The only megacity in the western United States
has an ideal climate and a history of development based - uniquely - on vehicle mobility.
There is no place quite like it on Earth. A powerful trendsetter, this diverse,
beautiful city is one of the most recognizable on the planet. Arguably the most influential
and successful urban area of the 1900s, its population grew from 100,000 to more
than 15 million in just over a century. But this amazing boom favored some much more
than others and has required a re-engineering of the natural environment on a scale
previously unseen in human history. This is Los Angeles, California’s megacity. Close to the beach, but not directly on the coast,
the area along the Los Angeles river was home to the Chumash and Tongva indigenous peoples when
it was claimed in 1781 by Spain, who recruited 11 families to come from what is now the state of
Sinaloa in Mexico. These 44 people - a majority of whom were of African descent - founded the
Spanish empire’s second town in California, El Pueblo de Los Ángeles. It was still a small
settlement 40 years later when it came under the control of a Mexican government, that was
fresh off gaining independence from Spain. The catholic mission system was out, replaced
by the cattle-raising culture of wealthy rancheros. But just a few years later the
United States won the Mexican-American War, and in 1848 California officially became a US
territory. The discovery of gold in the north grabbed headlines across the country. With people
rushing in, and lawlessness running rampant, residents badly wanted the stability that
came with official American statehood. But before the US Congress could act, the
delegates at California’s constitutional convention took it upon themselves to settle the
two most vexing issues facing any aspiring state at that time. First, they decided
what their own borders would be and, second, on the slavery question,
voted unanimously to join the Union as a free state. Congress was so eager to gain
such a vast area rich in resources - and extend the Union across the continent to the Pacific
- that they accepted the Californians’ terms and granted them statehood in record
time as part of the Compromise of 1850. With its broader security and governance issues
settled, the humble settlement on the Los Angeles River quickly grew into a city of more than
100,000 by 1900. This population explosion was in part thanks to the construction of two
major railways: the transcontinental, connecting LA to San Francisco so burned-out gold rushers
could come south, and the Santa Fe, between LA and Chicago, allowing easier long-distance
ground transport of both passengers and goods. One of the main industries drawing workers to Los
Angeles was petroleum. By 1923 California was the country's largest oil producer–and accounted
for one-quarter of the entire world's output. Film production was also taking off as sunny
Hollywood allowed for year-round shooting. By 1921, all the major studios were based in LA and had a monopoly, with 80% of
the world’s films made there. The other industry that California is perfect
for is agriculture, and by the first half of the 20th century Los Angeles county was among
the most valuable croplands in America. There was just one thing holding the
region back: its Mediterranean ecology didn’t provide enough water. So in 1907 Los
Angeles voters approved a bond measure to begin construction of an Aqueduct to bring
water south from the Owens Valley, 233-miles away. This deal was highly controversial. And some
desperate farmers whose fields were suddenly dry used violence in vain to disrupt the aqueduct.
But it was no use, LA’s thirst would be quenched. This compelled many adjacent cities and
communities to join Los Angeles to gain access to its water, including the valuable seaport of
Wilmington and San Pedro, absorbed by LA in 1909. Between 1910 and 1940, LA incorporated Hollywood,
the San Fernando Valley, and many other areas. Securing a reliable water source for a
population of millions enabled the city of Los Angeles to expand its borders. But
it was a confluence of additional factors that took the growth of the entire region
to a whole other level, quickly transforming the basin into the thriving, sprawling,
one-of-a-kind megacity that is modern LA. The sheer amount of land available
to develop played a major role. “If you think about Manhattan Island, and the narrowness of that piece of land, or even
San Francisco, as a peninsula. Los Angeles has those natural boundaries in the mountains and
the ocean, but the scale is much much bigger.” Prior to 1900, most Angelenos got around
on foot or by horse-drawn carriage. To paint this picture here’s Belle
Collins, who grew up in 1880’s Los Angeles. “Main street had a sidewalk which was wo
oden–it was just wooden planks laid down. And it was all unpaved and dusty in the
summer and frightfully muddy in the winter.” Around the turn of the 20th century, Los
Angeles underwent a transportation revolution. The electrified trolley, also known as the
streetcar - or intraurban - was fast, cheap, and reliable, and it carried passengers
up off of those dirty, bumpy roads.
