[Carfreeliving] Mayor Shares Vision for L.A.

[Tom Radulovich]

Antonio Villaraigosa, the new Mayor of Los Angeles, has been saying  
good things since his mayoral campaign. Tom Matoff sent me this  
article from the LA Times about the themes from his state of the city  
speech; clearly, he has not been paying close enough attention to the  
Wall Street Journal editorial page. He has been walking the talk as  
well; as the article notes, he has "put prominent environmentalists  
on his port commission and Department of Water and Power board". How  
nice it would be to have a mayor who isn't cowed by the likes of  
SFSOS and the Coalition of San Francisco Neighborhoods...


http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-mayor9dec09,1,6714538.story? 
coll=la-headlines-california
NEWS ANALYSIS

Mayor Shares Vision for L.A.
Villaraigosa's ideal city would be a prosperous 'global capital' with  
affordable housing, good schools -- and residents riding trains.
By Richard Fausset
Times Staff Writer

December 9, 2005

Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa gave the yearly "state of the  
San Fernando Valley" speech Thursday, but he delivered something much  
broader: a discourse on the ideal Los Angeles of the future.

It was the latest version of a stock speech Villaraigosa has been  
giving for weeks at rubber-chicken galas and civic symposia all over  
town. In it, the mayor attempts to place his early moves in a  
strategic context, paint himself as a maverick reformer and justify  
some liberal policies as business-friendly.

But mostly, it is a vision for the unwieldy metropolis Villaraigosa  
has been chosen to govern, a new narrative for a city wondering how  
its next chapter will read.

In earlier versions of the speech, Villaraigosa has said Los Angeles  
should realize its potential as a "great global city on a hill." That  
image has roots in the Book of Matthew and Jesus' advice to his  
disciples that they should set a good example. But over the years it  
has been famously borrowed by John Winthrop, the 17th century  
governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and former President Ronald  
Reagan.

Like Reagan, Villaraigosa seems to appreciate the power of positive  
thinking: One of his strategies appears to be talking Los Angeles  
into a good mood. But like Winthrop, Villaraigosa wants his people to  
know that the world will be watching — and judging — the grand social  
experiment before them.

To the new mayor, a glorious future is not a given.

As a result, Thursday's speech was threaded, like most of his recent  
speeches, with a subtle reminder that L.A.'s civic and business  
leaders need to face the city's challenges.

One remark to the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn. was typical.  
Lamenting the lack of affordable housing in the city, the mayor of  
five months blurted out: "We'd better figure it out, everybody."

If all goes well, however, Villaraigosa's Tomorrowland will have some  
readily definable characteristics:

•  Los Angeles will connect the world.

Villaraigosa, a history major at UCLA, wants Los Angeles to become  
"the Venice of the 21st century" — a reference to the powerhouse city- 
state that dominated European trade in the 15th century.

"We need to imagine a future in which Los Angeles is … the global  
capital linking the manufacturing economies of the east with the  
emerging markets of the south," Villaraigosa said Thursday.

Though blessed geographically, Los Angeles needs to move aggressively  
to modernize its port, airport and infrastructure to allow better  
movement of goods, Villaraigosa has said. It was in that context  
Thursday that he touted his nominee to head the port of Los Angeles,  
Geraldine Knatz, currently an executive at the better-performing Long  
Beach port.

He also praised last week's agreement to shelve the expansion plans  
for Los Angeles International Airport, plans that prompted lawsuits  
from local communities. The cities have agreed to drop their suits,  
giving the city a chance to start over with its modernization effort.

•  Los Angeles will turn diversity into dollars.

Diversity, he told Valley leaders, "is going to make us rich and  
prosperous, make no mistake about it."

The racial differences that threatened to tear L.A. apart are to  
Villaraigosa a blessing: a city where 120 languages are spoken by  
ethnic groups whose ties to their home countries can mature into new  
avenues of trade. He noted that the Valley, once considered lily  
white, is now the most racially diverse area in Los Angeles — and one  
of its most economically vibrant.

In previous speeches, the mayor has even been exhorting monolingual  
Angelenos to learn at least one other language — "like they do in  
Europe."

•  L.A. will be the "greenest and cleanest big city in America."

Much like his embrace of diversity, Villaraigosa's environmental  
goals are pitched in terms of commerce, not political correctness.  
His goal to plant a million trees and spruce up the L.A. River will  
make the city more attractive to tourists, he has said.

The mayor has put prominent environmentalists on his port commission  
and Department of Water and Power board, but he doesn't dwell on the  
cost of potential new regulations. Instead, he said, if the city  
holds itself to high ecological standards, it will stimulate new  
green industries and jobs.

•  L.A. will thrive on its embrace of new technology and new industry.

The successful cities of the future won't be built on smokestack  
industries, Villaraigosa says, but with businesses that run largely  
on brain power. With major research universities next door to  
Hollywood, L.A. should be "the place where technology and  
entertainment converge." Villaraigosa has said he hopes to invest  
city pension funds in new technology — from digital media to biotech  
— and find a way to lighten the tax burdens for start-up companies.  
And he wants to lure them to long-suffering areas like South L.A.  
with a tax subsidy program.

This strategy, he said Thursday, will replace the region's "good  
middle-class jobs" that were once dominated by the likes of aerospace  
and auto manufacturers.

•  L.A. will become denser and taller.

Villaraigosa has argued that housing construction along public  
transit lines will help solve the housing crunch and get cars off the  
streets. He notes that 46 high-rises are going up in L.A. over the  
next four years. The mayor would like to see what Oakland Mayor Jerry  
Brown has called "elegant density" — developments that mix commercial  
and residential units, and include open space.

Villaraigosa has proposed putting a $1-billion affordable housing  
bond before voters, and he notes that fewer than 15% of today's  
Angelenos can afford a median-priced home.

On Thursday, he told Valley leaders to brace for a city that may  
never look the same. "This old concept that all of us are going to  
live in a three-bedroom home, you know with 2,500 square feet, with a  
big frontyard and a big backyard — well that's an old concept," he  
said. "You've been to Chicago, you've been to New York, you've been  
to San Francisco…. Not everybody in the world lives like that. And  
they live a good life."

•  The Angelenos of the future will ride the train.

"We are not going to build more freeways in the city of Los Angeles,"  
Villaraigosa said in a recent speech.

In Villaraigosa's future city, railways will take residents from  
South-Central to North Hollywood and from Boyle Heights to LAX. In  
the meantime, he has been choosing to ride public transportation  
himself every once in a while in an attempt to lure his fellow  
residents to do the same.

"You can use public transit," he said Thursday. "You can get where  
you want to go. We've got to start to articulate that vision for the  
city, or this isn't going to be a city where any of us want to live."

•  L.A. won't achieve city-on-a-hill status with a broken educational  
system.

Perhaps Villaraigosa's boldest move has been his promise to take over  
the troubled Los Angeles Unified School District, following the lead  
of mayors in New York and Chicago.

To the mayor, Los Angeles simply cannot compete if its main  
educational system is rife with dropouts and graduates who "can  
barely fill out a job application."

In other big cities, mayoral takeovers haven't been a panacea. But in  
those cities, he said Thursday, "you see a dynamic system where you  
see new things, where they're innovating and thinking outside the  
box. And that's what we have to do here."
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