ancient cities

iots were sparked across the city after the acquittal
of four white police officers who had been
caught on videotape beating Rodney King, an
African American, subsequent to a high-speed pursuit.
The underlying racial animosities fueling the
Rodney King uprising were different than during
the Watts riots, however, as many historically
black neighborhoods in south-central Los Angeles
were turning increasingly Latino. Economic prospects
for African Americans grew dimmer throughout the
1980s as unionized Black workers in downtown Los
Angeles lost their jobs to Latino immigrants who
were ready to work for substandard wages and
African American–owned liquor and grocery stores
were taken over by Asian immigrants.
In 1973, the Democrat Tom Bradley became the
first Black mayor to be elected in a large U.S. city
with a White majority. He governed Los Angeles for
20 years, contributing to the city’s transformation
into a multicultural world city. After Bradley’s
retirement, the businessman Richard Riordan
became the city’s first Republican mayor in more
than 30 years. His administration was overshadowed
by public controversy over the massive cost
overruns and construction mismanagement related
to the construction of Los Angeles’s first modernday
heavy rail subway line, the Red Line.
Transit politics in Los Angeles have always
been closely linked to complex ethnic and class
struggles. In most other cities of the world, a federally
subsidized rail project would have been
hailed by a majority of residents as a much-needed
project, but in Los Angeles, both the predominantly
White residents on the affluent West Side
and the poorer African American and Latino residents
in South, Central, and East Los Angeles
strongly objected to the Red Line. While the former
group largely preferred car-oriented to transitoriented
solutions, the latter argued that a diversion
of scarce funds from the overcrowded and underfinanced
buses, which carried the vast majority of
transit passengers and almost exclusively served
transit-dependent people of color, to expensive
new rail projects targeted at more affluent residents
was racially and spatially discriminatory.
The Bus Riders Union (BRU), a civil rights
advocacy group organized by the L.A. Labor/
Community Strategy Center, brought a class
action lawsuit against the Los Angeles County
Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA/Metro) in
Los Angeles, California
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1996 and successfully forced the authority into a
10-year consent decree designed to support bus
operations and reduce bus overcrowding. The
BRU consent decree has received nationwide
attention as a key success story of the environmental
justice movement.
In 2001, Riordan was succeeded by James
Hahn, the son of the late Kenneth Hahn, who served
on the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors
for 40 years from 1952 to 1992. Then, in a closely
watched race, incumbent Hahn lost the 2005
mayoral race to Antonio Villaraigosa, who became
the city’s first Latino mayor since 1872. At the
time Villaraigosa took office, Los Angeles was
48 percent Hispanic, 31 percent White, 11 percent
Asian, and 10 percent Black. Villaraigosa arrived
in office with strong credentials as a labor and
community advocate, and he stepped onto the
national political scene as a charismatic and progressive
urban leader who vowed to put environmental
and working-class community issues at the
forefront of his local agenda.
However, many of the city’s most pressing problems,
such as environmental degradation, traffic
congestion, unaffordable land and housing prices,
and substandard public services, including poor
educational and medical facilities, can be effectively
addressed only at the regional or state level.
Unfortunately, regional governance in the Greater
Los Angeles area has always been extremely fragmented.
Los Angeles County is a hodgepodge of
88 incorporated cities and many additional unincorporated
areas, and the larger region has more
than 180 individual municipalities.
Los Angeles’s Urban Renaissance
Los Angeles is currently well on its way to defying
most of its historical stereotypes. Downtown is
undergoing a major urban renaissance. Apart from
new museums and entertainment and sports centers,
thousands of new residential loft and condominium
apartments have been created since the city
council passed an adaptive reuse ordinance in 1999,
encouraging the conversion of vacant office and
commercial buildings. Several spectacular mixedused
urban redevelopment megaprojects are in the
advanced planning and early construction stages.
The future of the large industrial district around
downtown is uncertain. Between 2005 and 2007,