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A U G U S T 1 9 9 8
by Robert D. Kaplan
ANDSTONE cliffs, a
peacock-blue ocean, and an endless bar of cream-colored sand filled my first
view of greater Los Angeles as I drove south from the Santa Barbara airport on
the Pacific Coast Highway and entered Los Angeles County. With the
10,000-foot-high San Gabriel Mountains stepping down to the sea, L.A. appeared
too beautiful to be real.
From north to south, greater Los Angeles spans close to a hundred miles of
seacoast. I stopped at Santa Monica, a city of 90,000 on the northwest edge of
Los Angeles. After checking into a hotel, I looked at a map and saw that the
Third Street pedestrian promenade was only half a mile away. My decision to
walk there was a mistake I did not repeat in Los Angeles. The scrawny palms
provided no shade on the sun-blasted asphalt. Except for a bag lady, a woman
pushing her child in a pram, and a young man with tattoos who passed me at high
speed on Rollerblades, the street was empty for that half mile -- a half mile
that took me past the Civic Center and Auditorium, where the Academy Awards
ceremony used to be held; the Art Deco town hall; and the Rand Corporation.
Rather than people I saw only cars and enormous parking lots.
Discuss this article in the Community & Society forum of Post & Riposte.
From the archives:
The rapid growth of office space in suburbs is creating "urban villages," which are confronting local governments with new kinds of urban-planning problems.
Related links:
An article by Robert Geddes in The American Prospect. "A new form of human settlement has emerged in the twentieth century, radically different from the cities of the past. The city has become a city-region."
Basic information about L.A.'s population, geography, history, and government.
Over the next few days I drove through the suburban San Fernando Valley bordering Santa Monica to the north, which is equally prosperous. Unlike Santa Monica, the San Fernando Valley is part of the City of Los Angeles. Its business and political leaders want to secede. With 1.3 million inhabitants, the San Fernando Valley would constitute the nation's sixth largest urban area, and one of its richest. This is not white flight -- 40 percent of the valley's residents are Latino or Asian. Among the white population, Jews are the largest ethnic group. These people want to duplicate the prosperity of incorporated post-urban dynamos in northern Los Angeles such as Burbank -- now the home of the Walt Disney Company, Warner Brothers, and NBC -- and Glendale, 45 percent of whose population is foreign-born Latinos, Asians, and Armenians. Joel Kotkin, a Los Angeles-based urban-affairs specialist, calls the secessionist trend that has already Balkanized St. Louis and other American cities the "urban confederacy movement." Unlike the original secessionists, these activists will win, he thinks, because cities are now too big to work -- they can function only as a league of smaller, incorporated pieces.
A third of all U.S.-born middle-class Latinos and more than a quarter of all U.S.-born middle-class Asians in the five-county greater Los Angeles region marry someone of another race. Even the notion of white versus black is losing relevance here, with Latinos constituting 38 percent of the Los Angeles County population and Asians and blacks 11 percent each. The racial polarization that divides Washington, D.C., for example, where white suburbs surround what is, in effect, a black urban homeland, is little apparent in L.A. Even within the Los Angeles city limits blacks make up only 14 percent of the population, whereas they make up 29 percent in New York City. For ten days I drove throughout greater Los Angeles, stopping often to walk in different neighborhoods. Media images of the L.A. riots and the O. J. Simpson trial had prepared me for a city as divided as Washington. But in L.A., where more than eighty languages are spoken, that's not what I found.
Zaheer Virji is a twenty-seven-year-old ethnic-Indian immigrant from the East African nation of Tanzania. He wore a blue-velvet baseball cap, a white T-shirt, jeans, and running shoes when I met him and his American wife in a Santa Monica hotel lobby. Virji's family, which imports goods from Hong Kong to Tanzania, is part of a merchant community from the Indian subcontinent which forms the middle class in Tanzania, along with several other African countries. Virji remembers the times when police thugs under the control of the former Tanzanian President Julius Nyerere harassed his relatives and arrested his uncle. He told me that race relations are "so much better" in southern California than in Africa, where Indians and Africans completely stereotype each other: "I came here to escape not just Africans but Indians, too." (The name Virji is an alias.) He went first to England and then to Canada, where there are large Indian communities. But he didn't feel free. "In those places the community is what is happening. Here in the U.S., it's youthat is happening. There is less of system here, fewer laws to restrict you."
