Galicia owns a small construction business and is also a minister at a primarily Latino Pentecostal church downtown. He tries not to fume against his misfortunes, but he has a beef with the city, which to this day can’t even identify the owner of the lot. Repeated calls to his city councilman, radical DSA member Hugo Soto Martinez, have proved fruitless.  

“There are millions for the homeless, but nothing for those who work hard,” Galicia notes. “The sidewalks are never fixed and the police are slow to come. It would be easier if the government would not make everything so miserable.” 

LA is currently hosting the World Cup, and two years from now, it will host the Olympics. The city should be ready for its closeup —  but it isn’t.  

This is a painful change for anyone who, like me, came to the City of Angels 50 years ago and embraced its eclectic mix of cultures and businesses. In the 1980s, LA was what the conservative historian Fred Siegel called “the entrepreneurial dynamo.” Unlike New York or the Bay Area, where academic pedigree and family ties were the keys to success, LA was an everyman city, a place where you could afford to start a business and live in a house like Galicia’s, all within the perimeter of a great metropolis.

Aesthetes long preferred New York or San Francisco, but the masses headed to LA. Between 1900 and 1940, the city’s population surged to 1.5 million from barely 100,000. After the war, LA expanded again, enriched by its huge oil and defense sectors, and by 2020, hit its peak population of 3.8 million, with another 6 million living in surrounding Los Angeles County. These areas once domiciled 13 Fortune 500 companies, including Disney, Northrop Grumman, Security Pacific Bank, First Interstate, Union Oil, Getty Oil, and Arco, and a long list of successful growing businesses, as well.

Since then, the Fortune 500 locals have dwindled to seven, with just one, Farmers Insurance, inside city limits, and that just barely, on the furthest fringes of the San Fernando Valley. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Times, once a critical part of the city establishment, has abandoned Downtown for El Segundo, amid severe financial strains and a paid circulation that’s a fraction of its once vast readership. 

Most critically, Los Angeles County now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. As you drive the streets of South Los Angeles and along the historic main street of black LA, Central Avenue, now predominantly Hispanic, the ambiance is increasingly reminiscent of the colonias of Mexico: broken pavements, battered buildings, outdoor swap meets, and fly-by-night food stalls.

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The county is shrinking too. Once celebrated as “the city that grew,” by 2070 it will suffer a reduction of more than a million people — 14% of its current population. Since 2000, the area has experienced a devastating loss of 750,000 people under 25, and it has the second-lowest birthrate among the 53 US major metropolitan areas, according to the American Community Survey. 

And while it is still home to more than three million immigrants, newcomers are increasingly headed elsewhere, notably to Texas, Florida, and other Southern states. The political class may be proud of creating a “sanctuary city,” but since 2010, the area’s foreign-born population has declined.

One reason is a lack of civic leadership. LA is increasingly a headless city. For many years, an almost exclusively white, male, and Protestant business elite embraced manifest destiny and dominated the surrounding region. These leaders fostered the creation of the kind of infrastructure that makes a great city — roads, universities, observatories, aerospace plants, a massive streetcar grid, as well as car and tire factories.  

This ruling alliance was transformed during the mayoralty of Tom Bradley, who won office in 1973 and served for 20 years. Now the old business establishment shared primacy with unions and rising Jewish and African American communities, an alliance that fostered long-term planning rather than cosmetic and rarely effective “short-term fixes,” according to Nick Patsaouras, an urban planner and public official with a long history in LA development.

Today, groups like the Chamber of Commerce have little influence over the city’s direction. “There are no ‘civic’ leaders left,” Patsaouras told UnHerd. “Just parasites feeding from public trough and crooks.”   

The optimism that once defined the city has withered as well. Once it was widely believed that LA was developing into a true rival of New York, with its own subway system and a downtown filled with sparkling high-rises. By the 1980s, trade at the Long Beach-Los Angeles port surpassed that of the Port of New York. And investment, much of it from Asia, suggested a future “capital of the Pacific Rim.” As the popular slogan had it: LA’s the place.  

