IN A SERIES OF speeches around town, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has recently begun to flesh out a utopian vision for Los Angeles that gives new meaning to the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
The way he sees it, Los Angeles shouldn't be Los Angeles at all but should be reshaped into something that mimics the lifestyles of the great cities of the East Coast and of Europe -- dense, transit-dependent cities of high-rise apartment buildings like New York, Chicago, Boston and Paris.
"This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know, this 2,500 square feet, with a big front yard and a big backyard -- well, that's an old concept," the mayor suggested in a speech last week.
Instead, he said, Angelenos need to move away from that and look at the "good life" lived in traditional, densely packed, apartment-dominated cities.
But is that necessarily a good idea? Is that what Angelenos want? To be sure, some measure of market-driven densification is probably inevitable. But what sets L.A. apart from other great cities -- and what makes it so attractive -- has traditionally been exactly the opposite: its pattern of dispersion and its strong attachment to the single-family home. Assault that basic form and you will turn L.A. not into Paris but something more like an unruly, congested, dense Third World city. A Tehran, if you will, or a Mexico City.
Despite the conventional wisdom, L.A.'s multi-polarity -- it has no one distinctive center -- was created intentionally. In 1908, L.A. created the nation's first comprehensive urban zoning ordinance, encouraging the development of sub-centers, single-family homes and dispersed industrial development.
Henry Huntington's sprawling Pacific Electric Railway set the pattern for the city's expansive geography by allowing for the dispersion of jobs and homes throughout the vast L.A. Basin. Later, the automobile further accelerated dispersion. As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the average American. At the same time, the city's historic downtown was already becoming ever less important as the region's economic and social center.
The usual motivation -- the quest for greed and power -- motivated some of these developments. But many L.A. bureaucrats and developers also believed they were creating a superior urban environment. In 1923, the director of city planning proudly proclaimed that L.A. had avoided "the mistakes which have happened in the growth of metropolitan areas of the East."
