Land of New Vistas Seeks Vision

The overriding factor to note amid the statistics and predictions about Southern California in the coming year is a gathering affirmation of this region.

After years of gloom caused by economic downturns and disparities, racial animosities and regional bickering, a new spirit is emerging that acknowledges Southern California’s dynamism and celebrates its innovative ways.

The economic climate favors optimism, to be sure. In the six-county area of Southern California, job growth will be rapid in Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside and Ventura counties and moderate in San Diego and Los Angeles counties.

More business in small packages is the trend. The number of companies with 1,000 or more employees continues to shrink, but growth of business establishments with fewer than 50 employees is explosive. Los Angeles County leads the United States in the number of business establishments with more than 216,000.

In the early 1990s, that small-business trend was seen as a fatal weakness for the region’s economy. Now the Bank of America calls it “an evolving 21st century model,” and business and academic experts agree.

Signs of self-confidence are showing up in the region. Work has resumed after a pause of 20 years on the full extension of the Foothill (210) Freeway to carry it out from San Dimas to the I-15 at Rancho Cucamonga and later to the I-215 at San Bernardino, as originally intended. That freeway work confirms people’s “preference for horizontal living in a warm climate,” for private homes and spread, proclaims San Bernardino-based economist John Husing.

“We held back on freeways because we were told they cause sprawl,” says Husing, the foremost expert on Inland Empire economics. “But people have been moving out here even though we didn’t build roads for them. Southern California is not Boston.”

Most of all, cultural attitudes are changing. Virulent criticism has greeted “Ecology of Fear,” a book by Mike Davis, who was lauded previously for his grim portrayals of Los Angeles and its region. The book’s depiction of Southern California as a caldron of natural and man-made disasters has been ridiculed worldwide--in the pages of the Economist magazine--for gross inaccuracies.

To be charitable, the book is a relic, a type of unrelieved dirge about Southern California that was fashionable--and even partly accurate--in the first half of this decade, when recession, riot, fire, earthquake and county bankruptcy hit the region.

But the area turned around after the 1994 Northridge earthquake. People noticed that recovery was swift and that Orange County’s economy didn’t miss a beat because of county bankruptcy later that year.

New thinking about this region emerged at that time--with Gregory Rodriguez of Pepperdine University and David Hayes-Bautista of UCLA pointing out the growing Latino middle class.

The entrepreneurial prosperity of the San Gabriel Valley, home to legions of Asian immigrants, became visible. Business became the emphasis of every community from South Los Angeles to San Bernardino.

Investment funds flowed into the region and so did people. Yet unemployment declined because jobs were being created.

Southern California in short began to feel the power of its numbers. Over the last three years, Los Angeles County generated “50,000 more jobs than New York and 80,000 more than Seattle,” notes economist and social commentator David Friedman. In job terms, this region has produced the equivalent of a new Baltimore, Friedman observes.

Southern California, despite severe job losses in the recession, is now gaining on the state’s northern region in high-tech jobs, according to the American Electronics Assn. If medical technology jobs are included, this region has more.

Major infrastructure projects are employing thousands right now, from the $2.4-billion Alameda Corridor to expansion of the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Disneyland in Orange County is expanding, Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles is arising.

The film and television industry, now employing more people than any other local industry, is due for accelerated growth in 1999, according to the Los Angeles Economic Development Corp.

Sure, the region has problems. Population is growing faster than available housing in Los Angeles. Supplying water to the region’s

expanding population in the next two decades will take major efforts. Education of Southern California’s young people is the most important challenge.

But racial animosity and violence are not the problems they were in the worst years of the early ‘90s. Economic opportunity is helping Southern Californians to live and work side by side, as different groups have done in American cities for centuries.

The expanding economy has opened new vistas. Modern factories are rising in the Inland Empire, providing good jobs for people moving there. High-tech manufacturing plants are springing up in south Orange County.

Older communities such as Santa Fe Springs, Downey and Pico Rivera will have to cooperate to upgrade their vacant factory space if they are to attract new business, says economist Jack Kyser.

A new vision is emerging of Southern California as a bustling region, a place like Meiji Japan in 1870, full of entrepreneurial energy and changing ways. The region today is a crossroads of the world, as New York was a century ago.

“It is a binational region,” say Los Angeles-based futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, referring to the area’s links not only with Mexico but Asia too.

It is a place grappling with basic questions--whether the San Fernando Valley should secede from Los Angeles. It shouldn’t, of course; success in the global economy lies in cooperation, not separation.

Finally, this is a region trying to define itself. “It demands a writer to give us a vision encompassing the whole,” says Kevin Starr, California historian and state librarian. Wanted: a writer to capture the fascination of Southern California, one more job opening in the ecology of opportunity.

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The Ecology of More

With Southern California’s economy back on track and creating more jobs, home construction is up--but so is unwelcome freeway congestion.

Southern California Regional Nonfarm Employment

Annual averages, in millions, for Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego

and Ventura counties

1999 estimate: 7.6 million

Note: March 1997 benchmark

Source: California Employment Development Department

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James Flanigan can be reached by e-mail at jim.flanigan@latimes.com.