Today, the Entertainment Capital of the World can’t even fend off challenges from places like Dallas-Fort Worth, Nashville, and Miami. Michael Kelly, director of the Drucker Institute at the Claremont Colleges, suggests that virtually every basic industry — including manufacturing, finance and business services —  has lost jobs, or at best has stagnated, since 2019. Only government-funded education and health jobs showed significant growth. If LA had grown as quickly as the national average, he calculates, it would have created 300,000 more jobs. 

Instead of focusing on development, the city’s establishment increasingly resembles the rulers of the late Roman Empire, offering the people the distraction of bread and circuses. Even as the signature industry, entertainment —  down 42,000 jobs in the past three years — shrinks, a passion for showiness and glamor remains. Diversions include the Dodgers, the Lakers, the World Cup, a sparkling new George Lucas $1 billion Museum of Narrative Art, due to open this fall — and most particularly, the Olympics. 

The city’s business “leaders,” Drucker’s Kelly suggests, aren’t fixing the weak economy, the dysfunctional schools or the increasingly dilapidated and dangerous LA parks. “All they care about is the Olympics,” he says.  

But the City of Angels today hardly resembles the brash upstart that held a successful Olympics in 1932 or the emerging world capital that, in 1984, under the brilliant leadership of businessman Peter Ueberroth, ran the Olympics with little incident and a profit. The LA 28 organization, the official host committee, claims it has enough sponsorships and TV deals to pay for what is needed, although there are growing doubts whether the city can absorb Olympics-related security costs, given its near-disastrous fiscal shape. Officials should hope that visitors, particularly journalists, will not see eyesores like Juan Galicia’s burnt-out home, and will skip the visit to Skid Row, close to the city’s downtown business district, which has a murder rate 17 times the city average. 

This was once a city that, like Marlon Brando’s broken boxer in the movie On the Waterfront, “could have been a contender” to challenge New York and other more established metropolises. But since the end of Republican Richard Riordan’s mayoralty in 2001, power has shifted to a motley coalition of political operatives, those using the city’s infrastructure to enrich themselves, and increasingly powerful public-sector unions. A focus on “social justice” and green virtues has thoroughly replaced the old growth-oriented vision. 

Homelessness is the most obvious failure. Even as San Francisco, under reform Mayor Dan  Lurie, aided by the local tech community, has turned back the homeless tide, Los Angeles retains roughly 70,000 “unhoused” people. It has spent billions but has refused to take such steps as shutting down the camps. Half of the homeless are known to be from somewhere else, attracted by the salubrious climate, free needles, and lack of police enforcement. 

The problem is no longer confined to the infamous Skid Row, but has spread to once stable neighborhoods, even as those charged with improving conditions have been charged with corruption. In a neighborhood close to where I used to live, homeless people hang out in the supermarket and eat in the aisles. Others harass business owners and illegally draw power from the city grid.

In part due to homelessness and the largely unchecked gangs, many of LA’s once great public places, like MacArthur Park, have become crime-ridden dystopias, filled with the mentally ill, firebugs and gang members. Even the libraries are increasingly unsafe. As long-term LA journalist Sam Quinones suggests: “in Los Angeles, private spaces have become public threats.”

But the homeless are just one element of the growing disorder. Add to this attacks by gangs of kids, vandalism, and theft throughout the city, particularly downtown. Thieves removed the copper pipes from Galicia’s burnt-out home. Criminals are now so bold that they have started stripping copper wire from street lights, leaving some of the city in the dark. 

Not surprisingly, the middle class is heading for the exits. Since 1980, the percentage of city residents who own their own home has fallen from 40% to roughly 33%, compared to rates of roughly 65% home-ownership nationally and 56% in the state. 

The loss of the middle class has transformed the political landscape, largely to the benefit of the Left. When Republican Riordan ran in 2001, Republicans could account for as much as a third of the electorate, notes longtime GOP strategist Arnold Steinberg. Today, amid the expansion of mail-in ballots and lax control over who votes, they barely constitute half that amount. Add to this ultra-permissive voting rules and legal “ballot harvesting,” including from the homeless, and changing the political direction seems almost impossible. 

Spencer Pratt’s mayoral campaign may have thrilled conservatives around the country, but few of his greatest admirers vote in LA. He came in third behind current Mayor Karen Bass, a long-time Leftist who organized help for Fidel Castro’s Cuba in the 1970s, as part of the Venceremos Brigade, and Nithya Raman, a 44-year-old Mamdani clone, who lives in a $1.9 million house in fashionable Silver Lake and has a planning degree from MIT. 

