Urban Issues

The Cruel Inhumanity of the YIMBY Movement

Christopher LeGras — Mon, 30 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

A large and ever-expanding body of research demonstrates what anyone with a reasonable functional frontal cortex knows instinctively: Human beings benefit in myriad ways – physically, emotionally, psychologically, spiritually – from spending time in nature. As the Wall Street Journal reported in 2021, at the height of pandemic lock downs (or more accurately, lock-ins), “Spending time in the woods — a practice the Japanese call ‘forest bathing’ — is strongly linked to lower blood pressure, heart rate and stress hormones and decreased anxiety, depression and fatigue.” Getting out into nature on a regular basis can even reduce people’s risk of cancer. Similarly, living in a neighborhood with open spaces, trees, gardens, and yards, has benefits over living in dense, congested, largely nature-free urban cores.

It’s not just the exercise. When we’re in a forest, up in the mountains, walking along the beach, or walking down a quiet, tree lined street, we’re engaging in versions of activities that every living creature in history did all day, every day, until relatively recently. We’re doing what we evolved to do for the first 300,000 years of our existence on this planet. We are quite literally in our natural element. No wonder we feel good.

Of course, most people don’t need peer-reviewed studies to reach these conclusions. Hiking or jogging in the forest or hills, walking in the park, spending time in local open spaces, and so forth are part of our weekly routines. For many of us that hour or two on the trail is a highlight of our days. Our brains slow down, our anxiety eases, our stress levels drop.

These inarguable realities of human existence point to a central, and fatal, flaw with the so-called YIMBY (“yes in my backyard”) approach to housing and community development. The YIMBY movement, which unfortunately has captured public policy in city halls and statehouses nationwide, is premised on the notion that the solution to the country’s housing affordability crisis is to pack Americans into dense urban cores comprised of large apartment buildings that lack so much as setbacks for trees and other greenery. We’ll be lucky to have a small balcony with a view of the buildings across the street.

We definitely won’t have cars, because another YIMBY obsession is the elimination of private automobiles. Not only will we live in those steel, cement, and glass labyrinths, we won’t have the ability (aka freedom) to travel to our favorite trailhead, surf break, or picnic spot. We’ll rely on mass transit, bicycles, and our own two feet in what YIMBYs call “15 minute neighborhoods,” places in which all of life’s essential needs are, theoretically, accessible within a quarter hour walk, bicycle ride, or transit trip (a lucky few will be able to afford a $40 or $50 round trip to the trail in a Waymo several days a week). Another word for “15 minute city” is “Khruschevka.” In the 1950s and 60s under Premiere Nikita Khruschev, the Soviet Union built millions of five to ten story apartment blocs in centrally planned microneighborhoods in which necessities were within — wait for it — walking distance. The more things change, and such.

Read the rest of this piece at All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: This violent graphic was posted with approval on a pro-YIMBY Twitter account. We can only hope the residents and drivers escaped the flames. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

AI is Killing Jobs and Fueling Campus Radicalism

Joel Kotkin — Sun, 29 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Revolution and disruption rarely stem from the poor and destitute, but from what Alexis de Tocqueville described as “a revolution of rising expectations”. After all, it was the bourgeoisie who forged both the American and French revolutions. In the 20th century, it was the educated middle classes, often underpaid and feeling unappreciated, who flocked to Vladimir Lenin’s banner or that of the Nazi Party.

Today we may again be creating an assertive and angry class — as evidenced in the recent LA riots and the pro-Palestine protests on US campuses over the last year and a half — made up of degree holders. We can see this in recent reports that show the job market getting tougher for graduates. Hit hardest are those professionals on the “soft” side of the economy (finance, accounting, law, coding) whose jobs are increasingly threatened by the rise of artificial intelligence.

These industries tend to have a higher proportion of humanities graduates and countries in the West more generally have a problem with elite overproduction. As AI grows, there won’t be enough jobs to go round, and even if those graduates do get a job, their employers, with so many candidates to choose from, won’t pay well.

