The city of Los Angeles has undergone significant changes in the last century. Much of the change revolves around the deindustrialization of the region that occurred during the post-war era, which paved a golden path for land speculators and house hunters alike. While many other urban powerhouses of the first half of the 20th century declined sharply due to the deindustrialization process, Los Angeles’ real estate industry allowed it to weather the storm. Aside from the obvious question of whether or not real estate speculation is a sustainable model of economic stability, this practice remains part in parcel with the Southern California business cycle of growth and contraction. Land speculation is intimately tied to the issue of scarcity in the market system, as the control of supply is what determines the flow of demand. The postwar white-flight perpetuated racial segregation in the United States that would eventually find its political traction in grass-roots conservatism indicative of Ronald Reagan. However, resembling a sack of potatoes, the silent majority of homeowners in the Southern California region has evolved the rationalization of its posture, always connected by a crucial thread; the transformed position in question, whether it be racial discrimination or environmental protection, was always central to serving the vested financial interest of the homeowners. This reflects the rollercoaster that reflects the shifting alliances bound loosely by the desire to satiate condominium coffers.
The demographic pillars characteristic of the Southern Californian conservative movement were white, home owning, gentile, and middle class people. Resurgent conservatism in Southern California was rooted in traditionalist White’s deeply ingrained socialized values as opposed to their individual assessment of changes in the proximal stimuli. In an analysis between ideological conservatism and personal unhappiness, Sears and Kinder assert that while indicators of personal discontent had virtually no impact, ideological and generalized versions of personal discontents did have significant social and political salience. Among four sets of racial attitudes, Whites in Southern California exhibited negative attitudes concerning the broad notions of symbolic racism. Issues of little personal relevance that nonetheless address one’s sense of how society should be organized are very powerful examples of symbolic racism; common instances of this abstraction of symbolic issues are conservative’s commonly held opinions that “Negroes are too pushy,” “that Negroes on welfare are lazy and do not need money,” and that “Negroes get undue attention from government when they make a request.” This in part helps explain white racism in the voting booth. (Sears)
The white suburban Californian often exhibits the following characteristics: racially liberal in terms of general principals of egalitarianism; unwilling to accept changes in the status quo that might interfere with their personal lives; possessing very scant interaction with Blacks; potentially hyper-sensitive to threatening racial content in the media. Thus, white racism in Southern California exists on a fantasy level because of black invisibility, reflecting a naïve response by inexperienced whites to symbolically threatening material in the media; all of this while the measuring of these notions of political socialization against their personal experiences goes overlooked. (Sears) The root components encompassing this phenomenon are in traditional religious value socialization of a secular culture known as American civil Protestantism, laissez-faire political conservatism, and unacknowledged negative feelings towards blacks. (Hough) The values derived from the secularized version of the Protestant ethic included hard work, individualism, sexual repression, delay of gratification, patriotism, and reverence for the past. Through this cultural lens conservative Whites thought Black demands for hiring, educational and housing quotas, recognition and respect, and end to all de facto segregation was immoral as their tactics were seen as militant and pushy. The more traditional and conservative these whites and the more negative were their feelings towards blacks, the more likely they were to express their outrage in symbolic opinions and symbolic behaviors.
We arrive at a definition of symbolic racism as an expression by suburban whites, in terms of abstract ideological symbols and symbolic behaviors, of the feeling that Blacks are violating cherished values and making illegitimate demands for changes in the racial status quo. Symbols that alienate White’s perceptions towards Blacks include welfare, black anger and militance, riots, black mayors, crime in the streets, affirmative actions programs, public officials sensitive to Black demands, and the devil-incarnate fair housing laws. These common symbols are the organelles of the cell that is white racism, and play a significant role in the increasing suburbanization of White Americans, which in turn directly contributes to the urbanization of Black Americans through Wilson’s concentration effects.