Bass’s disastrous mishandling of the Palisades fires has made her vulnerable to an even further Left challenger. Raman’s handlers hope to sell her as a “change agent” and a competent manager, something Bass is clearly not. Raman is currently, by some polls, in the lead. But whoever wins, nothing much will change, at least not for the better. Political power will continue to remain in the hands of militant public unions, notably the SEIU, which represents generally low-income service workers, and the teachers, who demand ever more taxes to pay their salaries and generous pensions. 

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Homelessness will remain a massive problem whoever wins. Raman has opposed restrictions on public camping and sleeping. “Raman’s record on homelessness is worse than Bass — if that is possible,” notes westside activist Tim Campbell, a longtime Angelino and former government auditor. “She’s incompetent and arrogant, which is a fatal combination.”  

Raman’s managers will paint her as pragmatic, but her political allegiance belongs to the Democratic Socialists of America, whose platform includes seizing private housing, a 100% renewable energy system, making all public transportation free, the decriminalization of drug use, and the decommissioning of the central jail. Her purported moderation only makes sense when compared to her fellow DSA council member Ysabel Jurado, who favors not just defunding the police but abolishing them.  

Whoever wins in November, Los Angeles seems likely to continue its masterclass in urban dysfunction. As in New York, Seattle, Washington, DC, and other cities, the DSA is cementing a coalition of public-employee unions and the welfare-dependent with a crop of young college graduates who predominate in neighborhoods such as Echo Park, Silver Lake and Hollywood,  LA’s version of New York’s “Commie Corridor.”  

If the City of Angels is to come back, don’t look to the business elites but to working and middle-class immigrants from places like Mexico, Central America, China, Taiwan, India, and increasingly, Africa. Many of them now settle in smaller cities in Los Angeles County — Paramount, Bellflower, Downey, and South Gate, among others — that are showing that you can build a successful city amid the big city’s dysfunction. 

These cities pride themselves on the basics like law enforcement, street maintenance, and schools, and demonstrate that such initiatives can work in today’s Southern California. Indeed, in a study I conducted with researcher Bheki Mahlobo, we found that these south Los Angeles County cities, once seen as backwaters, have managed to outperform the city itself, particularly its South Side, in terms of employment, public safety, and school scores.

Los Angeles retains a magnificent collection of neighborhoods, and is home to remarkable institutions like the Getty Center, a striking museum in the Santa Monica Mountains. And there are some tentative signs that the LA electorate is capable of pushing back to defend it. In 2024, voters ousted Soros-financed District Attorney George Gascon; they have also displayed a growing resistance to tax increases. You can still feel the area’s potential in places like El Segundo, where space and aerospace firms are flourishing, and at a charter school in Granada Hills, where largely minority students — Chinese, Korean, Middle Eastern, Latino — routinely win the national academic decathlon. Hollywood still possesses a reservoir of entertainment-industry talent. And, of course, the weather and topography remain daily reminders of why people came here in the first place. 

The key to renewal lies with people like Juan Galicia who, despite everything, is pursuing permits to rebuild in his neighborhood. Sustained by his faith and his commitment to making Los Angeles a better place, Galicia, like many Angelinos, is staking out a claim for a better future. Some, like me, may have fled — in my case, south to Orange County — but I will cheer Galicia and people like him as they try to restore a city to which I owe much, and would be delighted to see ascendant once again.      

“I want my trees back and my home back,” Galicia tells me. “I have to work every day and rebuilding this house is my dream. It will happen, you’ll see. I still feel blessed to be here.” 

The evidence is becoming difficult to ignore. Last week, two Democratic Socialist of America members achieved electoral successes that underscore the movement’s growing ability to outcompete the party mainstream. In Maine, Graham Platner, who has described himself as a DSA member in online forums, clinched the nomination for the US Senate, besting the party’s preferred candidate, Gov. Janet Mills. On the other coast, Nithya Raman, the first DSA member elected to the Los Angeles City Council, advanced to a mayoral runoff against the establishment-backed incumbent, Karen Bass. 

