When you think of teeming masses, crowded cities, the vision of Manhattan’s skyline leaps to mind. But that vision ignores the fact that those skyscrapers, signature New York buildings, are housing millions of people vertically as well as horizontally across adjacent boroughs. Take a similar population and shove them into thousands of small houses and foxhole apartments. That is the definition of much of Los Angeles, a city that grew on the promise of vast stretches of sun-filled land yearning for a vast array of houses with white picket fences.
A gaggle of Los Angeles Times writers put together a massive examination of the impact of crowding in The City of Angeles, where COVID spread like wildfire in the most densely populated city in the United States. Start with the facts: “The infamous examples of overflowing apartments, such as 19th century tenements in New York City, are mostly relics. A Times analysis of census data shows that 3% of U.S. homes are overcrowded, defined by the federal government as having more than one person per room, excluding bathrooms.
“In Los Angeles, the overcrowding rate is 11%. In Pico-Union, it is 40%, making the community just west of downtown one of the most crowded in the country. Some 40,000 people live in its 1.33 square miles — a population density that surpasses New York City’s, without a skyscraper in sight.
“Here, people rent spots to sleep on the floors of laundry rooms. Teenagers do homework in alcoves outside apartments. Families use the bathroom in shifts… There is nowhere to hide when an infectious disease strikes.” In the megalopolis in Southern California that stretches from Ventura County, through Los Angeles County, embraces San Bernardino and Riverside Counties, zips through Orange County and south, through San Diego Count to the Mexican border, there are huge pockets of super-crowded areas, none more toxic than the areas of central Los Angeles.
Los Angeles began luring new residents, parallel with the movement of the motion picture industry from New Jersey to sunny Los Angeles, in the mid-1920s and 30s, but the explosion of movement really hit the city after World War II. Mostly Los Angeles was very welcoming to white citizens, accommodating black, brown and yellow only to service the richer migrants. With earthquakes, the notion of survivable high-rise buildings also faced another challenge. The relevant building codes and construction sustainability of such tall buildings did not create structural viability until the latter years of the 20th century. To date, there are still a ton of dangerous unreinforced building all over the city.
The Times continues: “To understand the contradiction underlying L.A.’s status as the nation’s capital of both crowding and sprawl, The Times reviewed historical archives, oral histories and newspaper accounts, analyzed decades of U.S. census data and conducted dozens of interviews with academic experts, public officials, residents of cramped apartments and people whose family legacies in the region date back more than a century. What emerged was a singular thread tying civic leaders’ decisions from the founding of modern L.A. to today’s living conditions.
“In the late 19th century, the city’s railroad magnates and newspaper publishers began promoting Southern California as a slice of paradise and encouraged white Americans to come buy a piece of the dream… The promise of Los Angeles was bright winter sun; clean, dry air; single-family homes with lawns in front and orange trees in back; and panoramas of mountains and sea. It lured millions from dark, big-city tenements and cold Midwestern farms to the new suburbs.
“To bring the vision to fruition, business leaders recruited Mexican laborers en masse to build rail lines, houses and schools; pick crops; clean homes; and work in slaughterhouses, sugar-beet refineries and steel plants. But racist real estate rules and low pay sequestered Mexican workers and their families in cramped, often pestilent shacks, where deadly tuberculosis spread just like COVID-19 has today.
“In the middle of the 20th century, L.A. leaders bulldozed Mexican neighborhoods in Chavez Ravine, forcing out thousands with the promise of new, low-cost, public housing to meet the needs of a city exploding in population after World War II. Then real estate interests exploited the communist paranoia of the Red Scare to defeat the housing projects. Instead, the city gave the land to the Dodgers for a stadium to entice the team’s move from Brooklyn… ‘We had affordable housing,’ said Carol Jacques, 79, who grew up in Chavez Ravine and lost her family home. ‘We had the opportunity to do generational wealth building and have us do better.’
“By the 1970s, ‘slow growth’ fervor, combined with a diminishing supply of new land to develop, spelled the beginning of the end of L.A.’s home-building booms. This change happened just as Mexican, Guatemalan and Salvadoran immigrants were pouring into the region to work, leaving them no choice but to pack into low-rise slums and hastily converted garages. In recent decades, as immigration has waned, skyrocketing housing costs have locked generations of Latino families into grim cycles of overcrowding.
“For many, living in crowded spaces and sharing the burden of unaffordable rents has become the last line of defense against joining L.A.’s ever-swelling homeless population… Overcrowded homes have left scores dead in horrific fires and, studies have shown, stunted children’s health and achievement in school. But more than any other calamity, the pandemic exposed how vulnerable Los Angeles is to mass outbreaks of communicable diseases.”
While housing unaffordability is a national problem, the Federal Reserve’s push to stem inflation by raising interest rates has created a living nightmare in the most expensive urban regions in the country, where most of the jobs remain. Rents are soaring. Fewer Americans can afford even to think about home ownership. Realtor site Redfin tells us that the “average sale price of a home in Los Angeles was $950K last month [September], up 3.3% since last year. The average sale price per square foot in Los Angeles is $607.” While prices are moderating somewhat under pressure from the Feds, that is not resulting in increased affordability; instead, it has forced more people to rent… and rents in some LA neighborhoods have skyrocketed (over 30% in Glendale, for example).
The system does not work. Cutting taxes for the rich – like the multi-trillion-dollar tax cut in 2017 – doesn’t work. Raising interest rates doesn’t work. And policies like redlining and offering economic incentives to white residents has finally backfired. It is very, very hard to rebuild a city whose very attractive lure has created an out-of-control urban sprawl. As the Los Angeles City Council devolves over its internal racial prejudices, we can clearly see why LA has the issues it does.
I’m Peter Dekom, and equal opportunity and political racial neutrality have real value and real issues when they are not applied.
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