Southern California’s regional economy is huge, diversified, and in a perpetual state of flux. Agriculture became important after the first citrus orchards were planted by Spanish missionaries in the 1700s. Manufacturing has also been important. The county features a wide range of financial and business services, high-technology manufacturing, and craft and fashion industries such as jewelry, clothing, toys, music, and, most famously, movies. If the Los Angeles metropolis were a country, it would have a gross national product exceeding those of all but a handful of the most prosperous countries in the world.
After a long period of growth in the 20th century, the local economy experienced a recession in the 1990s. A strong recovery began mid-decade, and the economy showed considerable resilience, particularly in the high-tech area. By the end of the century the fastest-growing sectors for employment were construction, transportation, public utilities, finance, insurance, real estate, and government services.
The global economy has created bewildering crosscurrents in the regional job market since the 1980s. As less-profitable manufacturing plants have closed or have moved to other countries, higher-paying and more labour-intensive jobs have declined and lower-paying jobs have increased. Local employers rely increasingly on immigrant labour. Sweatshop conditions exist in some clothing manufacturing and other low-wage industries.
From the 1930s to the ’50s, the labour movement achieved considerable strength in the auto, aircraft, movie, trucking, longshoring, and food handling industries. Then, after a gradual membership decline in those activities, unions organized teachers, nurses, and other service employees. The gains continued in the 1990s and early 21st century, when the AFL-CIO embraced immigrant workers (especially those engaged in janitorial and hotel work), advanced the policy of a living wage for city employees, and took an active role in local politics.
In generations past, agriculturalists nurtured bountiful orchards of oranges, lemons, apricots, and peaches, planted broad fields of vegetables, and raised dairy cattle. By the mid-20th century Los Angeles was the country’s most productive agricultural county. Most of the county’s orchards and farmland have succumbed to urban sprawl, but agriculture continues to play a role in the regional economy. Principal crops include nursery and greenhouse plants, vegetables, fruits, nuts, seeds, and hay.
When Edward L. Doheny discovered oil under a private residence in 1892, he set off an oil-drilling spree that made Los Angeles one of the world’s major petroleum fields. Oil fostered industrialism. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, some of that city’s manufacturers moved their operations south, where wages were lower. During World War II the federal government poured vast sums of money into plant expansions. Los Angeles produced enough warplanes and merchant vessels to earn the title “Pittsburgh of the West.” During the Cold War, Los Angeles was, arguably, the centre of what became known as the military-industrial complex, notably in the aerospace industry. Partly through a federal housing loan program for service veterans, the construction industry reached its peak activity in the decade after 1945, when developers bulldozed as many as 3,000 acres (1,200 hectares) of farmland daily to build new homes, shopping malls, and offices. Corporations based in the eastern United States saw the advantage of opening branch offices—or even headquarters—in Los Angeles.
Gradually, many of the leading industries of the first part of the 20th century—fish packing, shipbuilding, airplane and auto assembly, oil production, steel production, and tire and glassmaking—diminished or vanished. The newer plants feature fewer employees and smaller assembly lines, an increased involvement with electronics and computers, and alliances with laboratories such as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. Despite these changes, in the 1990s most goods manufactured in California were produced within a 60-mile (100-km) radius of the Los Angeles Civic Center. The onset of recession in the 1990s—brought on in large part by considerably reduced post-Cold War military spending—shut down many of the leading aerospace facilities, causing severe unemployment and disruption in long-established blue-collar communities.
Finance and other services
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The service sector is the primary component of the Los Angeles economy. Business and professional management services, health services and research, and finance are important, as are trade and tourism. The bulk of the workforce is now employed in services such as retail, restaurants and hotels, government agencies, and schools and colleges. The single largest private employer in the city is the University of Southern California (USC).