Meanwhile, in New York City, fewer than five months after becoming mayor, Zohran Mamdani is using his newfound political capital not to unify the Democratic Party, but to build a New York-based socialist faction in Congress. In a surprising escalation, he has endorsed the DSA-backed firebrand Darializa Avila Chevalier in her bid to unseat Rep. Adriano Espaillat, and the progressive Brad Lander in his challenge to Rep. Dan Goldman. The Democratic establishment will now be compelled to spend millions to fend off these DSA primary challengers, no small feat for a party that needs significant funding to compete in the battleground races it must win to retake Congress.

The national Democratic leadership seems unwilling to publicly acknowledge the scale of the challenge emerging from the DSA and broader Left-wing movement. 

Unlike previous iterations of the American hard Left, today’s movement has learned to build a durable political infrastructure capable of producing candidates, mobilizing volunteers, and influencing Democratic politics. For more than a decade, this movement has quietly built a political ecosystem that operates independently from the traditional party. Organizations such as the DSA, Justice Democrats, and the older Working Families Party have spent years recruiting candidates, training activists, building donor networks, and developing local power. 

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Dems are losing a winnable election

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The movement’s success isn’t measured only in the number of candidates it elects. It is also reflected in a growing capacity to shape Democratic politics. Across many cities, self-described progressives and DSA-endorsed candidates have assembled voting blocs on city councils and  successfully pressured moderate Democratic elected officials to slash police funding, ban ICE from city jurisdictions, and expand state and city funding for various social-welfare programs.

No organization has been more central to this effort than the Democratic Socialist of America. With more than 200 chapters nationwide, 100,000 members, thousands of highly motivated volunteers, and a growing roster of elected officials, the DSA has become the backbone of the modern socialist movement. Its greatest strength is the organization’s willingness to adapt its tactics to local conditions, now touting its presence, now deliberately obscuring its involvement when doing so is more electorally advantageous.

The rise of Graham Platner illustrates this point. It is now being revealed that his candidacy was largely manufactured by a handful of DSA members from the same networks that powered Mamdani’s election. Socialist operatives Daniel Moraff and Leanne Fan found Platner through a DSA-affiliated local activist group, but that affiliation never became part of his public profile. Instead, the duo built a carefully curated image of him as a humble veteran and oysterman. 

The operatives also managed to keep several major liabilities from coming to light before the primary, including his Nazi tattoo, allegations of manhandling his ex-girlfriends, and extramarital sexting. Now that Platner is the nominee, these DSA operatives have effectively saddled the Democratic Party with a nominee offering a socialist platform and enough personal baggage to sink its chances in Maine and damage the party’s broader brand heading into November.

If Platner’s campaign showcased the growing sophistication in defeating the party’s preferred picks in a primary, Raman’s challenge to Karen Bass reveals something more fundamental: the radical Left-wing movement will turn on Democratic incumbents — regardless of how much those incumbents have conceded to it. 

Bass wasn’t a moderate figure who resisted progressive demands from city lawmakers or the grassroots. She and Raman had worked closely together on their biggest shared priorities, including the city’s massive homelessness crisis. Bass also had the support of many of her progressive colleagues on the council, who chose to endorse her over Raman. But none of that mattered. The moment Bass became politically vulnerable, as she did after her mishandling of the Palisades wildfires, Raman filed to run against her. This is not a movement that can be appeased into loyalty, it is an insatiable insurgency that views propagating its own power as equally important, if not more so, than securing policy victories. 

Leading into the midterms, the Democratic Party faces the seemingly impossible task of forging a united campaign capable of winning enough moderate votes to flip at least one chamber of Congress, while simultaneously resisting a hostile takeover by a radical movement. Nowhere is the cost of that takeover more visible for Democrats than in Maine. DSA operatives built Platner from scratch and hid his liabilities long enough to push Janet Mills out of the race. Now that Platner is in the hands of the Democratic Party as its official Senate nominee, party officials have no choice but to defend him. Senate Democratic leaders have been forced to publicly rationalize his fitness to the moderate voters they can’t afford to lose. 

And it was the decision by the broader progressive ecosystem to challenge Karen Bass through Raman that helped transform what might otherwise have been a routine municipal election into a national headache for Democrats. It’s true that the DSA has thus far formally withheld its endorsement from Raman, in part over her tepid statements in support of Israel in the aftermath of Oct. 7. Still, there’s hardly any doubt that she can be expected to push city politics closer to the group’s position.