The increased militancy of the new urban black man, which is essentially is a response to the dismantling of the Black community’s resources, inevitably precipitates greater movement towards separatism among whites. Therefore, continued racial isolation creates template for the perpetuation of symbolic racism. (Sears) As Wilson describes, symbolic racism relates to the urbanization of Black Americans in that it has contributed, through the concentration effects of deindustrialization, to a social isolationism within the inner cities that has spurred the creation of a ghetto underclass. The growing perception of the city as a dangerous and dirty (read: black, brown, and poor) became a part of popular culture, as noir film and literature portrayed the disordered Black city as an urban wasteland and made strong connections between White deviance and Black identity. Deindustrialization and the flight of capital from traditional urban centers worked in confluence with the perception of the deteriorating socially isolated city in the creation of the bleached suburban paradise that Southern California would become. Thus, the Disneyfication of cultural, and perhaps more importantly spatial, composition of the population shift that occurs as a response comprises of the era of perpetual continuity known as white flight. (Avila) Demonstrating the linkage between how cities are imagined and how they are made, Disneyland introduced the cultural mythical model of suburban whiteness in that it provided vital spatial articulation of a new suburban culture. It appealed to the sensibility of the defense-industry that enveloped Southern Californian as it dictated a space for “quite family neighborhoods”, a euphemism for sanitized and regulated bastions of whiteness.
Television, suburban shopping malls, and freeways all served to remove suburban consumers from the public realm of decaying cities and allowed them to structure their suburban retreats on the ideals of a new cultural order of private homeowners. The Disneyfication of this new culture was perfectly personified in the political rise to power of Ronald Reagan; property rights, private enterprise, law and order, family values and small town government were positions that pandered to the sensibility as an emerging silent majority who retreated from the danger of the public sphere to the safety of their bleached communities. Popular culture in the age of white flight thus enabled the very realization of that new spatial order as it represented a very applicable model that fostered popular aspirations toward it.
WWII undermined the hegemony of urban industrial society and culture by diluting the density of public resources and private capital. During the New Deal, federal housing policy had discriminatory measures built into them, and subsequently acted as pillars in the construction of chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs that had become the archetype of race and space in the postwar period. Homeowner’s Associations first appeared on the scene in the 1920’s as instruments of white mobilization against attempts by blacks to buy homes outside the ghetto. (Davis) Due to deed and block racial restrictions (formed by “protective associations” in places where there was no restrictive covenant) 95% of the city’s housing stock in the 1920’s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians. When a single black family moved into a house near USC in 1922, whites quickly formed the ‘Anti-African Housing Association” (later renamed the University District Property Owners Association) whose main purpose was the defense of white dominance in the region. Industrial conversion in the 1930’s consumed hundreds of Black homes, creating overcrowding. Their attempts to move into white suburbs were met with immediate wrath by the white homeowners. Until the US Supreme Court ruled against restrictive covenants in 1948, white homeowner groups in LA had ample sanction in the law.
Those wishing to establish new municipalities prior to the 1950’s were deterred by tax burdens involved in establishing municipal services; incorporation-minded homeowners and industrialists preferred to be free-riders in under taxed, unincorporated county areas in hopes of maximizing fiscal advantage even if it came at the expense of local control over zoning. When the LA County Supervisors agreed to let Lakewood contract its vital services at cut rate prices, it allowed suburbs control over zoning without the burden of public expenditures proportionate to older cities. In other words, the taxpayers in the county of LA were subsidizing the services for Lakewood while simultaneously allowing them to skip out on the bill. The Bradley-Burns Act of 1956 allowed local governments to collect a 1% sales tax for their own use, giving a strong advantage to fringe areas with new shopping centers or other commercial assets, allowing city government to finance itself without resorting to a property tax. This greatly contributed to the separatist movement as it allowed suburbs to pay for contracted county services with sales tax from the greater community rather than property tax from within their own private enclave, amounting to a “direct subsidy to suburban separatism at the expense of the weakened tax bases of primate cities.” This exit privilege, among other things, allowed suburbs to safeguard their property from potential utilization as a resource for government expansion or fiscal redistribution. “Needless to say, by providing such an attractive escape hatch from ordinary municipal citizenship, the Lakewood Plan fueled white flight from Los Angeles, while at the same time reducing the city’s capacity to deal with the needs of increasing low-income and renter populations.” (Davis)
The basis of most residential incorporations was the clear delineation between the home values of the inclusive community and the area intended for inclusion. One consequence of this ongoing process is the racial segregation of neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. According to the 1980 Census, LA County was nearly 13 percent Black, but 53 of its 82 cities had Black populations of less than one percent. While established Black and Chicano neighborhoods were being lost to freeway construction, non-Whites only purchased 3.3 percent of the new housing stock constructed during the 1950’s boom. Thus the concentration effects of Disneyfication created a racially checkered city with great disparities in economic and social stability.