Virji came to the United States six years ago, and has no college degree or green card -- yet. In the six months before we spoke, he had earned more by investing in the stock market than his wife had made at her job -- a reflection not only of his skill but also of an economy in which stocks and other assets have risen but wages have not. With this money, along with funds from his family in Tanzania, he was looking to buy a business: a flower shop, a gas station, whatever he could get the best deal on. He was using a broker; if the business was a gas station, he told me, he would need to know about underground tanks and environmental regulations. He wanted to go into partnership with the current owner for a three-year transition period, to secure part of his investment if the business did not turn out as advertised. Ten years from now, he explained, he wants to be the owner of a small business with able employees, so that he can spend his time investing the profits in the stock market.
Los Angeles is full of Asian and Latino immigrants creating their own civilization, just as European immigrants did a hundred years ago. Because these new immigrants bring different historical and cultural experiences, and because they are integrating into American society under more-advanced technological conditions than did immigrants in the past, they will further reduce the distance between America and the rest of the world.
WENT east from Santa Monica across the City of Los Angeles to the suburbs of
Monterey Park and San Gabriel. As I drove, I saw a sprawling metropolis in
transition. The official, ceremonial downtown, composed of the convention
center, courts, government offices, and the Los Angeles Timesbuilding,
looked less vibrant than the new, pedestrian-packed downtowns I saw on the
way -- Westwood and Beverly Hills, a contiguous area marked by the office
buildings of City National Bank, Occidental Petroleum, and others; a Korean
church; a Mexican-American real-estate agency; and one of the largest schools
in the country that teaches English to foreigners. Several real-estate
agents told me that the 1992 riots in heavily black South Central Los Angeles
had quickened the exodus of corporations toward the wealthier western part of
the city.I passed through West Hollywood, an area of gays, elderly Jews, and Russian immigrants; Koreatown; and the "Banana Republic," a neighborhood populated by Central American immigrants. The notorious Watts and South Central neighborhoods were one-story encampments of poor blacks encroached upon by the Latino immigrants who make up two thirds of the population of those areas. Upwardly mobile blacks are moving from here to the Moreno Valley and other inexpensive suburbs in an eastern area of greater Los Angeles called the Inland Empire. Watts and South Central are, in ethnic and racial terms, being annexed to Mexican East Los Angeles. Demographers say that in coming years Latinos will dilute the presence of blacks in Los Angeles, as they have already done in Miami. Latinos are now the majority of the region's industrial work force. The number of Latino- and Asian-owned businesses in Los Angeles County has increased from 70,000 to 220,000 since the early 1980s, while the number of black-owned businesses has remained static at 20,000.
I parked in East Los Angeles and walked about a mile past small stores selling furniture and other household goods. I noticed many bridal shops, suggestive of strong family patterns, and many pedestrians, too. Los Angeles, I had begun to realize, was very much a vibrant pedestrian city -- in parts. One part I had seen was the largest garment district in North America, whose narrow alleys are packed with Latinos, Asians, and Middle Easterners, a throwback to early-twentieth-century New York. This vast confederation teems with successful commercial and residential areas like the Third Street Promenade and East Los Angeles. But you need a car to travel between them.
From the "Mexico" of East Los Angeles I crossed into "Asia": Monterey Park and San Gabriel, once gray and run-down and now booming with glittering banks, supported by Hong Kong Chinese and Chinese-American immigrant money, and many new malls, among them San Gabriel Square.
