The news had been so long anticipated here that, when it finally arrived in January of 1991, it provoked little more than resignation. Final 1990 census data confirmed that Los Angeles had eclipsed Chicago in population. The fabled Second City, ordinally inferior only to brassy New York, had fallen to third.
Now there is a possibility Chicago will reclaim its old nickname, and not just as the moniker of a world-class comedy troupe. Three areas of Los Angeles are attempting to secede from the city and form distinct municipalities. Even partial success could drop Los Angeles to third chair in population behind, yes, Chicago.
The temptation for the chauvinistic Chicagoan is to glance slyly westward, then affect a rapture of triumph and revenge. Little is more pleasurable than a rival’s pending downfall–especially if the rival is terminally self-absorbed and has never shown much respect for its elders.
But to embrace that myopic strain of civic boosterism is to overlook deeply troubling aspects of the proposed schisms–not just for Los Angeles, but for all of urban America.
For communities, as for couples, there are good reasons why breaking up is hard to do. Though secession sounds like justified payback for negligence from City Hall, the great American cities should stand for more than the convenience and self-interest of the tribes that, in any given century, call them home. “I find the whole idea repulsive, this notion that if you don’t like what’s going on, get out,” says Edwin Mills, an urban affairs specialist at Northwestern University. “Idealistic as it sounds, we should work to fix our problems, not run away from them.”
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What gripes the secessionist Angelenos are the predictable beefs of regions within anymegalopolis of 3.7 million–a headcount greater than those of 24 states. Geographically, Los Angeles has more than twice Chicago’s 224 square miles. And rather than being essentially compact, as is Chicago, the boundary map of Los Angeles mimics a blobby molecule, with great chunks of territory connected by narrow isthmuses. It’s no surprise that some far-flung provinces feel their complaints about crime, traffic and other urban ills routinely are ignored.
To settle the score, many residents in the San Fernando Valley to the north (pop. 1.4 million), Hollywood near the center (200,000) and the harbor area to the south (140,000) want secession proposals placed on the November ballot. The alleged benefit would be better municipal services at lower costs. To succeed, each secession proposal requires a majority yes vote within its own area and majority approval citywide. Together, three secession victories would strip L.A. of roughly half its footprint and citizenry.
It’s not yet clear that all three measures will make it to the ballot; there’s debate about whether the two smaller areas could meet a legal requirement that they be able to generate enough revenue to be self-sustaining. But support in all three areas is extensive. A March poll for the Los Angeles Times found that 55 percent of Valley respondents favored secession, as did 46 percent of all L.A. voters–10 percent more than a year ago.
Some of this dyspepsia over City Hall’s alleged sins is inordinately parochial. Example: Across the U.S., the secession talk occasionally heard at neighborhood meetings usually comes from prosperous whites eager to escape the urban problems of poor minority neighborhoods. In this case, though, some African-Americans are snuggling up to the secessionists–the better to unhinge Mayor James Hahn, a white Democrat who was elected with 82 percent of the black vote but who then summarily dumped Bernard Parks, the city’s black police chief. There’s also pettiness: Secessionists and loyalists are squabbling over whether a liberated Hollywood would include the landmark Hollywood sign–some 450 feet across–that looms on a disputed hillside.
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Opponents, led by the mayor, have fought secession mostly on unimaginative grounds. Hahn talks about a “harebrained” bust-up yielding too many politicians, too much bureaucracy and not enough money for services. Local editorials complain that, as the nation’s third-largest city, Los Angeles would lose some of its clout; editorialists also have harped about the difficulty of untangling breakaway communities from such tight balls of twine as the city’s employee pension plans, bond obligations and sewer grids.
All true, but hardly inspiring. By encouraging a what’ll-this-cost-me mentality, the opponents tacitly nurture the me-first attitudes that stoked secession fever in the first place. Fuss about sewer grids and you only push secessionists to tout pluses that go beyond jettisoning unresponsive politicos downtown. Example: If it splits off to become America’s sixth-largest city, the Valley could then try to enhance its independence by also ditching the city’s much-reviled school district and industrial-sized transit system. This orgy of hubris has escalated to the point that Valley pols are sharpening their elbows to seek the mayoralty of a city that doesn’t yet exist.
The secession decisions, of course, rest with Angelenos. That said, these three proposals should provoke a spirited national discussion of what it means to live in a great American city.
These cities are living, thriving entities. Their ailments aren’t best treated with amputation. They draw their raw power from their efficiencies of scale, from their ability to compete for jobs, for businesses, for sports or cultural assets. Their tumultuous histories have rested on the notion that those of us who care about them are here for the long haul. We abandon that unity, however grievously strained, at great peril.
There is, for instance, much to regret–with cruelty and hatred topping the list–about the white flight from cities that peaked in Chicago during years flanking 1970. But the overarching regret has to be that white flight was driven by a selfish sense of escape. If more neighborhoods had stood up to panic peddlers, and accepted new residents of different hues, would de facto housing segregation still mark so many Chicago blocks as exclusively white, black or brown?
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Secession talk warms the romantic revolutionary in us all. In New York City, residents of conservative, middle-class Staten Island have long yearned to form a city apart from more liberal and often poorer boroughs. Illinois law permits secession, though here it’s called “disconnection.” The law lays out two protocols under which the owners of a majority of the land in part of a city can break away–one by petitioning their city council, the other by going to court.
But even in Chicago–where the unofficial motto is “Where’s mine?”–crackpots don’t make serious moves to subdivide the city. Northwestern’s Mills thinks he knows why: If only for reasons of political expediency, Chicago mayors do a good job of at least pretending to spread their spoils in neighborhoods citywide. Never was that more striking than in the mid-1980s, when the late Harold Washington frustrated his white detractors by assuring that everyday services such as police protection, street repavings and garbage pick-up were provided relatively equitably in black and white wards.
It would be presumptuous to say, from this distance, that more attention to that kind of rough, never-perfect equity over the years could have pre-empted the divorce that now threatens Los Angeles. Secession movements are old hat there; local reports suggest that areas of the Valley that joined the city in 1915 launched their first secession drive in 1920.
It is, though, easier to assert from this vantagepoint that the L.A. secessionists are demonstrating the fragility of the fabric that holds these cities together. Balkanization is bad enough in the Balkans; giving it a powerful foothold in urban America would be a menacing precedent.
The painful truth is that more affluent citizens always will be tempted to leave behind those whose impoverished neighborhoods disproportionately consume costly government services. But secession further concentrates that impoverishment. And as both fast-gentrifying and fast-decaying neighborhoods in cities nationwide attest, there is no guarantee that today’s prosperous or poor neighborhood will be that way decades from now. The smarter strategy is to stay put, to participate more aggressively in city government, to force elected officials to deliver each community’s fair share of resources.
Chicago’s reincarnation as the Second City will be a hollow triumph if it comes this cheaply. Just as a slip of Chicago’s population (now 2.9 million) to fourth place would be utterly meaningless if the cities of Dallas, Houston and San Antonio somehow magically merged to form a metropolis of 4.3 million Texans–smaller than New York but larger than L.A.
True, this nation’s great cities have long been the victims of suburbanization, as families leave for what once, literally, were greener pastures. But those departures also have made way for new bloodlines of vibrant urban immigrants.
Secession is a more invidious threat. It’s one thing to walk away from a city that remains intact for the next generation, but quite another to make off with chunks of the city itself.
Escape does have its allure–but none to match the urgency of keeping a great American city just that.