Supermarkets, regional shopping malls, and retail strip malls are aspects of retail commerce closely identified with Los Angeles, particularly in the era of the automobile and related suburban expansion. When the city extended Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to the Santa Monica beach in the 1920s and ’30s, the street became the first major shopping artery to cater specifically to customers arriving by car. The first regional mall was the Crenshaw Shopping Center (now called Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza), which opened in 1947. Suburban retail expansion came at the expense of downtown department stores, but downtown still has Broadway, which is frequented mostly by Latino working-class families and is the busiest retail street west of the city of Chicago. With its trade ties to countries in Latin America, Asia, and the Pacific Ocean, Los Angeles is now considered by some to be the crossroads of the Pacific Rim. More than 85 countries maintain trade commissions in Los Angeles, while the Los Angeles Convention Center features key trade shows for national marketers of cars, electronic gear, high-tech products, motorcycles, pleasure boats, and recreational vehicles, among other products.
Los Angeles became a leading financial centre early in the 20th century in conjunction with strong activity in oil drilling, agriculture, and land development. A major milestone was reached in 1920, when Los Angeles’s bank clearings exceeded those even of San Francisco. In later decades more than a billion shares of stock were traded annually on the Pacific Stock Exchange. That institution closed its Los Angeles offices in 2001, redirecting local investors toward electronic trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Automobile-dependent Los Angeles has struggled to create a balanced mass transit system. It once took pride in the Pacific Electric Railway (PE), a privately owned trolley system created at the start of the 20th century by real estate and railroad mogul Henry E. Huntington. He intended the PE mainly as a vehicle for developing real estate, and it consistently lost money at the fare boxes. Over time, the PE’s “Big Red Cars,” running on fixed rails, could not rival automobiles for convenience in navigating the suburbs, and they increasingly became the cause of traffic jams and collisions on downtown streets. PE management ignored reformers’ repeated demands for system-wide improvements, while suburban taxpayers rejected proposals for a public buyout. The railroad slowly dismantled its lines, and the last Red Car ran in 1961.
By the late 1940s, Angelenos considered cars—and freeways—as necessities. Although these high-speed, multilane, limited-access highways were developed elsewhere, they reached their full flowering in Los Angeles. The prototype Arroyo Seco Parkway (Pasadena Freeway) had opened on the last day of 1939, in time to carry revelers to New Year’s Day festivities in Pasadena. The more-modern Hollywood Freeway (completed 1948) soon carried nearly 200,000 cars daily, prompting comedian Bob Hope to call it “the biggest parking lot in the world.” The four-level downtown freeway “stack” became the city’s most familiar icon of the built environment.
There followed a frenzy of freeway construction, and by the 1970s the system was largely finished. Although these roads unified and defined the physical structure of Los Angeles, their steadily increasing traffic—with an attendant increase in delays and smog-generating pollution—fueled a renewed interest in public transit. Los Angeles voters rejected several proposals before approving a plan for a new system that, in addition to revamping a dysfunctional bus system, would construct several light-rail lines and a subway. In 1993 the state followed suit by creating the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to build and operate such a system.
Work got off to a slow start owing to a tunnel collapse in Hollywood and delays in funding, but by the beginning of the 21st century the MTA had completed a subway between Union Station downtown and North Hollywood and several of the light-rail lines. Additional subway and rail lines were planned or under construction. The MTA also operates transitway buses (which follow dedicated bus roads, thus avoiding traffic problems) and Metro Rapid express bus service along several corridors across the city in addition to its regular city bus service. Los Angeles and neighbouring counties are also served by a patchwork of shuttle and other municipal bus lines. A separate regional commuter rail service, Metrolink, opened in 1992 and has developed into a network of lines connecting Los Angeles, Ventura, San Bernardino, Riverside, Orange, and San Diego counties.
Los Angeles is served by interstate buses and Amtrak intercity passenger rail service, but air travel is by far the most important transport link to outside the region. Los Angeles International Airport (popularly called by its international code, LAX) is one of the world’s largest airports, handling tens of millions of passengers and millions of tons of freight annually. Traffic at LAX keeps rising, but proposals to expand the facility evoke strong opposition from surrounding communities.