These developments may be felt most by upper-middle class young women, who make up almost two thirds of humanities graduates. This demographic has also been the driving force for campus radicalism. If they were alienated before by the patriarchy and capitalism, just wait till they can’t find a decent job and lose economic power.

More broadly the changing labour dynamics also undermine the future of universities, now the prime institutional bulwark of the American Left. The roots of this crisis were being dug up by economic forces well before Donald Trump started attacking them. This is due in large part to demographic declines among the young: by 2029 there will be 700,000 fewer people entering high school than in 2010. Since 2011 enrollments have fallen by roughly 15%. The ratio of college students to the total American population has declined even more, by around 20%.

At the same time, employers are increasingly disappointed with the quality of college students, according to the Harvard Business Review. Even the students know the score: more than half (53%) of these college graduates feel unqualified for an entry-level job in their field with nearly half (42%) admitting they did not have all the skills listed in the job description.

Read the rest of this piece at UnHerd.

Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.

Photo: Deepak Pal, via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.

New Report: How to Save Our Urban Centers

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

“A great city is not to be confounded with a populous one.” — Aristotle

American cities face an existential choice. They can continue down their current path – adopting policies that work against the interests of local residents – or develop new approaches to make urban life work for the broad majority.

Today, many urban centers, particularly older cities, are in decline. The proportion of Americans living in core urban areas has been decreasing for generations, a trend that has only accelerated in the wake of the pandemic, rising crime, and increasingly radical politics.

Economic and sociological trends are driving these changes. Even before the pandemic, the “transactional city” conceived by Jean Gottman – center of exchange, not production - was already facing challenges. Demographic and economic growth has shifted to less dense, often newer communities. The cities most identified with the transactional model – San Francisco, Chicago, and New York – are among those suffering the most.

Yet, urbanity itself – the concept of people living in proximity within a defined place – is far from dead. We continue to see the emergence of new communities on the urban periphery, as well as the revitalization of older suburban communities that are developing their own successful urban centers. In some major cities, even as office demand declines, residential construction continues to grow – particularly for the childless, young and affluent.

Rather than dismiss the urban future entirely, this paper explores how urbanism is being redefined in communities across the country. Cities, from the earliest times, have long been the cornerstones of human civilization. They will remain so – but in new and oft unrecognized forms, if local communities can organize themselves successfully.

View and download the full report here.

Affordable Housing for $1.3 Million Per Unit

Randal OToole — Tue, 17 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The Washington Post has discovered that there are “inefficiencies” in the nation’s affordable housing programs, including its largest one, low-income housing tax credits. Due to these inefficiencies, one non-profit developer in DC is spending up to $1.3 million per housing unit. Another developer spent $800,000 per unit, while right next door the very same developer built market-rate housing for just $350,000 per unit.

Ontario Place, the project pictured above, “will include a rooftop aquaponics farm to produce fresh fruits and vegetables for its tenants,” which contributed to the $1.2 million per unit cost. Another expensive project found by Post writers, which cost “only” $815,000 per unit, “includes a fitness room to encourage physical activity, a library, a large café with an outdoor terrace, a large multi-purpose community room with a separate outdoor terrace, an indoor bike room, on-site laundry, lounges and balconies on every floor.”

As economist Alex Tabarrok recently observed, affordable housing is unaffordable because the agencies distributing the funds are often more concerned about such things as environmental sustainability, racial equity goals, community development, and other factors that have little or nothing to do with affordable housing. Due to these misplaced priorities, I calculated more than a year ago, between 2004 and 2019, the amount of money spent subsidizing affordable housing more than doubled but the number of units built declined so that the subsidies per unit increased by at least 130 percent.

Most affordable housing projects are supported by multiple federal, state, and local housing funds. A report from California found that each additional funder adds more than $20,000 per unit to total development costs.

The Post discovered that New Jersey has set a cap of under $400,000 per affordable housing unit. “When you look at a deal structure, almost everyone else in the deal makes more money when costs go up,” the director of New Jersey’s housing agency told the Post. The developers themselves typically get 15 percent as a “developer fee.” So neither the developers nor any of the contractors have an incentive to oppose policies that make either affordable or market-rate housing more expensive.