At this mall, which is decorated with Spanish colonnades, I entered the 99 Ranch Market, part of a California Chinese supermarket chain. At first it seemed like any other enormous American supermarket, with dozens of aisles and too much air-conditioning. But nearly every product in the store was an Asian specialty item, either imported or grown in the Los Angeles area. Chinese food stores are common in the nation's various Chinatowns, and so, increasingly, are supermarkets like this one. But never before had I seen forty aisles, each a hundred yards long, devoted to noodles, pork, taro, tofu, pea sprouts, dried shrimp, soybean paste, spicy bean cabbage, dried seaweed, rice spirits, and also Thai, Korean, and Japanese items. Next door was a Chinese restaurant with an overabundance of employees and an absence of Western cutlery or Caucasian customers. Women crossed the red floor pushing food trolleys filled with saucers of chicken feet and other dishes.
A pseudonymous Los Angeles columnist stirs up the Korean-American community.
I visited another pan-Asian supermarket, this one to the south -- in Cerritos, once a dairy-farming district but now a planned, incorporated community 45 percent of whose inhabitants are Asian. The checkout counters are manned by Latinos, and the customers are mainly Chinese. A few blocks away I called on Vincent Diau, a forty-four-year-old who emigrated from Taiwan in 1981. Though ethnic Chinese account for only 2.7 percent of Los Angeles County's population, one in five home buyers in the county is Chinese, and such top Los Angeles hotels as the Beverly Wilshire and the Los Angeles Biltmore are Chinese-owned. Diau wore expensive glasses and casual clothes; there were two cars in his driveway and new appliances in his house. Everything was in perfect order, almost as though nobody lived there, although Diau and his Chinese-American wife, Alice, a schoolteacher, share the house with their two children. The children's academic awards were framed near a violin and a piano, and their schedule for music lessons and other after-school activities was posted on a wall beside charts of the English alphabet and Chinese characters. The Diaus own a computer, as do 72 percent of Chinese-Americans; 53 percent of Chinese-American families are linked to the Internet, in contrast to 11 percent of all families. (Forty percent of Asian-American adults hold college degrees -- almost twice the percentage of Caucasians.)
Diau told me, "I moved to Cerritos for the same reason that many Chinese and Korean immigrants have -- because Whitney High School is one of the best public high schools in the state." Diau has law and political-science degrees from universities in Taiwan, and a law degree from Tulane; he is a consultant on Asia with the Hughes Corporation. People complain about the American legal system, he told me, but compared with those in Asia it is straightforward: "If you have discipline and determination and a strategic goal, this country is simple; only the language and alphabet are hard." Because Americans are clear and informal, "you can cut through issues quickly," he said. "In Taiwan everyone wants to control you: there is so much social pressure. Here, among people who are not Chinese, I can truly be myself." Diau told me that he mixes with all kinds of people -- Latinos, Middle Easterners, Indians -- but unfortunately not with blacks. This was less choice than adherence to tradition, he explained. Chinese families favor intermarriage with Caucasians but not with blacks. "I hope that changes," he said.
Why, I asked myself, worry about "the Asian threat"? The best way to contain Asian dynamism is to absorb it -- which is exactly what the United States is doing.
S I drove through greater Los Angeles, the term "city-state" was foremost
in my mind, not because L.A. is similar to ancient Athens or Sparta but because
of the very size and eye-popping variety of this thriving urban confederation,
with its hinterland of oil refineries and agricultural valleys. Santa Monica
has the ambiance of a beach resort, East Los Angeles is like Mexico, Monterey
Park is like Asia, and Cerritos is an Asian Levittown for the nineties. Except
for the prevalence of home-security systems, the winding streets near Dodger
Stadium, north of downtown, have almost a rustic, Southern European aspect,
with their vine-covered houses and steep hills. Going from one township to
another, I often felt as if I had journeyed far and wide. The freeway system
makes this compression of distance possible, and climate abets the system's
expansion: because Los Angeles gets little rain or frost, road surfaces are
cheap and easy to maintain."I'm middle-class," Gregory Rodriguez, a researcher who lives on a steep street near Dodger Stadium, told me when I visited him. "But there are also working-class and poor people a block away, and some wealthy entrepreneurs: Jews, Anglos, Mexicans, Chinese, you name it. It's an Old World neighborhood of immigrants, like neighborhoods in Manhattan." I sought out Rodriguez, a thirty-one-year-old third-generation Mexican-American, to learn more about ethnicity in southern California, and particularly about the culture of "Latinos" -- a word Rodriguez prefers to "Hispanics," which he calls "cold and generic." "'Hispanic' is a term people in the East use," he said, "but here no one does." Had I relied merely on my East Coast impressions, the figures Rodriguez presented would have startled me. In the Northeast, "Hispanics" are often Puerto Ricans and Dominicans, who have not assimilated as successfully as Mexicans; yet nationwide, Mexicans account for 60 percent of all Latinos.