In the early 21st century, the combined ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach accounted for nearly two-thirds of the West Coast’s foreign import cargo and, in terms of volume, jointly constituted the third largest harbour in the world after Singapore and Hong Kong. Among the main imports were automobiles, gasoline and jet fuel, steel, footwear, lumber, scrap metal, copper ore, and inorganic compounds. The ports provided thousands of jobs and generated considerable tax revenues.
The city’s first newspaper, the Star, began weekly publication in 1851. Three decades later the Los Angeles Times published its first issue. Acquired the following year by Harrison Gray Otis, it became the bible for the city’s boosters, conservative Republicans, and antilabour forces. The paper continued in that mode for another generation under the leadership of Otis’s son-in-law, Harry Chandler. For two additional generations, the Times remained rock-ribbed conservative. While Times scion Otis Chandler held the reins of the paper (1960–80), he transformed it into a more liberal and worldly publication, in the process offending most members of the Chandler family. The family’s control of the paper ended in 2000 with the purchase of its parent company by the Tribune Company.
In 1954 the city had four daily papers, but competition was fierce and their number began to shrink. When the Herald-Examiner ceased publication in 1989, the San Fernando Valley’s Daily News remained the Times’s only major competitor. The Long Beach Press-Telegram, the Pasadena Star News, and other regional papers provide good coverage at the local level. La Opinión is the major Spanish-language daily. More than two dozen of the area’s radio stations broadcast in languages other than English. Several Spanish-language television network affiliates hold their own against English-language stations, and programming is broadcast in at least a dozen other languages on other stations.
Commercial radio broadcasting began in Los Angeles in 1922 and reached a milestone with a coast-to-coast transmission of the Rose Bowl game on January 1, 1926. Today more than two dozen of the area’s radio stations broadcast in languages other than English. The first flickering TV images were transmitted to just five television sets on December 23, 1931. By the 1950s the infant industry was strong enough to challenge the movies for a large share of the entertainment market. Several Spanish-language television network affiliates hold their own against English-language channels, and programming is broadcast in at least a dozen other languages on additional channels.
The entertainment industry
The media business, with filmmaking as its core, pumps tens of billions of dollars into the Los Angeles economy yearly and directly employs several hundred thousand people. Hollywood produces about half of all the films shot in the United States.
As California historian Kevin Starr pointed out, Hollywood is not only a town and an industry but also a creator of dreams and fantasies that have tremendous cultural impact. The “dream factories” are among the most global of industries, with huge overseas markets and an impact on people in practically every corner of the globe. Disney Studios elevated the cartoon character Mickey Mouse into what was arguably the most universally recognized icon of the 20th century. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ annual Academy Award (Oscar) ceremony broadcast from Los Angeles is said to have a TV audience exceeding one billion people. The industry also draws hordes of tourists into southern California.
The recording industry is another major player in the entertainment economy; virtually all major labels either are based in Los Angeles or have facilities there, and the industry employs thousands of workers. Giant corporations such as the Walt Disney Company, in Burbank, and Universal Studios, in Studio City, are involved in practically all aspects of entertainment, including theme parks.
Administration and society
A bewildering jungle of government jurisdictions—municipal, county, special district, regional, state, and federal—prevails in the county. Among elective bodies, the most powerful one is the County Board of Supervisors, a five-member panel with vast executive, legislative, and (in planning matters) quasi-judicial powers. It directly governs unincorporated parts of the county and contracts with some cities such as Lakewood for sheriff protection and other services. Wielding authority over a population of some 10 million people and an annual multibillion-dollar budget, the supervisors oversee the second biggest municipal government in the country, exceeded only by that of New York City. The next most powerful regional elective body is the 15-member Los Angeles City Council, with authority over contracts, permits, leases, licenses, zoning, planning, and funding for all city departments. The mayor is largely limited to preparing the city budget, nominating top officials, and vetoing council ordinances.