One man in particular had the right combination of experience in the railroad industry and
money to transform the entire region. “Those trolley speculators that predate Huntington
they build trolleys between a fixed point - Town A - and a fixed point - Town B - because there’s
a demand for what can traffic between those two towns. That’s logical. Huntington has so much
wealth he doesn’t need the other town yet.” “He would build lines to nowhere and then
create a name and a sign. And then follow that by building a community in these areas
that had available access to public transit.” By the 1920s, Greater Los Angeles had the largest
streetcar system in the world. 1,100 miles of line connected hundreds of small cities,
towns, and villages into a vast network. “The ability to get on a trolley
and travel across this basin inexpensively and efficiently
worked for decades and decades.” Ironically, the popularity of the
streetcar helped to hasten its downfall. As the system grew in size, it became more complex
and congested. As privately-owned enterprises, lines weren’t consistently maintained the way
public mass transit was in other big cities. And as passengers suffered more frequent delays,
they watched in envy as the latest innovation in transportation zipped all around them. The
arrival of the mass-production automobile meant liberation from the tyranny of the fixed track:
you went wherever you wanted, whenever you wanted. The Great Depression also affected
the development of Los Angeles. “In 1934 - all of the new homes built
in the United States were worth only $227 million dollars. A decline of 92% from 1928.” To jump-start the economy, as part of
his New Deal, President Roosevelt and a democratically-controlled Congress created
the Federal Housing Administration. The FHA provided mortgage insurance
to protect lenders from losses when a homeowner defaults on their mortgage. This
eliminated one of the riskiest parts of lending so banks could offer home loans to many more
buyers and on much more affordable terms. It’s hard to overstate how important the FHA
was - and continues to be - in supporting homebuilding in America. Think about this.
Before the FHA, you needed to put down half to buy a home instead of the 10-20% that's now
standard. And the repayment schedule was spread out over just three to five years. It’s no wonder
then that before the FHA just 1 in 10 American households owned the home they lived in, and that
65 years after the FHA was created over 68% did. This had a huge impact in Los Angeles
with so much available land to build on. With the dream of owning a detached home
within reach for middle-class workers in LA’s booming aircraft, rubber, automotive,
and oil industries, the population of the County surpassed two million before the Second World
War. The affordability of the San Fernando Valley was particularly appealing, and it became
the fastest-growing region in the United States, doubling in population in the 1940s, then
doubling again in the ’50s to over 700,000 people. On the other side of LA, a preview of the suburban
homebuilding style now familiar to anyone living in an American city was launched in Lakewood,
or what was known as “Tomorrow’s City Today,” Every day 4,000 workers completed at least
fifty homes in a giant outdoor assembly line. That was roughly one dwelling
completed every 10 minutes. Unfortunately, the FHA did much more
than trigger a housing construction boom. By only insuring a certain type of home, it
shaped what kinds of houses would be built, where they would be constructed,
and even who would buy them. It prioritized detached, new-built houses
on wide streets and cul-de-sacs, preferring expansiveness over density; and favored places
near arterial roads, rather than public transit. As a federal agency operating at the height
of the Cold War - the FHA was not immune to issues of national security. Los Angeles
was then the center of a booming military and aviation tech industry–a hub for the
likes of Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, which theoretically made it a target for
Soviet missile strikes. One way to protect American assets from nuclear catastrophe
- the thinking went - was to physically increase the size of the target by encouraging
residents to move away from city centers. This little-known policy of “Defensive Dispersal”
was quite literally a national security effort to incentivise suburban sprawl through affordable
home loans. By the mid-1950s, planned communities, spreading for miles around downtown LA, were
dominated by an ever-expanding network of charming ranch-style bungalows–reportedly the home
design that best withstood nuclear blasts. The FHA’s policies also excluded Americans
of color by design by refusing to insure mortgages in racially mixed neighborhoods. As
whites left America’s cities in droves for the brand-new suburbs, minorities were sidelined in
less desirable multi-family urban dwellings.
