception is UCLA’s influential cityLAB, founded by Dana Cuff, though its profile at its own host university is oddly not as high as it should be.) The big art museums in town have almost entirely abandoned exhibitions dedicated to architecture or urbanism. One group that did aspire to a broader role, the A+D (for Architecture and Design) Museum, has been condemned by almost comically poor leadership—at the board level, in particular—to a nomadic existence that has seen it bounce around from one leased or shared space to the next, with an extended period of “virtual-only” programming in between.

Meanwhile, the accelerating overall decline of my old employer, the Los Angeles Times, under the stumbling and craven leadership of the billionaire surgeon and investor Patrick Soon-Shiong, means that the paper’s place on the civic stage is fading fast.

That’s not to say the Times doesn’t occasionally try. In March of this year, I got an email from Tom Curwen, a prominent longtime features writer at the paper who was helping assemble, with my former editor Alice Short, a package on just this question: the future of the city. He asked me if I’d consider answering the following questions: “What do you hope for Los Angeles to be in twenty-five years? What should it be? What could it be? These are three overlapping questions. Maybe we answer one or all three. Of course, the question is inspired by aftermath of the January fires and their destruction of the city.”

In my brief entry, which joined contributions from Caruso, novelist Mona Simpson, planner James Rojas, writer D. J. Waldie, and artist and community activist Rosten Woo, among a handful of others, I tried to avoid the usual tropes of Los Angeles futurism, from flying cars to factory-built houses. I instead focused on how the city might recapture some of its atrophying talent for innovation and once again embrace, at grassroots as well as institutional levels, a spirit of real change, even—or especially?—if it feels disruptive. But there was something absurd about the whole exercise (even putting aside the fact that Curwen took a buyout and left the paper as soon as the package was complete, yet more evidence of the paper’s sinking fortunes). As I hope this essay has made clear, it’s nearly impossible to guess where Los Angeles will be one year hence, let alone twenty-five.