By law, city and county elections are nonpartisan, a heritage from the Progressive movement’s battle to eradicate party bosses early in the 20th century. Most Angeleno voters are registered Democrats, although Republicans have considerable strength in the suburbs. In the post-World War II generation, a small, well-organized group of white downtown businessmen ran the city virtually unopposed. The spread of population into the San Fernando Valley and the west side altered the old power alignments. In 1973 a new coalition of white progressives and African Americans led to the election of Tom Bradley, the city’s first African American mayor. This drastically changed the political climate. Upon Bradley’s retirement two decades later, political power in City Hall became diffused, and citizens, especially those living in outlying areas, complained increasingly about bureaucratic red tape, inadequate city services, and insufficient representation on the city council. Voter turnout for city elections fell drastically. Meanwhile, disgruntled leaders in the San Fernando Valley, Hollywood, and San Pedro organized movements for secession from the city of Los Angeles. A major charter-reform movement arose from civil discontents. The new city charter of 1999 established the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment (DONE) to organize neighbourhood councils everywhere (and seven new regional zoning commissions) to broaden the public’s input on all legislative matters.
By the early 21st century the substantial Latino population in Los Angeles had evolved into a potent political force. In the 2005 mayoral election, Antonio Villaraigosa captured an overwhelming majority of the Latino vote and three-fifths of the overall vote to become the city’s first mayor of Latino background since 1872.
Planning and housing
The future of downtown Los Angeles has been the subject of perennial debate in planning and redevelopment circles. The main problem has been finding sufficient resources to create affordable housing for low- and middle-income families, to create pedestrian-friendly promenades, to increase social services for the substantial homeless population, to preserve the historic theatres on Broadway, and to rehabilitate El Pueblo Park (Olvera Street), Chinatown, and Little Tokyo.
State law requires direct citizen input in the city planning process and encourages strict enforcement of environmental impact laws. While the pressures for unrestrained growth prevailed in Los Angeles through most of the 20th century, neighbourhood and homeowners’ associations and environmental organizations later coalesced and mounted successful campaigns to “slow the growth machine.”
Los Angeles developed some public housing in the early 20th century. Later, in the 1950s, the city acquired federal funds for a carefully designed housing project in Chavez Ravine. The building industry opposed public housing, however, and blocked the Chavez Ravine plan by exploiting the public’s fears of racial integration and communism. When housing official Frank Wilkinson refused to reveal his political affiliations before the House Un-American Activities Committee, it cost him his job. The city shelved the housing project and eventually earmarked Chavez Ravine as the home of baseball’s Dodger Stadium. To ameliorate the housing problem, the city later adopted a rent-control law and enforced building codes against indifferent slumlords, but the supply of low-income units has continued to lag far behind the demand.
Southern California governments have struggled to provide basic services to a rapidly expanding population spread over a huge area. The city of Los Angeles obtains an adequate water supply from the Owens River, with small amounts from the Feather and Colorado rivers, and from recycling facilities. It creates its own electrical energy from fossil fuels and hydroelectric sources, while the rest of Los Angeles county depends on private electric utility companies. Most other cities in the county (members of the Metropolitan Water District) draw water from the Colorado River and maintain wells and pumps that tap into ancient underground aquifers. The county and federal governments have gone to great lengths to control floodwaters throughout the basin. Many jurisdictions share the facilities of Los Angeles’s Hyperion Treatment Plant, which empties millions of gallons of treated wastewater into Santa Monica Bay daily.
Los Angeles homeowners burned combustible trash in backyard incinerators until 1957, when, in an attempt to reduce the eye-searing attacks of smog that were then plaguing the region, the practice was ended. Now, each day the city’s sanitation trucks collect several thousand tons of household trash and dump it into large local sanitary landfills. Hillside areas covered with tinder-dry foliage in the summer and fall create a huge fire hazard in the region. Wind-driven fires in Bel-Air in 1961 and over wide areas of the county in 1993 caused enormous property damage. Thus, in addition to their ordinary urban duties, firefighters from both the city and county departments must also contend with potentially disastrous brush fires, though the county bears the brunt of fighting the most damaging of these conflagrations.
