Everywhere is Already Los Angeles

The Cities of the Sunbelt are Just Rebuilding a Broken City

Los Angeles already built America’s future and now it’s out of ideas.

"Los Angeles on early morning" by Söki is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Los Angeles was the first place to implement the American royal decree of single-family homes and automobiles at scale. It was also the first place to come crashing up against the geometry of that vision. While later imitations across the Sunbelt are building the new homes and welcoming the new residents that once flocked west by the millions, their future is a false future—for it is one that we in California have already lived.

Right now, metro areas like Dallas, Las Vegas and Atlanta are time capsule visions of Los Angeles in the 1990s. They boomed by offering prospective residents a better, larger home for less money in amenity rich communities that were still relatively easy to navigate in a private automobile. They kept prices low by gobbling up adjacent land and building carbon copies of an assembly line urban form. But eventually, the bill comes due as the hard reality that a car requires 200 square-feet of space at all times can no longer be avoided.

Officially, Los Angeles’ borders zig-zag around tiny carve-outs, billows into the San Fernando Valley and reaches a tiny tendril down to San Pedro. Realistically, the city forms an unbroken mass of concrete that stretches from the shores of the Pacific to the foothills of the San Bernardino Mountains 60 miles to the east. Los Angeles is less a city than a sun that both sucks smaller celestial bodies into its orbit and fuels them with its rays.

Los Angeles exists within a basin of endless space. Save for the mountains that ring it, it lacks natural features. There is no great river that bisects it, there is no iconic bay that it abuts. Even its built features seem tiny and lackluster when you view them up close.

What defines Los Angeles is its scope. Los Angeles grew powerful by growing big and it grew big by cloning itself endlessly. The stripmall begat another stripmall which begat a third until either an ocean or a mountain stood in its path. LA didn’t invent this model—the stripmall comes from Washington DC and the tract home comes from Long Island—but it was the first place they were deployed at scale.

In the process, the city became detached from itself. The copy degraded until any semblance of the original was lost. Older cities like New York, San Francisco and Philadelphia have natural anchors. In its tragic downtown, Los Angeles has the ruins of one serving to remind the people in the fringes what they escaped from.

Los Angeles pioneered horizontal abundance. It built the homes needed to scale the great economy its civic boosters wanted it to be following World War II, but it built them in tight hedgerows giving every man his own 5,000 square foot kingdom. At first, these tiny manors were built around Huntington’s streetcars. But eventually, those gave way to the automobile. Los Angeles would never be limited by geometry so long as there was a Black man’s home to build a freeway through.

In the end however, geometry won as it always does. As urban theorist Alain Bertaud wrote, residents of an urban conurbation decide where to live by trying to maximize space while minimizing cost and distance to work. While we all have a private utility calculus, research shows preference for homes outside a 60 minute commute shed falls off rapidly. A private automobile traveling on a relatively uncongested roadway can cover far more distance in 60 minutes than a city bus, for instance, and more still than a person on foot. So in an ideal world, expanding the city’s borders another ten miles would add about 10-15 minutes to the commute of those who live in this new affordable fringe. For decades, the calculus for Los Angeles area politicians was easy—if the city became unaffordable, simply build more city.

However, roadways are the ultimate example of what economists call a “common pool resource.” It’s extremely difficult to limit access to a road, but someone else using the road at the same time as me diminishes my enjoyment of it. If too many people use the roadway at the same time, it becomes useless as it suddenly transforms into mere car storage rather than transportation when everyone’s speed is reduced to 0 mph.

If you add enough people to a metro area and limit their transportation options to private automobiles, the “commute shed” begins to shrink. The number of jobs you can access within 60 minutes of travel begins to diminish. At that point, a city begins to enter a downward spiral. Homes within that commute shed start becoming more expensive and people start grudgingly accepting longer commutes in order to find affordable housing. But those longer commutes further stress the roadways and shrink the commute shed even further.

This is the story of Los Angeles today—America’s least affordable metropolitan area where peripheral regions like the Inland Empire and the Santa Clarita Valley have essentially transformed into giant servants’ quarters. The greater Los Angeles region has the greatest concentration of super commuters—those who travel more than 90 minutes each way between home and work. There are more than 300,000 super commuters in the Los Angeles area. In Palmdale, about 60 miles from downtown Los Angeles, a full 17% of workers had commutes longer than 90 minutes.

There’s another layer to this self-immolation: the mechanism that creates this dysfunction is like a disease that also produces antibodies that attack the cure. It has to do not just with who is pushed to the urban fringe, but who remains inside.

As housing prices rise, so too do property tax bills. Homeowners love their rapidly appreciating asset, but are loath to pay advances on the windfall they’ll reap when they eventually sell. In 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, a constitutional amendment that forced county assessors to live in the magical fairy land that the most a home in California can appreciate is two percent per year. It was one of greatest acts of freeloading in American history and has hobbled California in ways far too numerous to include in just one post.

Rather than learn from California, states such as Texas cannot wait to step on the same rakes we did in decades past. Texas’ primary funding source for local governments is its property taxes, which are the seventh highest in the country, and are based on home values that are reassessed yearly. As home values in Texas have risen, so too have calls from irate homeowners for property tax cuts. The governing Republicans are only too happy to oblige—Gov. Greg Abbot, who is running for reelection this year, is campaigning on Proposition 13 style property tax cuts, including an exemption from school district property taxes.

The cities of the Sunbelt are not blazing a new trail, they’re simply riding an existing track laid down decades ago in Southern California. Eventually, they’ll reach the point we in the region currently live in—central cities for the affluent, peripheries for everyone else. Astronomical home prices won’t translate into any additional revenue for the government so services will remain dilapidated. No one’s tax burden will rise so unaffordability will only remain a problem for newcomers and the economically marginal—both of whom are better off living elsewhere in the eyes of incumbent politicians. Homelessness rates will increase and with them, a twin growth of indifference and animosity to poverty that is entirely preventable.

As California goes, so goes the nation—whether as an example to emulate or as a cautionary tale. When seeking to replicate our cities, other states should decide whether they wish to build an engine or an albatross. The latter is easy to replicate, the former is a work in progress.