Opinion: Tinselless Town, or, at least we beat Terre Haute, Indiana!

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La Opinión leads today’s edition with a look at L.A.’s declining glitter—signaled most recently by the city’s placement at Number 15 worldwide on the none-too-widely known Anholt City Brands Index. Nationally, the City of the Angels distantly trails New York, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco. Even humble Toronto, a city best known for the fact that Angelenos believe it looks enough like New York to sub for the Big Apple on movie shoots, edges out L.A.

You might say that being number 15 on the planet isn’t too bad, but Index master Simon Anholt tells the paper that L.A.’s problem is perceptual: When it makes national news, the topics generally seem to be gangs, pollution, or crime. (And wildfires, Simon, don’t forget the wildfires!) There’s some space given to the glamour of Hollywood and the idea that being a draw for immigrants is a sign of a healthy city (Fire away!), but the Anholt index, which is actually pretty interesting, assesses the city’s ‘brand,’ and as Anholt notes, ‘There aren’t many positive stories about Los Angeles.’ (A wiseacre might note that Hollywood is one of the reasons for the lack of positive stories.)

Every two-bit berg in the country has a legion of boosters, and perceptual issues are often an inverse measure of how much you’d actually want to live in a city. I’ve never met such a group of civic patriots as Philadelphians, whose hometown continued to lose population throughout the nineties renaissance of American cities. Conversely, though you don’t hear much about it anymore, there was a time when you could measure New York’s pre-eminence by the amount of time New Yorkers spent running the place down. Perception schmerception. Even Hobokenite Frank Sinatra finally admitted that L.A. was his lady.