The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was, until about 1965, considered one of the most highly professional and best-run law agencies in the country. In the 1950s and early ’60s the department prided itself on its ability “to protect and to serve” the sprawling metropolis and its growing diverse population. Then riots (or “rebellion,” as some called it) occurred in the predominantly African American Watts neighbourhood in August 1965. The outburst of arson and looting there was traceable to a host of underlying economic and sociological conditions and to the deterioration of police-community relations.
By the early 1990s the department had one of the lowest ratios of officers to residents of any city force in the country. The living conditions in South Los Angeles at that time were much the same as in Watts in 1965. Poor relations between the police and the community again set off rioting for five days in April–May 1992 when the police officers involved in the videotaped beating of African American motorist Rodney King were acquitted. The widespread disturbances that followed resulted in more than 50 deaths and caused extensive property damage. That riot differed from the Watts disturbance in that it also involved Latinos.
A blue-ribbon commission convened by Mayor Bradley looked into the overall management of the LAPD, including racial and gender bias, the process of external review, and hiring and training practices. The commission favoured the concept of community-based policing, in which officers spend more time outside patrol cars and engage local citizens in crime prevention. The Neighborhood Watch program, in which a designated lead officer meets regularly with local residents in order to combat crime and vandalism, has been successful.
One of the most intractable social problems in the late 20th and early 21st centuries was that of gangs and gang violence. The city had innumerable gangs and some two dozen separate programs to cope with them. The complaint of most reformers was that the lion’s share of funds went for suppression, which achieved limited results, and that the money could have been better spent on intervention, social services, job placement, and economic development. One point upon which most people agreed was that the city’s efforts were poorly coordinated.
Health and welfare
Southern California’s mild climate has long attracted health seekers. Beginning in the 1880s, thousands of tuberculosis and asthma sufferers were treated in numerous hospitals and clinics. Although this “health rush” ended long ago, the region has retained its outstanding medical facilities. The medical schools of USC and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and the Kaiser Permanente, Cedars-Sinai, and City of Hope hospitals have won numerous awards for quality service.
Responsibility for protecting public health and welfare falls to the county. Its department of health services, the largest such agency in the United States, has long struggled with inadequate funding to serve an increasing number of poor clients. The county also handles all public welfare matters. Its caseloads rose by nearly half from 1988 to 1992, when 1.3 million persons were on welfare, a situation described as a social emergency of historic proportions. In the mid-1980s the welfare rolls swelled largely because of foreign immigrants, many of whom had entered the country illegally. More of those immigrants lived in southern California than in any other region of the United States. A welfare-to-work reform program instituted by national legislation in 1996 reduced caseloads significantly and connected people with social services. However, most participants in the program remained poor and worked at low-wage jobs without benefits. Owing chiefly to the influx of poor immigrant families, in the early 21st century Los Angeles county alone still had more cases to administer than did most U.S. states, and the concentration of poverty was increasing.
The Los Angeles area is renowned for its institutions of higher learning, both public and private, and its distinguished faculties, including Nobel Prize recipients. UCLA, established in 1919, is the largest branch of the University of California system. The California State University system has four campuses in the county in Dominguez Hills, Long Beach, Los Angeles, and Northridge. Among its well-respected private institutions, USC, the oldest independent university in the West (1880), has outstanding professional schools; the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has earned great distinction in the sciences; and the Claremont Colleges, Occidental College, and Loyola Marymount are among the excellent smaller institutions devoted to the liberal arts. Los Angeles pioneered the creation of two-year community colleges, which now channel thousands of students into California universities.
Southern California has scores of independent school districts. The Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), the second largest public school district in the country, is run by an independent elected board working under state—rather than city—jurisdiction. Turmoil erupted in the 1970s over court-ordered busing to eliminate racial segregation. This litigation never gained full public support and resulted in “white flight” into the suburbs and the formation of numerous private schools. The LAUSD had upward of 750,000 students in the early 21st century, the majority of whom were Latino. In recent decades the system has struggled to improve instruction and learning amid exploding enrollments and declining public funding for education.