Most developers sell low-income housing tax credits to banks for 25 percent discounts. The developers themselves have been found to get 45 percent of the benefits from affordable housing projects. After deducting costs added to the projects in the name of sustainability and other goals, low-income people probably get less than 20 percent of the benefits of the projects.

Congress created low-income housing tax credits in 1987 in the hope that private developers would be more efficient in building affordable housing than public housing agencies. Instead, the program has proven that private businesses can be just as wasteful and costly as public agencies if they are given the same bad incentives. It’s time to abolish affordable housing programs. If four-fifths of the benefits of affordable housing go to people other than tenants, low-income families would be better off if just one-fourth of the costs of those program were dedicated instead to housing vouchers.

This piece first appeared at The Antiplanner.

Randal O'Toole, the Antiplanner, is a policy analyst with nearly 50 years of experience reviewing transportation and land-use plans and the author of The Best-Laid Plans: How Government Planning Harms Your Quality of Life, Your Pocketbook, and Your Future.

Photo: Ontario Place, a so-called affordable housing project that is costing $1.2 million per unit. Courtesy the Antiplanner

What's the Matter with Los Angeles?

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Los Angeles is reeling once again from urban disturbances, as it did in 1965, 1992 and 2020. After each outbreak the city is widely seen as a hopeless disaster that epitomizes everything wrong with American cities.

That’s ironic because since its infancy Los Angeles sought to develop a new model of post-Dickensian urbanity – what the early 20th century minister and writer Dana Bartlett called “the better city” – one dominated by middle class single family homes. At the time, the city that was among the whitest, and most protestant in the nation. Bartlett predicted it would become “a place of inspiration for nobler living.”

The strategy, a combination of vaulting ambition and careful planning, worked brilliantly. Lured by the pleasant climate and a business-dominated political economy, industries and entrepreneurs flocked to the Los Angeles area. Initially, the growth came largely from oil and agriculture, but by the 1920s, the nascent movie industry had settled in Hollywood, putting Los Angeles on the world map. By 1940, the county’s population, barely 300,000 in 1900, had grown fivefold, bumping San Francisco off the top of the list of California’s biggest urban areas.

In the ensuring decades, the city and the surrounding region absorbed millions more migrants, both from overseas and across the country. LA thrived becoming in the words of author Carey McWilliams, “the first modernized decentralized industrial city in America.” Los Angeles became the leading manufacturing center of the country, with dominant positions in everything from aerospace to fashion and toys.

But by the early decades of this century, the city’s economic edge faded. Once a beacon for the upwardly mobile, it now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state, and among the worst in the country. The worst poverty rates, poor income, and homeownership among minorities. Latino incomes, adjusted for cost of living, and homeownership rates are among the lowest in the nation. This has left the immigrant population – roughly one third of its total – largely stuck in the low wage economy. And now a section of that group is rioting and being arrested.

The riots fit a pattern a steep decline. Over the past 20 years, the LA region has lost 750,000 people under 30 – the biggest decline in youth among all large U.S. counties. Even the immigrants are leaving; between the 2010 and 2020 Censuses, the number of foreign-born residents actually dropped. Looking ahead, the state’s Department of Finance predicts no population growth and a reduction of well over a million people for L.A. County.

What went wrong? You can start with the political takeover of the city by ever more leftist leaders. Once dominated by Republicans and conservative Democrats, the city has fallen ever more into the progressive mold, genuflecting to green, gender and racial ideology, which has left LA with an awful reputation among businesses and particularly developers. Indeed despite the city’s advocacy for more housing, it is among the least proficient in building them. There have been declines in everything from manufacturing to Hollywood.

Not everything is failing. There are pockets of success, particularly in the revived aerospace industry, located south and west of the city, but also in spots such as the Asian-dominated San Gabriel Valley or a host of largely successful Latino-dominated cities to its south.

But overall Los Angeles, particularly its central core, now suffers from all the plagues associated with older cities, such as Detroit, Cleveland, Manchester or Liverpool. Far from being “the better city”, Los Angeles is now best known for riots and failing to solve a massive homeless problem, the second worst in the country, despite billions in expenditures.