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, Rodriguez told me, 55 percent of Latinos are bilingual in English and Spanish. In greater Los Angeles four times as many U.S.-born Latinos are in the middle class as live in poverty. A quarter of all middle-class families in southern California are Latinos, and in economic performance U.S.-born Latinos living in greater Los Angeles are not far behind whites and Asians: about half of U.S.-born Latinos here are in the middle class, whereas 58 percent of white or Asian households are. Among black households in the area 38 percent are in the middle class; the national average is 26 percent. Perhaps the most telling distinction among Latinos, Asians, and blacks is in the percentage that are government employees in an increasingly entrepreneurial economy. While 28 percent of middle-class blacks in greater Los Angeles work for the federal, state, or municipal government, only about 14 percent of middle-class Asians and 10 percent of middle-class Latinos do.
Rodriguez used his own term, "mestizo-ization," for a dual perspective prevalent among Latinos: they maintain a firm belief in some degree of bilingualism while welcoming U.S. citizenship and often intermarrying. David E. Hayes-Bautista, a medical sociologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, told me that the Latino experience suggests that "being American simply means buying a house with a mortgage and getting ahead -- there is no agreement anymore on culture, only on economics." Seventy-five years ago D. H. Lawrence called America a homeland "of the pocket" and not "of the blood."
Immigrant dynamism coupled with Asian as well as Latino mestizo-ization are the central facts of late-twentieth-century Los Angeles. And the reality is richer still, as Indian immigrants buy up Artesia, next to Cerritos, and Iranian immigrants, after buying many properties in Beverly Hills, buy now in nearby Westwood. "South Central is no longer a burnt-out core, and that is partly because of Latino immigrants," Rodriguez said. "Because Latinos came in at the bottom, a pool of home buyers existed for upwardly mobile blacks who needed to sell their properties and escape South Central and Watts for racially mixed, middle-class areas. Leftists talk of blacks being 'displaced,' but that disparages the very blacks who have succeeded. Is it 'displacement' to climb your way out of the ghetto?"
RANGE County, which forms the southern part of greater Los Angeles, is, along
with Westchester, Marin, and Dade, among the few counties in America that are
household names. Orange County is America's most fully evolved urban pod, in
which alliances are based on technology rather than geography and classic
definitions of city and suburb no longer apply. Perhaps the county -- larger and
less dense than the largest cities but smaller than the smallest states -- will
replace the city as the civic center of the future. Already the western Kansas
City suburbs, which I had visited earlier, are called Johnson County, and the
prosperous Maryland suburbs of Washington, D.C., are called Montgomery County.Orange County -- "a major airport in search of a city" -- stands for what everybody hates about the suburbs, with their crass affluence and neither-nor landscape. It is often described as 782 square miles of dull residential streets, malls, and office parks without a downtown. And it is notorious for the 1994 bankruptcy of its treasury, the result of trying to fund its operations not through high taxes but through risky investments. I was prepared to hate Orange County. I came away respecting it, more intrigued than I had been by many "exotic" and "romantic" cities.