Race has been used in Southern California politics in order to bring forth certain political regimes, particularly over matters of the availability and accessibility of social services as well as growth. The mayoral race in Los Angeles in 1969 was a battle in which a well-qualified liberal black candidate, Thomas Bradley, against the unpopular conservative incumbent Sam Yorty. The study generated by Sears and Kinder generated the conclusion that symbolic racism was the deciding factor that allowed Yorty to be victorious, as he received a boost in the electorate voting block by the independent inclusion of those who harbored symbolic racist views who may have voted for more liberal candidates in the past.
New development was seen as a threat to the detached culture of low-density residential life, and environmental critiques entered into prominence among homeowners as they realized that the nature surrounding their property raises the value in an increasingly concreting city. The greening of LA was widely seen as a hypocritical attempt by the rich to use ecology to detour Vietnam-era growth around their luxury enclaves, however it would be reinforced by populist outbursts in dozens of flatland white-collar communities. When apartment complex projects loomed in many suburbs, homeowners rallied to prevent the “contamination” (read racial connotations) of their lifestyles. (Davis) Planners and politicians accommodated the Viet-boom in high-density residential projects by rezoning single-family zones. Most homeowners were angered by the rate of infill, decreasing beauty of their physical neighborhoods, spikes in traffic congestion, increasing numbers of the poor and minorities, perceived tax costs, and the dilution of political clout. The result of the 1972-3 density revolt ironically was to reinforce pro-growth coalitions at city and county levels. The initial push for slow growth caused developers to organize their resources to install pro-growth candidates by simply outspending their opposition. Additionally, candidates who opposed apartment construction alienated renters and minorities and thus received an even smaller fraction of influence in the election. The lasting effect of the revolt against density was intense homeowner opposition to apartment construction, which largely contributes to the drastic shortage of affordable rental housing in California.
In the late 1970’s the purpose of owning a house began to be seen an as investment more than a dwelling given the rate of bubble-growth, and this led to a flurry of house trading and land speculation; the process enriched many homeowners, elevating a swath of the population from middle-class to the next rung of the pecuniary ladder. A proposed large hike in property taxes caused public outcry among these homeowners; Howard Jarvis hijacked traditional homeowner tax protest by the “upwardly redistributive, pro-business” posture of the United Taxpayers Organization in order to assure passage of Proposition 13. Tax protesters frequently resorted to the image of the suburban family taxed to death in order to fund social programs that only benefited the city’s have-not populations. Busing students for racial balance, implemented in Los Angeles County in 1978, serves as a good example of such a program. As it stood, escaping LA’s school system was often the primary reasons for families relocating to suburban enclaves of whiteness. (Davis)
The 1986 Election in Los Angeles saw one of the first major challenges to the city’s growth ethic in decades in Proposition U. It proposed to reduce developable commercial density in the city by half and imposed a ten-point growth management plan. The “green” slow-growth movement in Southern California is mainly derived from homeowners using populist rhetoric such as “community control” in order to position themselves as regulators of neighborhood quality. Anticipating that the slow-growth movement would further constrict the limited supply of land that could be developed, hordes of house-hungry buyers rushed into the market: a self-fulfilling prophecy that led to Tokyo-type escalations in median home values in Los Angeles and Orange County during 1987. The battle over Prop U’s passage once again galvanized developers, who engaged in a pro-growth blitzkrieg and edged out popular growth-control initiatives in Orange and San Diego Counties.