But the homeless are only the surface of a bigger problem. We’re seeing a huge emergent class of disaffected and disappointed youth. Asked whether in LA is a place where working hard pays off two-thirds of young people said no, which is far higher than older generations.

It’s not just impromptu streetside rioting. It’s “smash and grab” gangs making commerce impossible. It’s criminal crews stripping the city lights of their copper wire, leaving parts of the city in darkness.

And until the city again becomes a place of aspiration, the violence and alienation will only increase. As everyone can now see, life in “the better city” gets worse and worse.

This piece first appeared at The Spectator.

Photo: Los Angeles protest (2017) Flickr under CC 2.0 License.

The Fundamental Falsehood Guiding Modern Liberal Politics

Christopher LeGras — Sun, 15 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

One of the more curious, not to mention consequential, aspects of modern liberalism is its reliance on assumptions that collapse under even rudimentary scrutiny. For example, the liberal “YIMBY” movement (for “yes in my back yard”) assumes that the sole cause of the housing affordability crisis plaguing liberal states like California is a lack of supply. There isn’t enough housing, ergo, housing is expensive. Build more of it, of any type, and prices will fall. It isn’t simple, it’s simplistic. A robust and growing body of research demonstrates that housing costs are far more complex, involving variables like income levels in different neighborhoods, costs of land, materials, and labor, and market preferences. More fundamentally, the YIMBY theory reduces supply and demand to a meaningless tautology.

Nevertheless, lawmakers in states including California, Washington, and New York have jumped on the YIMBY bandwagon. Over the last seven years, California alone has passed some 400 new laws intended to unleash a new flood of housing supply by limiting or eliminating local zoning, land use, and development rules as well as state environmental reviews. Other bills provide myriad perks to developers of market rate and luxury multifamily housing by eliminating things like setbacks, height limits, floor area ratios, and off street parking. Supply, supply, supply.

This is all coming from Democrats, particularly liberal Democrats, who until recently were champions of things like housing affordability and accessibility, and, in particular, environmental protections. In contrast these days, California Democrats have embraced trickle down economics to a degree that would leave Ronald Reagan himself aghast at their audacity. It’s not just housing. They’re using supply side policies to spur everything from mass transit to wind and solar energy. Everywhere you look it’s “build, baby, build.”

There’s just one little problem: None of it is working. The YIMBY theory of housing is producing housing that most people don’t want. According to the US Census Bureau, about 82% of Californians live in single family or small multi-family homes (duplexes, fourplexes, townhouses, small apartment buildings). The vast majority of those homes are in low density urban neighborhoods, suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas. This, of course, stands to reason. Most people want space of their own, private or shared front and back yards, gardens, lawns, and trees. These features aren’t “nice to haves,” enjoyed by the privileged few. They’re fundamental to quality of life.

This isn’t what a majority of people want, but it’s what California liberals are building by the thousands.

Yet YIMBYism is predicated on dense new urban neighborhoods consisting of apartments with no green space. In a very real sense, the movement seeks to turn back time. After a century in which Californians, and Americans in general, flooded out of cities for suburbs, YIMBYs want to claw them back. Which is where the movement rests on another easily disprovable assumption, that, with apologies to Dr. Seuss, a home is a home no matter the type. In other words, YIMBYism is premised on the assumption that housing is fungible.

This is economically illiterate. A fungible product is one that is identical, or nearly so, no matter the supplier. Commodities are generally close to perfectly fungible. So is currency. The $20 bill in your wallet is identical to the one in my pocket. On the retail side, gasoline is close to fungible. Think of the intersection in your city where there are gas stations on two, three, or all four corners, all offering the same price per gallon. Generally speaking, you don’t care whether you fill up at Shell, Chevron, or 76. You’re going to fill up at the station with the shortest line, or the one that happens to be on the side of the street you’re on.

Read the rest of this piece at The All Aspect Report.

Christopher LeGras is an attorney, journalist, muckraker, and Californian.