Parts of Orange County are beautiful, and the county works. If it were a state, its economy would be roughly equal to Arizona's; if it were a country, its economy would rank among the top thirty or so in the world. About a third of the firms in the county are involved in international trade, and they run the gamut of high-technology products. Orange County is now what Johnson County and other suburban pods I visited in the Midwest could become: a multiracial world trade center linked to overseas cities by direct flights -- say, between Omaha and Beijing and Kansas City and Paris. (Since the late 1980s the export sectors of many local economies in America have grown dramatically; from 1987 to 1995 by 200 percent in California, 250 percent in Utah, and 375 percent in Idaho.)
The received impression that Orange County's 2.6 million residents are "white bread" is false. Almost a quarter of the county's population is Latino, two and a half times the national average; 11 percent is Asian, nearly three times the national average. Only two percent of the population is black -- one sixth the national average.
Another false perception of Orange County is that there is no there there. In fact there are many theres there. The county comprises twenty-eight separate municipalities, many with their own centers. The term "suburb" does not properly describe this advanced, polycentric urban pod. Because these centers do not resemble traditional downtowns, they are overlooked by people whose eyes have yet to adjust to the post-industrial age.
DROVE first to Newport Beach, one of Orange County's municipalities,
to see Dennis Macheski, a real-estate consultant who worked in a well-appointed
two-story office complex beside the Pacific. "The myth that people in places
like Orange County spend an inordinate amount of time in their cars is wrong,"
Macheski began. "The average commute in the United States is twenty-two
minutes. In southern California it is twenty-five minutes -- almost the average.
That's because almost everyone in the area works close to home. The jobs are no
longer in the city -- they're right here, in post-suburbia, or whatever you want
to call it. Even in the Inland Empire, whose suburbs are the least developed
and attractive, seventy percent of the residents work locally. Nobody in the
suburbs needs to drive more than thirty minutes to a great restaurant or a
theater." In fact, established post-suburban regions like Orange County and
northern New Jersey rank high nationally on availability of cultural venues.
"We're no longer a suburb. Affluent New York City bedroom communities average
fifteen hundred persons per square mile. Orange County's average density is six
thousand. So we're far more urban in many respects than parts of New
York.""Tell me about the future of greater Los Angeles and the United States in terms of real-estate patterns," I said.
"Fifteen years hence we will be bigger. Nothing will stop us. Instead of fifteen million in greater Los Angeles we'll be eighteen million. Two thirds of the new people will be in outlying areas as the urban region spreads farther. The same will be true for Las Vegas, Phoenix, Portland, Sacramento, cities in Colorado, and elsewhere. Two thirds will be homeowners, but only one quarter will be married with children. There will be more and more nontraditional families and singles.
"The number who work at home and telecommute may double, from two to three percent of homeowners to six percent. But so what? It's still just six percent. Because media people travel in the same circles as telecommuters, they exaggerate their importance, but in the real-estate business we know that most people -- no matter what wonders technology brings -- want to be reasonably close to the action in urban regions.
"Otherwise the two big immigrations will continue, because the economy requires highly educated Asians to work in high tech, and low-skilled Latinos to be the housekeepers and gardeners, among other jobs, for the high-tech people. These are the people who will largely account for the increased growth of urban regions across America. In greater Los Angeles the black population grows at one percent a year, but the Asian-Latino population grows at three percent. Even in California politicians have proved that they lack the will and the ability to stop immigration. Proposition 187 [an effort to deny benefits to noncitizens] was directed against the poor -- nobody thought the worse of Asians or middle-class Latinos. The result, of course, was merely to encourage more Latinos to apply for citizenship. Corporations will determine immigration: if they need highly skilled workers in defense and software industries, they will recruit them in one form or another from Asia and other places."
As I had been told over and over again by businesspeople and other experts, it is far more cost-efficient to import the rest of the world's talent than to train citizens at home, especially when weak or nonexistent national education standards and insufficient tax revenues have been the ruination of many local schools. For the low-skilled worker, U.S. citizenship confers less advantage than it used to, because those with higher skills will get the well-paying jobs anyway and become citizens in the process.