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The entry of television personality Spencer Pratt further amplified scrutiny of blue governance in the city and state, drawing national attention to the party’s failure to deal with homelessness and public safety. Perhaps unexpectedly, the race has also brought attention to California’s unusually slow vote-counting process and permissive election rules, both of which have long raised Republican ire. In that respect, the Los Angeles race has provided Republicans with a highly visible example to cite as they continue pushing the SAVE Act and its proof-of-citizenship voter requirements.

As usual, Democratic leaders have opted for damage control rather than direct confrontation in response to each of these power grabs. This posture of strategic ambiguity reflects a naive confidence that maintaining a peaceful coalition will eventually absorb DSA and progressive officials into the party apparatus and keep them under establishment authority. But that logic is flawed. It doesn’t account for the strength this movement has built at the local level, or its willingness to use local political power to resist submission to national leadership.

The tipping point may already be here. If Mamdani succeeds in helping even one DSA challenger unseat a sitting member of Congress, or if the candidate cultivated by DSA operatives captures the Maine Senate seat, it will demonstrate that the Democratic establishment can no longer protect its own incumbents. Once that assumption disappears, every safe Democratic seat becomes a potential target. Members of Congress will live in fear of the DSA or other Leftist organizations launching  primary challenges against them. The threat itself would become the most powerful leverage the movement has to push the national party to the hard Left. The party’s performance in the midterms, as well as its viability in the 2028 presidential election, will depend upon whether it can confront this threat. 

Instead of facing up to their fundamental challenges in livability and economic viability, the Big Apple and other cities like Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Chicago are falling for full-spectrum progressives. In Tuesday’s local elections, Zohran Mamdani, a socialist running as a Democrat, handily defeated former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who ran independently after failing to secure the Democratic nomination. Leftist have also scored recent victories in smaller cities like Oakland, Cincinnati, Syracuse, Albany, and Buffalo.     

It’s hard to see how politicians like Mamdani, following the Democratic Socialists’ platform, will  abolish capitalism or implement the “social ownership” of all industry in a still profoundly capitalist country. People, at least outside the bluest cities, may not respond well to progressive ideas about taxing “white” areas, one of Mamdani’s proposals, or regarding the very existence of the NYPD as an obstacle to “queer liberation.”

His defenders insist Mamdani has disavowed such views since he aired them in the febrile Covid-and-BLM era. But his statements from back then, which wasn’t that long ago, give every impression of sincerity; Mamdani — unlike, say, his failed opponent Andrew Cuomo — comes across as an ideological true believer if ever there were one.

The bigger problem is that this abrupt Left turn comes as cities are losing their primacy. Today, core cities account for just 15% of the US population, down from a quarter in 1950. Meanwhile, the suburbs and exurbs have seen explosive growth — accounting for 86% of the metropolitan population, up from 13% at the outset of World War II. Suburban and, especially, exurban dominance of metropolitan growth has only accelerated in recent years.  

More critical still, cities are losing their once-dominant economic role. In 2019, before the pandemic, office construction was a third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Even large multinational firms, historically anchored in cities like New York and Chicago, are rethinking their real-estate strategies. According to the Financial Times, many companies are planning to reduce their office footprints by 10% to 20%. A study from the University of Chicago found that as much as a third of the urban workforce could operate remotely.

It is precisely these conditions that have helped create a new urban demography favorable to far-Left city politicians like Mamdani. Between 1970 and 2000, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income areas in core cities dropped 23 percent, down from nearly half, while the majority lived in low- or very-low-income areas. Job losses in manufacturing and middle management, notes MIT economist David Autor, were “overwhelmingly concentrated in urban labor markets.”     

The Big Apple, for example, has lost some 76,000 middle-income jobs since 2020, while upper-income and low-income jobs have grown. This has paralleled the exodus of middle- and working-class ethnics — Italians, Irish, Jews, African Americans, Puerto Ricans — into the suburbs, particularly those with lower prices. Their departure is a blessing for the professional-class Left that backs Mamdani (while remaining middle- and working-class voters largely continued to back Cuomo to the bitter end).