Photo: An example of high density housing that is popular with planners, but isn’t what a majority of people want. Courtesy The All Aspect Report.

Los Angeles Has Fallen

Joel Kotkin — Fri, 13 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Los Angeles is burning again, and it is not the Olympic flame. After riots in 1965, 1992 and 2020, Angelenos are bearing witness once more to a rash of violent unrest. US president Donald Trump deployed the National Guard at the weekend and he has since called in the Marines, too. Trumpian lunatic-in-chief Steve Bannon even suggests these riots augur a domestic ‘World War 3’.

Reality may not be quite so grim, but it is understandable if the world feels less than enthused about flocking to LA for the Olympic Games in 2028 – or the World Cup in 2026. Yet come they will.

Ahead of the Paris Olympics last year, the French capital was similarly disrupted by sometimes violent protests. And as happened there, a huge security presence will be needed for LA. Indeed, the Paris games required 45,000 police officers, 10,000 soldiers and 22,000 private security staff. If Kamala Harris were in the White House, substantial aid would surely flow to LA to allow it to mount an operation on a similar scale. But now the city must petition the mercurial and spiteful Trump for security assurances.

LA28, the organisation responsible for organising the games, claims it has secured enough sponsorship and television deals to meet its needs – and that had better be true, given the city’s fiscal situation. LA today lacks the entrepreneurial dynamism that once defined its remarkable rise. Fortunately, the city’s sporting legacy – notably its two previous Olympics – has bequeathed it the stadia and much of the infrastructure needed to host the world, and even to protect it.

But unless vast sums are spent on a Potemkin-like makeover, the world will also witness what many of us residents have long suspected – that the city is slipping into an inexorable decline.

Things were very different in 1932, when LA first hosted the Olympics. With a population of 1.2million – a third of today’s population – LA was still fledgling. But the 1932 games served as a wake-up call to the world that LA was on its way to becoming one of the planet’s great cities.

I covered the run-up to the second LA Olympics, in 1984. It was arguably the most successful games in history, despite Russia’s Cold War-era boycott. This was LA at its peak – with native son Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the defence, aerospace, housing and entertainment sectors all booming. ‘LA’s the place’, as the promoters then put it, and few could deny the truth of it.

Some may hope the new games will rescue the city from its doldrums. But numerous studies show that hosting an Olympics offers, at best, fleeting economic benefits – and often leaves enormous burdens. It can provide an opportunity to make a statement, heralding the rise of cities such as Berlin under the Nazis in 1936 or Beijing under the CCP in 2008. But staging an Olympics in a city plainly in decline seems a fool’s errand.

Read the rest of this piece at Spiked.

Photo: Opening ceremonies at 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles Wikimedia in Public Domain.

Cities and Economic Pivots

Pete Saunders — Thu, 12 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Here’s something I think about a lot. I believe in that Shakespearean phrase “what’s past is prologue”, meaning that past events serve as a good indicator of what the future may hold. Or, as AI just told me when I asked for its interpretation of the phrase, the past provides context and background for understanding the present and planning for the future.

In the context of cities, this applies to the economic histories of numerous cities across America. Throughout history cities have been founded for economic, social or cultural reasons. They are places where people initially came together to trade, to administrate, to celebrate, to defend. Later on, cities would find new reasons for their existence, often built on the knowledge gained from the city’s earlier phases.

Consider New York City. A deepwater seaport connected to a river that reached deep into the hinterlands made Manhattan an excellent location for the fur trade 400 years ago. The early Dutch and later British settlers were able to bring furs from the interior to New York Harbor and shipped to Europe. More entrepreneurs sought other goods to sell across the ocean. A link to European markets was established, and that enabled other commercial ventures to flourish. That created opportunities for banking, financing and investing to grow.

