Comments
GUEST WORDS--Someone may be putting something in the Los Angeles water supply. In the past months, two unlikely LA-based presidential contenders — Mayor Eric Garcetti and Disney Chief Robert Iger — have been floated in the media, including in the New York Times.
But before we start worrying about how an LA-based president might affect traffic (after all this is the big issue in Southern California), we might want to confront political reality. In both cases, the case for our local heroes’ candidacies is weak at best, and delusional at worst.
The Disney fantasies
The Iger case is, if anything easier to dismiss. Iger can sell himself, like Trump, as a business success story, and with probably far-fewer questionable business transactions. Yet Iger, trying to run as a progressive in an increasingly left-wing Democratic Party, will face numerous challenges that dwarfs those faced by Trump. (Robert Iger, with Mickey, photo right)
Iger, for example, will have to run against the sad record of his company’s self-serving interference in Anaheim. Disney is generally a low-wage employer, and, in Orange County, this can be seen as contributing to the enormous disparity between cost of living and low salaries. I don’t suggest that companies should be primarily social justice warriors, but when a corporate executive runs, he’s going to be subject to their scrutiny.
Other problems also abound. For example, in 2016 the firm laid off 250 of its Orlando tech employees, replacing them with H-1B visas holders from an Indian outsourcing firm, and then, insisted that some train their replacements before being laid off. Let’s just say that won’t play well if Iger had to run against populists like Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, or even Joe Biden.
Should mayors run the world?
If Iger suffers from Mouse made illusions, Garcetti gets his from urbanist circles, who increasingly maintain that mayors should run the world. This may seem strange given that core cities account for barely a quarter of our major metropolitan population. In the Los Angeles metropolitan area, most of regional growth takes place well outside the urban core. The slow growing city, which was first claimed to have reached four million people in 2008, has still not achieved that number according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Unfortunately for Garcetti, LA makes a hard sell as an exemplar for the economic future. Some cities like New York and San Francisco, have enjoyed robust expansions of employment in the past decade, but not Los Angeles. Overall, notes a recent survey in Wallet Hub of 150 cities in the country in terms of job prospects, ranked Los Angeles 115th well below less hyped places as Irvine, Rancho Cucamonga, Ontario and even Fontana.
Garcetti’s has tried to sell LA’s “silicon beach” as a hot tech location but, despite the success around the now faltering Snapchat, overall STEM growth over the past decade has been slightly negative. Remarkably for a one-time tech behemoth, the county now has less STEM employment per capita than the national average. At the same time, rankings of inequality and poverty, as measured by urban theorist Richard Florida, place the LA area, which includes the surrounding communities, dead last among the 20 largest metros. Overall the poverty rate in both the city proper and in the riot zone is higher now than before the 1992 riots.
Has Garcetti’s density agenda paid off elsewhere? One in four Angelinos, according to a recent UCLA study, spend half their income on rent, the highest again of any major metro.
Garcetti’s backers praise pro-density policies and hail him as a crusader against sprawl. But ordinary citizens are less enthused about his policies for narrowing streets, which has not only slowed traffic but also seen an increase in accidents; congested traffic also tends to generate more greenhouse gas. Garcetti gets kudos for his transit fixation but last year Los Angeles accounted for almost one-quarter of the strong national decline in transit ridership; in the period spanning his first term, Los Angeles lost 113 million annual rides, 16.6 percent of its 2014 ridership.
Deep blue visions on the national stage.
Of course, Mayor Garcetti is not to blame for all LA’s troubles, which have been festering for decades. His culpability lies with doubling down on failed policies. If someone is running for the highest office in the land, it’s nice to have something to brag about other than speculative high rises in the inner core and the arrival of two football teams, both scheduled to play in Inglewood.
The good news may be neither of these people are going anywhere. Both Garcetti and Iger seem unlikely to outdo California’s favorite daughter, Sen. Kamala Harris, in the early primaries. She may have little to show for her time in office — except for a genius for grandstanding — but her multi-cultural allure, to coin a phrase, trumps that of white male heterosexuals in today’s identity crazed Democratic Party.
Basically, my old New Yorker’s advice to both these guys is: “fuggedaboutit.” America may be nutty enough to nominate a Californian, but it won’t be either of you.
(Joel Kotkin is executive editor of NewGeography.com … where this column was originally posted … and a CityWatch contributor. He is the Roger Hobbs Distinguished Fellow in Urban Studies at Chapman University and executive director of the Houston-based Center for Opportunity Urbanism. His newest book is The Human City: Urbanism for the rest of us. He is also author of The New Class Conflict, The City: A Global History, and The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050. He lives in Orange County, CA.)
-cw
