Failure of Secession: Why a City Divided Still Stands as One

Not so many months ago, the city that reinvented the American city seemed destined to take corrective action, rebelling against its own immensity.

Wilmington had its bags packed.

San Pedro had the car running.

Hollywood and the San Fernando Valley felt so jilted, they had divorce papers drawn up.

And yet today Los Angeles wakes up whole, its borders untouched, its unhappy children still living at home.

So why did the idea of secession never catch fire?

Theories will be tossed around for years.

1. Secession leaders were rank amateurs who never made a compelling case for a breakup.

2. They were so wildly outspent by the other side -- roughly 5 to 1 -- they didn’t stand a chance.

3. The problems people care about most -- crime, traffic, schools, health care -- can’t be fixed by forming new cities.

4. Angelenos are too disengaged to have cared one way or another.

There’s truth in each of those. But there’s a more compelling reason the city is intact today.

Los Angeles, despite considerable flaws, is reasonably content with itself.

“This is God’s country,” Herm Siegle, 87, proclaimed on the way out of his polling place on Huston Street in Sherman Oaks.

“I voted ‘no’ on secession,” the retired clothier said proudly, pointing out the lovely tree-shaded vista.

“We’ve got problems, and I hate the traffic, but every city has problems.”

Valley secession leaders miscalculated in more ways than one.

First, they pitched a new bureaucracy -- the Valley city of 1.5 million would have been the sixth largest in the nation -- as a cure for whatever ails people in the very region where the nation’s anti-government tax revolt began.

Second, they failed to understand that residents of Los Angeles don’t identify with a city framed by lines on a map, nor do they get worked up about civics unless something really goes haywire.

They live in their backyards and in the small orbit of their own neighborhoods, which too often have fences between them. But they also live in and relate to the idea of Los Angeles -- a vast, borderless universe identified by climate, mountains, beaches, autonomy, invention, Kobe Bryant.

Anyone who thinks it’s a bad deal already moved to Phoenix or somewhere.

“L.A. is both bigger than the city of Los Angeles and smaller than it,” says Joel Kotkin, a political commentator who took his daughter trick-or-treating on Halloween and saw hundreds of families of all backgrounds on the streets of Valley Village.

“The city works on that neighborhood level and on the mega-level. But it’s the middle part we can’t get right,” says Kotkin, who blames both sides of the secession debate for failing to break through the wall and get people talking about ways to make L.A. work better. “Political boundaries and abstractions don’t engage people.”

Tom Flaherty, a retired school principal, was engaged. But he wasn’t convinced there was any reason to secede, he said after casting a ‘no’ vote on Chandler Boulevard near Laurel Canyon Boulevard.

“I think L.A. is doing a reasonably sound job of serving the Valley, and I feel like I can influence a change if I need to,” Flaherty said.

Michele Leff, an artist and student, followed Flaherty out of the polling booth and said she listened to the anti-secessionists during the campaign, but didn’t hear a clear plan for a better city.

“As an artist,” she said, “I see a lot of cultural advantages to being a part of Los Angeles.”

The election day sun shone brightly through the haze, casting a warm glow on this love affair. I drove out of the Valley, over the pass, and into the bedroom of the other allegedly unhappy child -- Hollywood.

Ira Dankberg, an architect, had just left his polling place at Wilcox and Fountain, having cast one more vote for Los Angeles.

“I see L.A. as unique,” Dankberg said. “I see the whole city as an exciting mosaic, an exciting vegetable soup. I like having so many flavors, textures and cultures, some new and some old. I like how it all blends together. My family is in Phoenix and when I visit I find it too clean, too white, and too simple for me, and I always want to come back home.”

And so the city wakes up whole, its borders untouched, its unhappy children still living at home.

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Steve Lopez writes Sunday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at steve.lopez@latimes.com