The emergent war of position between the “green” branches of government and the private sector is reshaping the language in which the politics of growth are articulated, and the terrain on which different interest contend. Developers attempt to lay claims to being “friends of the people”, denouncing “selfish, elitist homeowners” who prevent the “trickle down” of growth dividends and low-income housing to the lowest ranks of the urban population. Also employing the facade of populism is an alliance of developers, contractors, realtors, and banks- all of whom are vehemently opposed to growth controls. In reality, the debate between affluent homeowners and mega-developers centers the debate on issues of growth and neighborhood quality, while wholly ignoring the increasing social isolationism occurring within LA’s inner city areas. Non-affluent homeowners and renters have seen their interests, such as economic justice and environmental protection, drowned out by the discourse of these elites. Slow-growth is essentially a reassertion of the traditional homeowner political stance of social privilege; pro-growth reflects the desire to continue enlarging the land speculation bubble for wealth extraction, plotting under the guise of some sort of mutilated vanguardism for those losers of the previous safaris of the land-speculation-bubble hunt.
The most powerful social movement in Southern California consists of affluent homeowners engaged in defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity. The contemporary battle between affluent homeowner and mega-developer plays a certain kind of politics. It is not the kind that we like to think of when we think of the word, such as a feeling of group solidarity or social togetherness, but rather in the definition of using the poor and minorities in particular as pawns in the political chess game. If symbolic racism and the segregation of the suburbs points to anything conclusive, it is that spatial realities matter. Land values, the traditional yardstick by which the measurement of the movement of people’s occurs, are intimately tied to the people who live on that land; that spatial distinction has been shown to be intimately tied to class and race, and it follows that it is intimately tied to specific policy recommendations for specific policy outcomes.
One of the ambivalent things about living in our capitalist society is that our system is tied to a market, and one fundamental aspect of the market system is scarcity. This scarcity results in poverty as an inevitability of such an economic system, and in the zero-sum environment of a country experiencing economic decline it comes at the cost of others cultivating wealth. A radical solution arises: this pattern could undergo modification, so long as wealthy Americans would allow themselves to become rich at a slower pace. How we get to that point from here is truly hard to fathom however; after all, inertia is one of the few fundamental physical laws governing the universe as we know it, so it is a stretch to presume it to be any different in the realm of human social action. It is the force behind the bubble.
The demographic pillars characteristic of the Southern Californian conservative movement were white, home owning, gentile, and middle class people. Resurgent conservatism in Southern California was rooted in traditionalist White’s deeply ingrained socialized values as opposed to their individual assessment of changes in the proximal stimuli. In an analysis between ideological conservatism and personal unhappiness, Sears and Kinder assert that while indicators of personal discontent had virtually no impact, ideological and generalized versions of personal discontents did have significant social and political salience. Among four sets of racial attitudes, Whites in Southern California exhibited negative attitudes concerning the broad notions of symbolic racism. Issues of little personal relevance that nonetheless address one’s sense of how society should be organized are very powerful examples of symbolic racism; common instances of this abstraction of symbolic issues are conservative’s commonly held opinions that “Negroes are too pushy,” “that Negroes on welfare are lazy and do not need money,” and that “Negroes get undue attention from government when they make a request.” This in part helps explain white racism in the voting booth. (Sears)
The white suburban Californian often exhibits the following characteristics: racially liberal in terms of general principals of egalitarianism; unwilling to accept changes in the status quo that might interfere with their personal lives; possessing very scant interaction with Blacks; potentially hyper-sensitive to threatening racial content in the media. Thus, white racism in Southern California exists on a fantasy level because of black invisibility, reflecting a naïve response by inexperienced whites to symbolically threatening material in the media; all of this while the measuring of these notions of political socialization against their personal experiences goes overlooked. (Sears) The root components encompassing this phenomenon are in traditional religious value socialization of a secular culture known as American civil Protestantism, laissez-faire political conservatism, and unacknowledged negative feelings towards blacks. (Hough) The values derived from the secularized version of the Protestant ethic included hard work, individualism, sexual repression, delay of gratification, patriotism, and reverence for the past. Through this cultural lens conservative Whites thought Black demands for hiring, educational and housing quotas, recognition and respect, and end to all de facto segregation was immoral as their tactics were seen as militant and pushy. The more traditional and conservative these whites and the more negative were their feelings towards blacks, the more likely they were to express their outrage in symbolic opinions and symbolic behaviors.