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Burdened with astronomical college debt, these high-education-but-low-wage voters constitute the vanguard of the far Left in many cities. They have largely adopted radical positions hostile to Israel and are seen as threatening to Jews, especially older ones, who once played a dominant role in the city politics.

Onetime rapper and Hollywood nepo baby Mamdani knows well how to appeal to this emergent class. His high-priced proposals for free childcare may seem family-friendly, but many of these voters are unliikely to have children (a majority of Manhattanites are single and have never been married). Socialist campaigners thrive in those places that have far fewer children — gentrified  sectors of Queens and Brooklyn, Chicago’s near northside and trendy swaths of west LA. Those who march under the banner of LGBTQ also play an outsized role in these movements. Mamdani, despite his Muslim background and pro-Palestinian bona fides, romped in heavily gay-friendly parts of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens

What disturbs the young professional class most appears to be  high rents; Gotham takes the highest share of income for housing of any US big city. Mamdani’s programs — rent freezes, free buses, eviction restrictions, and the like — are designed to allow urbanites without the means to remain in the city, rather than join those moving to less costly cities to fulfill their dreams.

Some Leftist pundits see this class-based approach as the path to power, and even as the better substitute for the identity-based politics that dominated progressivism beginning a decade ago. High prices mean that coastal metropolises now suffer the lowest adjusted incomes, even as incomes in the less costly middle of the country remain above the national average. The thinking goes that, by running on “affordability” for this educated precariat, Democrats can regain their electoral footing after the thrashing they received in 2024.

Other economic pressures are radicalizing the hipsters. They face a job market that is  getting tougher — barely half of workers under 30 have full time jobs — even for those with expensive advanced degrees. Their jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence, including in finance, business services, and even “creative” professions that historically have clustered in cities.   

Cities, of course, can fight back against these trends by developing policies that encourage urban economic growth, something barely mentioned in the DSA and other Leftist forums. Through reasonable taxation, less regulation, and the nurturing of local high-wage industries, from light manufacturing to video production, an early generation of practically minded urbanists helped restore order and growth. Mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg in New York, Bob Lanier and Bill White in Houston, Richard Riordan in Los Angeles, Ed Rendell in Philadelphia and Steve Goldsmith in Indianapolis showed how cities can come back.

Today’s urban politics, at least for now, make such a revival unlikely. Chicago’s Brandon Johnson, in office since 2023, was elected by a very Mamdani-like coalition of poor minorities, public employees, and hipster whites. Under Johnson’s steady misrule, schools deteriorate even as he pushes through big raises for teachers and other public employees, leaving the city with an extremely high pension debt.  

Even where reformers have triumphed this decade, as in San Francisco and Seattle, radical forces appear to be once again ascendant. Long a favored destination for college-educated migrants, Seattle during the 2020 riots shut down for weeks and even spawned something of a mini-Havana near its downtown. The city suffers from stubbornly high office-vacancy rates, large numbers of empty stores, and business flight. Crime is down, but hardly back to its pre-2020 levels. The George Floyd Plaza, meant to be some sort of public shrine, remains largely desolate and threatening.

In Portland, another city still reeling from the effects of 2020, socialists are also ascendant, having displaced Republicans as the city’s essential second party, and one with all the momentum. As in Seattle, the local progressives seemed reluctant to police even violence-prone groups like antifa.

Just recently New York Times veteran Nicholas Kristoff blithely dismissed Trumpian assertions about Portland as a crime-cursed dystopia, suggesting that “hell does not serve Pinot Noir this good.”  Of course, not everyone in these cities loves the helmeted kids in black, notably those who have suffered their attacks, including the Seattle police union.

Much the same process appears to be taking place in Minneapolis, which suffered massive  disorder during the “summer of love.” There, Mayor Jacob Frey, after eight years, is deeply unpopular and could lose out to his socialist challenger, Omar Fateh. The race was too close to call as of this writing.

Radical realignment is also unfolding in San Francisco, where since 2020, the city had tacked to the center. Once united in opposition to the progressives, the moderates are now increasingly divided. Now the city’s Board of Supervisors may have a DSA majority within a year or two.

President Trump deserves some blame for the socialist tide. He may well have saved the career of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, who impressed few during last year’s fires and continues to disappoint, as the city’s performance in rebuilding has been abysmal at best. The city’s economy may be largely moribund, losing companies at a rapid clip. But Bass’s fervent attacks on ICE agents have helped her galvanize progressive support.  

