While the City Spins Out of Control : Government: Los Angeles seems to be going through a textbook case of a city descending into chaos. Can we lurch back from the abyss?

In the wake of the Rodney G. King beating, there’s only one viable consensus left in Los Angeles. It is the shared perception, both at the grass-roots and in the smoke-filled rooms, that city government is careening out of control.

The euphoric and largely hypocritical civic unity of the 1984 Olympics now seems like a dream from another lifetime. All the vicious little power struggles of the last few years are coming to culmination in a Hobbesian state of disorder.

Mayor Tom Bradley’s belated attempt to make Parker Center accountable to the Police Commission--a 1973 campaign promise honored 18 years later--has become the pretext for a virtual coup d’etat , in collusion with the city attorney and supporters of the police chief, by the City Council.

The city is becoming ungovernable in three fundamental senses.

First, the “algebraic” and countervailing balance of power between the mayor and the council established by the 1925 Freeholders’ Charter has been decisively shifted in favor of the latter. The center no longer holds, and Los Angeles will soon resemble a medieval Polish monarchy--where a powerless figurehead presided over a quarrelsome and anarchic nobility, whose allegiance to the realm was strictly their devotion to their own estates. At this point in the city’s devolution, the council represents little more than an unholy alliance between erstwhile liberals and authentic conservatives in pursuit of feudal prerogatives.

Second, the council’s overriding of the Police Commission suspension of Chief Daryl F. Gates--prompted, we are told, by the mobilized opposition of the business community and white homeowners--drove back race relations to 1964, the year before the Watts rebellion, when two-thirds of white Californians voted to repeal the state’s fair-housing law. Like Proposition 14 a quarter-century ago, the council action--despite what the Christopher Commission may recommend--spits in the face of black demands for elementary democratic redress. Council members Zev Yaroslavsky, Joy Picus and Joel Wachs--to name three who should have known better--might as well have awarded Gates a medal.

Third, the underlying cohesion of Los Angeles’ government over the past generation--the cross-town Bradley coalition of liberals, Jews and blacks--has vanished almost without trace. Ironically, the Westside, where progressive lawns now sprout thickets of little armed-response signs, has deserted Bradley over the one issue that once most easily united blacks and white liberals--after all, police batons cracked the heads of Yenta peaceniks at Century City in 1967 as well as street brothers in Watts.

What we’re left with, instead, is a sprawling, confused disalignment of constituencies: liberals who are, in large part, no longer liberals; conservative Valley homeowners who admire Gates as much as Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf; blacks watching their electoral dreams reduced to ashes; Chicanos represented by cautious agnostics; new-immigrant Latinos represented by nobody and a business community--or should we say an invisible government--still so omnipotent that one phone call from a power broker like Richard Riordan can force the mayor into ameliorating penance in front of Gates and Council President John Ferraro.

To make matters worse, Los Angeles is plunging into a recession that all our court astrologers claim was impossible. Last year, the UCLA econometric model was still predicting an endless summer, while the newly minted “L.A. 2000” reports proclaimed that the city was a perpetual-motion machine, “self-energized by its bigness, drawing to itself more people, energy and wealth to become even bigger and more powerful.”

Now we know the two mainsprings of our economy--real estate and aerospace--have gone haywire. Dirt no longer turns into gold. Home starts are plummeting, mini-malls have become investment death traps, the Japanese are retreating to Ginza and reckless dreams are being burnt to a crisp as key developers abandon Central City West and downtown. Meanwhile, the region faces a new wave of deindustrialization as key military contracts shift out of state. Aerospace is expected to hemorrhage almost 100,000 jobs by the middle of the decade, and dark rumors fly about the possible closure of one or more giant defense factories.

Politically, this bursting of the city’s bubble will translate into even more tight-fisted middle-class demands for fiscal austerity, while the competition between blacks and Latinos over their relative shares of the downsized public sector will accelerate. Drastic deficit-driven reductions in the supply of government services will coincide with desperate demands for more welfare.

The very poor--those who experienced the glitzy 1980s as an undeclared depression--will be driven further to the wall. In particular, tens of thousands of recent immigrants trapped in the lower depths of the underground economy--including those who stand in street-corner “slave markets” or sell oranges from freeway ramps--will soon swell the ranks of the hungry and homeless. A collapsing school system, ravaged by a new tier of cutbacks and sacrifices, will graduate even more of our kids to the street gangs and, eventually, the prisons.

In the face of the centrifugal forces pulling Los Angeles apart, is there anyway to put the city back together? Two scenarios come to mind: One ominously plausible, the other plausibly utopian.

In the first case, what might be called the “Chicago scenario,” minority white rule in the city is re-established by the continuing collusion of neo-liberal and conservative council members. The Hollywood Hills cease to be an important ideological divide as the white Westside and Valley are reconciled by the support for the L.A. Police Department’s all-out war on crime. A tough death-penalty Democrat like James K. Hahn breaks away from the gridlock of mayoral aspirants to win crucial endorsements from law-enforcement and homeowner associations. As poverty and violence soar in the inner city, increasingly hysterical suburban cries for security drown out all other demands. The First World and Third World cities pull farther apart--spatially and economically. Los Angeles is governable only by repression.

In the second scenario, still just a dream deferred, a new generation of activists--recognizing the dangers of white restoration and a law-and-order Armageddon--start to lay the foundation for a durable rainbow coalition whose fulcrum is a black-Latino alliance.

They refuse to accept the zero-sum game of competing for diminishing public resources, proposing instead a “critical needs” agenda for the city that recognizes basic entitlements to education, welfare, recreation, health, housing and employment as human rights. They also provide an ark to preserve many of the imaginative environmental and housing policies developed by the fifth Bradley administration, which now risk being swept away in the deluge.

Structurally, a new progressive coalition in Los Angeles would have to address charter reform issues that lay beyond the mere division of power between the mayor and the council. If an elected civilian review board is the most immediate demand, an erratically enlarged City Council--coincident with community plan areas, if not with neighborhoods--would be the most empowering. Paradoxically, a parliamentary council system of, say, 60 members would better represent general interests, as well as greater diversity, than the current presidium of 15.

A genuinely democratic city government would take advantage of the state Constitution to locally enfranchise, by charter amendment, its hundreds of thousands of hard-working non-citizen residents.

Los Angeles, in reality, is only governable by justice.