We arrive at a definition of symbolic racism as an expression by suburban whites, in terms of abstract ideological symbols and symbolic behaviors, of the feeling that Blacks are violating cherished values and making illegitimate demands for changes in the racial status quo. Symbols that alienate White’s perceptions towards Blacks include welfare, black anger and militance, riots, black mayors, crime in the streets, affirmative actions programs, public officials sensitive to Black demands, and the devil-incarnate fair housing laws. These common symbols are the organelles of the cell that is white racism, and play a significant role in the increasing suburbanization of White Americans, which in turn directly contributes to the urbanization of Black Americans through Wilson’s concentration effects.
The increased militancy of the new urban black man, which is essentially is a response to the dismantling of the Black community’s resources, inevitably precipitates greater movement towards separatism among whites. Therefore, continued racial isolation creates template for the perpetuation of symbolic racism. (Sears) As Wilson describes, symbolic racism relates to the urbanization of Black Americans in that it has contributed, through the concentration effects of deindustrialization, to a social isolationism within the inner cities that has spurred the creation of a ghetto underclass. The growing perception of the city as a dangerous and dirty (read: black, brown, and poor) became a part of popular culture, as noir film and literature portrayed the disordered Black city as an urban wasteland and made strong connections between White deviance and Black identity. Deindustrialization and the flight of capital from traditional urban centers worked in confluence with the perception of the deteriorating socially isolated city in the creation of the bleached suburban paradise that Southern California would become. Thus, the Disneyfication of cultural, and perhaps more importantly spatial, composition of the population shift that occurs as a response comprises of the era of perpetual continuity known as white flight. (Avila) Demonstrating the linkage between how cities are imagined and how they are made, Disneyland introduced the cultural mythical model of suburban whiteness in that it provided vital spatial articulation of a new suburban culture. It appealed to the sensibility of the defense-industry that enveloped Southern Californian as it dictated a space for “quite family neighborhoods”, a euphemism for sanitized and regulated bastions of whiteness.
Television, suburban shopping malls, and freeways all served to remove suburban consumers from the public realm of decaying cities and allowed them to structure their suburban retreats on the ideals of a new cultural order of private homeowners. The Disneyfication of this new culture was perfectly personified in the political rise to power of Ronald Reagan; property rights, private enterprise, law and order, family values and small town government were positions that pandered to the sensibility as an emerging silent majority who retreated from the danger of the public sphere to the safety of their bleached communities. Popular culture in the age of white flight thus enabled the very realization of that new spatial order as it represented a very applicable model that fostered popular aspirations toward it.
WWII undermined the hegemony of urban industrial society and culture by diluting the density of public resources and private capital. During the New Deal, federal housing policy had discriminatory measures built into them, and subsequently acted as pillars in the construction of chocolate cities and vanilla suburbs that had become the archetype of race and space in the postwar period. Homeowner’s Associations first appeared on the scene in the 1920’s as instruments of white mobilization against attempts by blacks to buy homes outside the ghetto. (Davis) Due to deed and block racial restrictions (formed by “protective associations” in places where there was no restrictive covenant) 95% of the city’s housing stock in the 1920’s was effectively put off limits to Blacks and Asians. When a single black family moved into a house near USC in 1922, whites quickly formed the ‘Anti-African Housing Association” (later renamed the University District Property Owners Association) whose main purpose was the defense of white dominance in the region. Industrial conversion in the 1930’s consumed hundreds of Black homes, creating overcrowding. Their attempts to move into white suburbs were met with immediate wrath by the white homeowners. Until the US Supreme Court ruled against restrictive covenants in 1948, white homeowner groups in LA had ample sanction in the law.