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Is this the denouement of great cities? Even under socialist rule, big cities like New York will continue to attract young professionals, globe-trotting elites, and cultural creators, as well as some immigrants. In New York, while the overall population has declined, ultra-wealthy residents, boosted by the stock market, continue to spend lavishly at the city’s often absurdly expensive restaurants. Similarly, tourists continue to flood in, gawking at the bright lights, street characters, and remarkable cultural assets built by earlier generations.  

Yet over time, socialist rule may make it impossible for big cities to finance their current costs, much less elaborate schemes for redistribution. Trump and the congressional GOP are unlikely to   give much help with mass transit or to fund new city services. And there remain definite limits to what the rich — notably, those who earn and not just inherit their wealth — will absorb in terms of taxes and public humiliation.

It’s hard to see how cities like New York can expand spending without keeping these people. Between 2011 and 2021, New Yorkers with more than $1 million in adjusted gross income averaged 0.7% of all tax filers, but paid 42.4% of municipal personal Income Tax. Between 2018 and 2022, the city lost some $10 billion in revenues just to south Florida. Even Andrew Cuomo vowed to head to the Sunshine State in case he lost, which, he did.

On the other hand, socialist wins could prove a boon for places like Palm Beach, Fla., which have become beacons for people leaving places like New York and Chicago. Dallas is developing  a stock exchange to rival Wall Street and is eyeing a Mamdani mayoralty as an ideal marketing device. 

Some conservatives might celebrate the radicalization of cities and salivate at the prospect of hard-Left control of the Democratic Party. But they ignore the underlying forces boosting socialism, notably the cost of living and diminished employment prospects for the young, which could also spread beyond the radical cities. Rather than a boon to conservatives, the rise of the radical city constitutes a loss for the country, and can be reversed only by a rebirth of pragmatic reason.

Fires have been a reality in California for at least 20 million years. In my own, far shorter lifetime, I have seen numerous blazes, and covered several on television. They aren’t predictable, but you know when they are likely to occur. They aren’t preventable, but you can be prepared for them. Fires, floods, and earthquakes — disasters are us, and that has been the case as LA grew over the past century.

This time around, city and state leaders bear a heavy blame for a shocking lack of preparation, given weather conditions that were well predicted and have caused disasters in the past. As Traci Park, a member of the City Council, recently suggested, the fires revealed “chronic underinvestment in our critical infrastructure”. Perhaps the most remarkable failure was the lack of pressure to get water out of hydrants.

This disaster reflects the failure of the one-party progressivism currently dominating governmental structures. In this worldview, basic infrastructure is less important than addressing climate change and “social justice”; measures such as building dams or hardening the electric grid are demoted to a secondary role, with catastrophic effects.

While the fire may not reverse this mentality, it has demolished the reputations of two major adherents: LA Mayor Karen Bass and California Gov. Gavin Newsom. Even as federal authorities warned of fires, Bass elected to take a junket to Ghana at the behest of President Biden. She came back to a city ablaze, with thousands of Angelinos having lost their homes and businesses.

During her tenure, Bass, whose political icon was Fidel Castro, had cut the fire department budget, signed off on lavish, and largely unsuccessful, programmes to address homelessness, and crowed about how the city would defend illegal immigrants. Meanwhile, everything in the city — from parks to schools — is worn and in a state of ill repair.

Nor has this regime done much for its poorer residents, which it claims to care most about. LA suffers among the highest poverty rates in the state and the worst in the country. South-central LA, the epicentre of two of the worst riots in American history, is now poorer in relation to the rest of the city than before those upheavals. It remains the second worst homeless capital of America and builds far fewer new housing per capita than almost every other large US metro area. The city still wants to raise taxes amid a deepening budget hole .

In turn, Newsom presides over a California with roads now among the worst in the country and a high-speed bullet train plagued with endless delays and massive cost overruns. Precious little has been done to boost water systems critical in a perennially drought-threatened state. And state environmental policies, as the Little Hoover Commission found, have contributed significantly to the severity of conflagrations, largely by blocking controlled burns and allowing the pile-up of dry, combustible brush.