Macheski's analysis does not contradict Gregory Rodriguez's. The housekeepers and gardeners Macheski referred to are first-generation Mexican-American; the skilled Latino middle-class workers Rodriguez documents are usually second- or third-generation.
EFORE you leave Newport Beach, go see the Fashion Island Mall," Macheski
suggested.
From the archives:
"Robert Gibbs ... is a retail consultant who travels the country telling towns and small cities how to survive and prosper by learning the lessons of the shopping mall."
"See this one -- it's really affluent and evolved. Believe me, it's worth it."
It was. From Macheski's office I drove past two more office campuses and then into a large parking lot. I ascended a wide stairway and entered the mall -- an outdoor labyrinth of crowded pedestrian streets punctuated with large clay pots full of bright-red geraniums, and storefronts that mixed neoclassical and baroque styles with red-tiled roofs. There was a fountain shooting pellets of ice, and jewelry carts made of hand-tooled wood painted in rich earthen shades standing in the middle of a sidewalk that was laid with brilliant tiles. The geometric sweep of marble, sea-green wrought iron, and terra-cotta partially obscured by bougainvillea vines made for a brilliant mixture of late-twentieth-century abstractions and nineteenth-century intimacy and rusticity; I was as impressed as I had been when I saw the great squares of medieval Bukhara and Samarkand. I stood in an atrium made of pink and cream stone, veined marble, terra-cotta, what looked like malachite, and chrome alloys. Here postmodernism, the architectural style characterized by eclectic juxtapositions, was fully articulated. Malls in affluent pods of the Midwest may soon look like this.
Of course, the year-round warmth of southern California helps: it allows for the outdoor setting, and for the flowers that soften industrial aspects of the architecture. Still, I thought about what Joel Garreau suggests in Edge City(1991): a beautiful urban setting like Venice once seemed crass too, to sophisticated people of the age; malls and office parks are only early phases of an architecture that might become equally lovely as it develops. Are the souks of Damascus or Fez truly more beautiful than the Fashion Island Mall? Not to me. But the Damascus and Fez souks do have one feature they share with ancient and medieval marketplaces and not with this one: they bustle with activity and chatter. The shoppers at Fashion Island Mall, unlike the less-wealthy crowd at Santa Monica's Third Street Promenade, were quiet. Conversations were so few as to be memorable. I recall a group of men and women in business attire at a café table with open account books and spreadsheets, talking softly about a building plan. Otherwise, smooth elevator music was all I heard.
Alladi Venkatesh, of the Graduate School of Management at the University of California at Irvine, describes the Nordstrom's at nearby South Coast Plaza as "both a shopping complex and a fantasy land," where a shopper can try on a pair of Italian shoes while a live pianist plays Chopin. I saw similar scenes at Fashion Island Mall. The pursuit of style, whether in art, architecture, or the flesh (and physical comfort and high fashion are now much more widely available than in the past), may be the ultimate goal of the good life. But its side effect is social fragmentation: the threatening and unsightly poor are kept out of sight, and, as usual, people choose to live in exclusive residential areas.
Libertarianism -- the politics of many Orange County residents -- is the ideological companion of such fragmentation, favoring individual choice on such social issues as abortion and marijuana use along with fiscal conservatism and tax cuts. Libertarians say, "Leave me alone to live my life and don't bother me with paying to help less-fortunate citizens." Fashion Island Mall suggested how the urban pods I saw in western St. Louis and western Omaha could one day be as aesthetically agreeable as they were already economically efficient. But I wondered whether the new urban civilization evinced by this mall could also foster traditional patriotism or civic virtue.
Robert D. Kaplan is a contributing editor of The Atlantic. His article in this issue will appear, in somewhat different form, in his new book, An Empire Wilderness: Travels Into America's Future, to be published by Random House in late summer.
Copyright © 1998 by The Atlantic Monthly Company. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; August 1998; Travels Into America's Future; Volume 282, No. 2; pages 37 - 61.
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