Those wishing to establish new municipalities prior to the 1950’s were deterred by tax burdens involved in establishing municipal services; incorporation-minded homeowners and industrialists preferred to be free-riders in under taxed, unincorporated county areas in hopes of maximizing fiscal advantage even if it came at the expense of local control over zoning. When the LA County Supervisors agreed to let Lakewood contract its vital services at cut rate prices, it allowed suburbs control over zoning without the burden of public expenditures proportionate to older cities. In other words, the taxpayers in the county of LA were subsidizing the services for Lakewood while simultaneously allowing them to skip out on the bill. The Bradley-Burns Act of 1956 allowed local governments to collect a 1% sales tax for their own use, giving a strong advantage to fringe areas with new shopping centers or other commercial assets, allowing city government to finance itself without resorting to a property tax. This greatly contributed to the separatist movement as it allowed suburbs to pay for contracted county services with sales tax from the greater community rather than property tax from within their own private enclave, amounting to a “direct subsidy to suburban separatism at the expense of the weakened tax bases of primate cities.” This exit privilege, among other things, allowed suburbs to safeguard their property from potential utilization as a resource for government expansion or fiscal redistribution. “Needless to say, by providing such an attractive escape hatch from ordinary municipal citizenship, the Lakewood Plan fueled white flight from Los Angeles, while at the same time reducing the city’s capacity to deal with the needs of increasing low-income and renter populations.” (Davis)
The basis of most residential incorporations was the clear delineation between the home values of the inclusive community and the area intended for inclusion. One consequence of this ongoing process is the racial segregation of neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. According to the 1980 Census, LA County was nearly 13 percent Black, but 53 of its 82 cities had Black populations of less than one percent. While established Black and Chicano neighborhoods were being lost to freeway construction, non-Whites only purchased 3.3 percent of the new housing stock constructed during the 1950’s boom. Thus the concentration effects of Disneyfication created a racially checkered city with great disparities in economic and social stability.
Race has been used in Southern California politics in order to bring forth certain political regimes, particularly over matters of the availability and accessibility of social services as well as growth. The mayoral race in Los Angeles in 1969 was a battle in which a well-qualified liberal black candidate, Thomas Bradley, against the unpopular conservative incumbent Sam Yorty. The study generated by Sears and Kinder generated the conclusion that symbolic racism was the deciding factor that allowed Yorty to be victorious, as he received a boost in the electorate voting block by the independent inclusion of those who harbored symbolic racist views who may have voted for more liberal candidates in the past.
New development was seen as a threat to the detached culture of low-density residential life, and environmental critiques entered into prominence among homeowners as they realized that the nature surrounding their property raises the value in an increasingly concreting city. The greening of LA was widely seen as a hypocritical attempt by the rich to use ecology to detour Vietnam-era growth around their luxury enclaves, however it would be reinforced by populist outbursts in dozens of flatland white-collar communities. When apartment complex projects loomed in many suburbs, homeowners rallied to prevent the “contamination” (read racial connotations) of their lifestyles. (Davis) Planners and politicians accommodated the Viet-boom in high-density residential projects by rezoning single-family zones. Most homeowners were angered by the rate of infill, decreasing beauty of their physical neighborhoods, spikes in traffic congestion, increasing numbers of the poor and minorities, perceived tax costs, and the dilution of political clout. The result of the 1972-3 density revolt ironically was to reinforce pro-growth coalitions at city and county levels. The initial push for slow growth caused developers to organize their resources to install pro-growth candidates by simply outspending their opposition. Additionally, candidates who opposed apartment construction alienated renters and minorities and thus received an even smaller fraction of influence in the election. The lasting effect of the revolt against density was intense homeowner opposition to apartment construction, which largely contributes to the drastic shortage of affordable rental housing in California.