It turns out that governance matters. The Golden State’s ascendency was a product of a state that the great liberal economist John Kenneth Galbraith in 1971 described as run by “a proud, competent civil service”. This legacy reached its zenith not under California Gov. Ronald Reagan, as some conservatives might wish, but under the responsible liberal regime of Pat Brown, building excellent roads, addressing state water needs, and fostering what Galbraith hailed as among “the best school systems in the country”.

In contrast, California’s government now has been ranked by Wallet Hub as the least efficient in delivering services relative to tax burden. The primary education system stands now among the worst in the country, particularly for poor and minority students. Simply put, progressive Democrats don’t seek to build capacities that made life better for people, unlike their predecessors.

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By Joel Kotkin

Such degradation is thrown into sharp focus by disasters. In the aftermath of the 1994 earthquake, Mayor Richard Riordan was everywhere, and repeatedly questioned bureaucratic roadblocks that would slow recovery. With the help of Gov. Pete Wilson, he managed to have a critical section of freeway connecting the Westside and downtown rebuilt in a remarkable 66 days. Under Riordan, much of the city, including sections that burned in the 1992 riots, was rebuilt, in large part with private investment.

Such effective political leadership is all but gone from both Sacramento and the LA City Hall. Yet LA’s decline isn’t foreordained — a fact highlighted by the rise of the largely Latino industrial cities outside LA’s jurisdiction. As you enter well-run cities like Southgate, suddenly the streets are well-paved and there are few vacancies, with virtually no graffiti or homelessness. An exhaustive study by Chapman University researcher Bheki Mahlobo found that these cities generally outperform adjacent regions of Los Angeles, and even the city itself, in retail sales, labour participation, crime rates and poverty. Downtown LA’s office vacancy rate is almost three times that of the independent cities just to its south.

Yet the prospects for change, both in the state and the city, aren’t favourable, the recent fire notwithstanding. Not that Californians or Angelinos are happy with the status quo. Only 40% of California voters approve of the legislature and almost two-thirds tell pollsters the state is heading in the wrong direction. As misrule persists and opportunity diminishes, the young head for the exits. Since 2000, LA has lost 750,000 people under the age of 25.

Yet in both California and LA, the progressive stranglehold seems strong enough to survive a nuclear war. After all, the state still voted overwhelmingly for Kamala Harris in November, deposed several GOP members of Congress, and maintained lopsided control of both state houses; Democrats boast four times as many voters as Republicans in LA.

Which brings us to the 2028 Olympics. The choice of LA to host the games seems hubristic, to say the least. The Olympics put enormous strain on any city: from law enforcement to traffic management to logistics. Yet this isn’t the LA economy and government that hosted the 1984 games, but the sadly diminished city of today. And even if a disaster of some kind doesn’t break out while millions of visitors are in town, it’s hard to see how the city revives itself in time.

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California leaves its poor to burn

By Samuel McIlhagga

In the past, the city and its economy were able to bounce back, even after earthquakes, fires, and riots. Without significant political change, the chances of that happening now are low. The current regime is more radical than ever, with four members of the far-Left Democratic Socialists on the 15-member council. Most of the rest are more mainstream progressives; none is a Republican.

The ascendant Left will inevitably blame the fires on climate change, ignoring the more obvious and proximate role of government mismanagement. As for the poorer Angelinos displaced by the fires, we can expect the growing progressive influence to replace the lost housing with publicly financed products. The goal is to turn a city built around single-owned houses into something more akin to life in the Soviet Union.

If there is a silver lining, it’s that the fire’s encroachment upon the city’s upper classes will prompt a rethink. This time, the damage to ultra-affluent areas like the Palisades and the Hollywood Hills brought governmental incompetence literally to the doors of the progressive elites, who thought themselves safe in their enclaves — just as they protected their kids by keeping them out of the miserable LA schools.

Clearly, a new more pragmatic mindset, not necessarily a conservative one, is desperately needed. The great entrepreneurial city must rediscover how to combine business-friendliness with good infrastructure. The opportunity is there to rebuild large areas of the city and rethink ways to prevent similar disasters. But unless state and city leadership change direction, the process will be slow, painful, and ultimately self-defeating.

Correction: Due to an editing error, an earlier version of this article misstated California Gov. Pat Brown’s first name.