Soon, New York City and business became synonymous. Very early on, it became not just the primary physical point of entry into America, but the economic entry as well, for foreign investors interested in making money, and immigrants looking for employment. That made it easy to become a city that would be skilled in media and publishing, interpreting and explaining American events to a worldwide audience. Elite universities both within and just beyond New York City’s limits would reinforce this, making sure a steady stream of smart and ambitious people were always attracted to it. Sure, it sounds seamless, but it wasn’t. There were aspects of this that overlapped, but there were aspects that had gaps, too. Still, in retrospect New York’s economy grew something like this.

However, “what’s past is prologue” is true, only up to a point. Sometimes cities serve an economic function well, until that economic function isn’t needed anymore. When this happens, cities are often sent adrift as they ponder the next economic driver.

This is easy to think about when looking at river cities that supported freight shipping activities until railroads made barge traffic irrelevant, or the manufacturing centers of the Midwest that couldn’t compete with global low-cost labor. Yet this is also true of Southern cities that served the 19^th century plantation economy, either through slave importation (Charleston, Savannah) or the shipping of products coming from plantations (New Orleans, Memphis). In all cases, one economic reason for being ran its course, but another one had yet to be identified.

As a Midwest native who’s seen the region’s economic diminution up close, I wonder about how those opportunities to reset happen.

When are new ideas or opportunities presented? How did city leaders, business elites, major institutions react to a possible reset? The answers to these questions can tell you a lot about how today’s thriving urban areas got where they are, and others are still lagging.

Consider the San Francisco Bay Area, specifically Silicon Valley. From an historical perspective, it’s pretty well understood that San Francisco rose to prominence as the financial capital of the West, spurred on by rapid growth due to the California gold rush in the 1850s. Across the bay, Oakland’s position as a deepwater port and the terminus of the nation’s first transcontinental railroad allowed it to become an industrial and manufacturing center. To the south, however, the areas that would become Silicon Valley (San Mateo and Santa Clara counties) were probably best known as “the largest fruit-producing and packing region in the world up through the 1960s”.

That changed shortly thereafter, as “past as prologue” took over in the Bay Area. The region became a military research and technology hub, driven by the U.S. Navy, beginning in the early parts of the 20^th century. Stanford University’s role in nurturing faculty and graduates to start their own businesses led to the creation of the Stanford Research Park in 1951. Numerous tech businesses got their start there, and by the 1980s a global technology center was born.

Silicon Valley, however, wasn’t the only region that had a shot at this kind of reset. It could’ve been Detroit.

Read the rest of this piece at The Corner Side Yard.

Pete Saunders is a writer and researcher whose work focuses on urbanism and public policy. Pete has been the editor/publisher of the Corner Side Yard, an urbanist blog, since 2012. Pete is also an urban affairs contributor to Forbes Magazine's online platform. Pete's writings have been published widely in traditional and internet media outlets, including the feature article in the December 2018 issue of Planning Magazine. Pete has more than twenty years' experience in planning, economic development, and community development, with stops in the public, private and non-profit sectors. He lives in Chicago.

Photo source: detroithistorical.org.

Class Warfare LA Style

Joel Kotkin — Wed, 11 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

The most recent Los Angeles riots reflect, among other things, the response of immigrant activists to President Trump’s crackdown, and the latest resurgence of organized left-wing activism, which had been relatively quiet in the early months of the new administration. A less widely remarked factor, however, is the emerging and complex nature of class in contemporary America.

Historically, particularly in the Marxist canon, the belief was that the proletariat would demand change and overthrow the bourgeoisie. This is a very different story from what is happening in Los Angeles. The unrest here is not primarily a movement of organized working people, but the outgrowth of a heavily racialized politics pushed to the extreme by a small, but militant radical core. This structure has long characterized LA’s disorders. In the city’s past riots, notably the 1965 Watts conflagration and the Rodney King outbreak in 1992, the predominant color of protest was black. This year, it is brown, reflecting the salience of immigration and the fact that Latinos now represent roughly half the area’s population.

LA County, whose population approaches 10 million, is the epicenter of a nationwide demographic shift. Home to over three million immigrants, an estimated one million of whom are undocumented, hailing overwhelmingly from Mexico and Central America. This part of the county’s population is increasingly marginalized, poor, and economically disillusioned.