In the late 1970’s the purpose of owning a house began to be seen an as investment more than a dwelling given the rate of bubble-growth, and this led to a flurry of house trading and land speculation; the process enriched many homeowners, elevating a swath of the population from middle-class to the next rung of the pecuniary ladder. A proposed large hike in property taxes caused public outcry among these homeowners; Howard Jarvis hijacked traditional homeowner tax protest by the “upwardly redistributive, pro-business” posture of the United Taxpayers Organization in order to assure passage of Proposition 13. Tax protesters frequently resorted to the image of the suburban family taxed to death in order to fund social programs that only benefited the city’s have-not populations. Busing students for racial balance, implemented in Los Angeles County in 1978, serves as a good example of such a program. As it stood, escaping LA’s school system was often the primary reasons for families relocating to suburban enclaves of whiteness. (Davis)
The 1986 Election in Los Angeles saw one of the first major challenges to the city’s growth ethic in decades in Proposition U. It proposed to reduce developable commercial density in the city by half and imposed a ten-point growth management plan. The “green” slow-growth movement in Southern California is mainly derived from homeowners using populist rhetoric such as “community control” in order to position themselves as regulators of neighborhood quality. Anticipating that the slow-growth movement would further constrict the limited supply of land that could be developed, hordes of house-hungry buyers rushed into the market: a self-fulfilling prophecy that led to Tokyo-type escalations in median home values in Los Angeles and Orange County during 1987. The battle over Prop U’s passage once again galvanized developers, who engaged in a pro-growth blitzkrieg and edged out popular growth-control initiatives in Orange and San Diego Counties.
The emergent war of position between the “green” branches of government and the private sector is reshaping the language in which the politics of growth are articulated, and the terrain on which different interest contend. Developers attempt to lay claims to being “friends of the people”, denouncing “selfish, elitist homeowners” who prevent the “trickle down” of growth dividends and low-income housing to the lowest ranks of the urban population. Also employing the facade of populism is an alliance of developers, contractors, realtors, and banks- all of whom are vehemently opposed to growth controls. In reality, the debate between affluent homeowners and mega-developers centers the debate on issues of growth and neighborhood quality, while wholly ignoring the increasing social isolationism occurring within LA’s inner city areas. Non-affluent homeowners and renters have seen their interests, such as economic justice and environmental protection, drowned out by the discourse of these elites. Slow-growth is essentially a reassertion of the traditional homeowner political stance of social privilege; pro-growth reflects the desire to continue enlarging the land speculation bubble for wealth extraction, plotting under the guise of some sort of mutilated vanguardism for those losers of the previous safaris of the land-speculation-bubble hunt.
The most powerful social movement in Southern California consists of affluent homeowners engaged in defense of home values and neighborhood exclusivity. The contemporary battle between affluent homeowner and mega-developer plays a certain kind of politics. It is not the kind that we like to think of when we think of the word, such as a feeling of group solidarity or social togetherness, but rather in the definition of using the poor and minorities in particular as pawns in the political chess game. If symbolic racism and the segregation of the suburbs points to anything conclusive, it is that spatial realities matter. Land values, the traditional yardstick by which the measurement of the movement of people’s occurs, are intimately tied to the people who live on that land; that spatial distinction has been shown to be intimately tied to class and race, and it follows that it is intimately tied to specific policy recommendations for specific policy outcomes.
One of the ambivalent things about living in our capitalist society is that our system is tied to a market, and one fundamental aspect of the market system is scarcity. This scarcity results in poverty as an inevitability of such an economic system, and in the zero-sum environment of a country experiencing economic decline it comes at the cost of others cultivating wealth. A radical solution arises: this pattern could undergo modification, so long as wealthy Americans would allow themselves to become rich at a slower pace. How we get to that point from here is truly hard to fathom however; after all, inertia is one of the few fundamental physical laws governing the universe as we know it, so it is a stretch to presume it to be any different in the realm of human social action. It is the force behind the bubble.
No comments:
Post a Comment