The economic situation reflects a collapse of opportunity. Once a middle-class haven with a broad industrial base, Los Angeles now suffers the highest poverty rates in the state and among the worst among the country’s big cities.The city, once a manufacturing powerhouse, has lost industrial jobs over the past decade at a higher rate than ALmost ANY major metro areas. Latinos represent the vast majority of the labor force for California’s declining construction and manufacturing industries. In past decades, these industries have provided newcomers with opportunities to gain skills, buy a home, and even start their own business. Now, recent immigrants confront a landscape of failing schools and dilapidated parks. Things are particularly bleak for Latinos; Los Angeles ranks at number 105 out of 107 on the 2020 Latino Upward Mobility Index.

This all comes at a time when Los Angeles, as a recent Chapman University study reveals, severely underperforms the nation in terms of producing high wage jobs. Even Hollywood entertainment, one of the state’s high-end industries, has lost jobs due to technological changes and incentives offered by other states and countries, depriving young Angelenos as well as migrants of high-wage opportunities.

The increasingly multiracial middle class, families, and the upwardly mobile flee the city, leaving Los Angeles divided between the economic underclass, highly paid professionals, and what Harold Meyerson calls the “new middle class” of public employees. In this economic configuration, LA Latino incomes and home ownership rates (adjusted for cost of living) are among the lowest in the nation.

Read the rest of this piece at Compact.

Photo: by Jonathan McIntosh. Immigrant rights march for amnesty in downtown Los Angeles, California on May Day, 2006. Wikimedia under CC 2.5 License.

LA Riots Reflect Failure of Progressive Leadership

Joel Kotkin — Mon, 09 Jun 2025 20:28:38 -0400

Los Angeles has a long, combustible history — and it’s flaring up again. The current unrest, driven in part by political grievances, reflects a deeper dysfunction steadily eroding the city’s foundations. Once a cradle of conservatism and the political home of Ronald Reagan, LA has become a hub of resurgent radicalism, and, to many outside its borders, a symbol of why the country turned to a nativist strongman like Donald Trump.

Now, amid the chaos, there is talk that Trump might go beyond the National Guard and deploy the Marines. It’s a characteristically extreme move, but one that, for anyone familiar with LA’s history of protests spiralling into violence and tragedy (as I witnessed during my 40 years there), may not be entirely out of step with the city’s volatile reality.

Often migrants who come to LA find opportunity but also profound disappointment. African Americans who arrived in large numbers during the Thirties and Forties escaped the overt racism of the South, only to encounter a hostile police force and deeply discriminatory housing practices. Their disillusionment erupted in two of the most explosive racial uprisings in American history: the Watts riots in 1965 and the unrest following the Rodney King verdict in 1992.

For many of today’s immigrants, particularly the undocumented, assimilation into the broader society has been difficult. But unlike African Americans in the Sixties, they are also immigrating to a city that no longer provides a lot of opportunity. Latino incomes, adjusted for cost of living, and homeownership rates are among the lowest in the nation. They also remain largely confined to the low-wage economy, including those who ICE arrested the past two days. The violent conflagration that took place at the Paramount Home Depot, a common gathering spot for undocumented labourers, is something that could be repeated elsewhere in the city.

These people deserve our respect and concern, particularly as they work and do not commit street crimes. But there’s also a large criminal element engaging in impromptu streetside rioting by “smash and grab” gangs that involves crews stripping lights of their copper wire, leaving parts of the city in darkness. In addition, the expansion of the troubled transit system has been slowed by persistent violence and vandalism.

To the delight of people like Trump and his Right-wing supporters, LA reflects the failure of progressive governance. Despite pouring billions into public services, the city is facing a growing budget crisis — all while producing less new housing per capita than nearly every other major US metro. Downtown, once the focus of lavish investment in transit and convention infrastructure, has deteriorated into a cautionary tale: a half-finished skyscraper covered in graffiti, encircled by homeless encampments, and surrounded by hollowed-out buildings, some of which have been set on fire.

Read the rest of this piece at: UnHerd.

Photo: screenshot from ICE Out of LA protests live stream via YouTube.