“The racism was very blatant - ‘It’s a white
man’s neighborhood’ - that’s how these tracts were sold. So this was the reason why you
saw restrictive covenants, things of this nature, it was to go along with that California
myth that this was the new white utopia.” All this was going on as 5 million African
Americans were moving from the Jim Crow South to cities in the Northeast, Midwest,
and West. By 1960 the FHA had underwritten tens of millions of mortgages on new houses
worth a total of $120 billion, but just 2% of these loans went to non-whites. Even though this
type of discrimination is now illegal, its lasting effects have reduced generational wealth and
educational opportunities in communities of color. Another development that has dramatically
changed life in Los Angeles has been the freeway. In the 1940s and 50s, the volume
of traffic and intersections - combined with the size of the region - meant trips
by car were taking longer and longer. The freeway allowed for high-speed, non-stop
travel over greater distances. But it came at a high cost: the decimation of neighborhoods
mostly home to lower-income and minority families. The Mexican-American community of Boyle
Heights had wide swaths demolished to make room for multiple freeways and interchanges,
while only one freeway was planned in white, wealthy Beverly Hills–until even it was stopped
by local protests and has never been built. The construction of freeways also meant the
continued expansion of development, creating even greater demand for water from ever-more
distant sources, culminating in one of the most audacious megaprojects in human history: the State
Water Project - or SWP - launched in the 1960s. [President John F. Kennedy]
“There is no other project in the history of the United States where a
state has put in such a large contribution to the development of its own resources,
and where the national government has joined with the state. This has brought your state to
be the pioneer in the United States in the field of development and conservation of our natural
resources. California in this area is number one. The SWP’s 21 dams and more than 700 miles
of canal, pipeline, and tunnel are now the lifeblood of modern California. The Project
delivers water to over 750,000 acres of farmland and 25 million people. Many reservoirs and
pumping stations keep the flow going–none more important than the motors that haul water
up an astounding 2,882 feet over the Tehachapi mountains - the largest water lifting system in
the world - so it can flow down into the LA basin. All this means Greater Los Angeles now
covers more than 33,000 square miles–the largest metropolitan region by
land area in the United States. Its economy is ranked 3rd in the world behind
just Tokyo and New York City, and its the main reason why California is America’s
largest state by both population and GDP. In fact, if California were a country of
its own, its economy would rank 5th in the world, ahead of India. And Los Angeles is often
billed as the "Creative Capital of the World" because one in every six residents does work
related to the arts. There are more writers, filmmakers, actors, dancers and musicians in Los
Angeles than in any other city on our planet. But for all its successes, it has its share of
problems. Air quality can be notoriously bad, though it has improved as cars, trucks, and
energy sources have become more efficient. To solve its worst-in-the-nation traffic,
it continues to build out its light rail and bus rapid transit systems. Now it needs to
focus on increasing density right around them. “With each rail line that comes into operation,
it just exponentially boosts all the other ones. But I think the next stage for LA really
shouldn’t be about more rail lines, it oughta be about taking advantage of
the rail lines that are already here. And making sure that there are more apartment
buildings built around the rail lines, more jobs located there, really just
building up the communities around it. Because that’s how we get the ridership and
the real benefit out of the rail lines.” Despite being one of the most expensive real
estate markets in America, Los Angeles accounts for 37% of California’s lowest-income residents.
With median home prices over $800K and affordable rental stock dwindling to less than 1 rental
for every 5 extremely low-income households, it's no wonder why LA has over 66,000 homeless
citizens. And many of those who can afford rent don’t get much for their money: with one of the
nation’s worst rates of residential overcrowding, 11% of Angelenos rent rooms shared by multiple
occupants. Some Angelenos are tackling this by building Accessory Dwelling Units to create more
housing on existing lots. A new state program even provides up to $25,000 in
grants for homeowners to put one up. “So this used to be a driveway all the
way through and there was a garage back there. So we just tore down the garage
and we built the house in its place. It’s a phenomenal thing. You could build
a second house on every single yard in Los Angeles as far as I can tell. I’d much
rather have a house than a place for my car. But despite its increasing density, Greater
LA continues to sprawl deeper into dry, windy, hilly areas, heightening
the threat of fast-moving, hard-to-stop wildfires, and mudslides. More
extreme weather is making them more destructive. With longer-lasting droughts, drinking water
supplies are threatened as reservoirs and rivers now routinely run dangerously low. As yearly
snowfall in the Sierras continues to decline, Los Angeles must turn to innovative
measures to save water any way it can. The most effective way to
do this is water recovery. Orange County, just to the south of LA, has
been operating a successful system since 2008.
“Potable reuse is where you take recycled
water, it gets pumped into a groundwater basin, referred to as an environmental buffer, and
then into the potable distribution system. We’ve expanded from 70 million gallons
a day to 100 million gallons per day. It’s the purest water that we have in Southern
California. It’s an incredible, valuable resource, the political problem is convincing people that
wastewater isn’t a bad thing, it’s a good thing. It’s actually cleaner than the water we get from
the Colorado or from Northern California. In fact, you even need to add some minerals to it because
it’s so pure. The Colorado river goes through people’s kidneys many times before it gets to the
point where its diverted to Southern California, so everybody in Southern California
today drinks recycled sewer water.” The Los Angeles region is only
planning to recycle enough water to serve less than 10% of its people. But if the
majority of California’s wastewater was recycled, it could produce water for 30 million residents.
This would allow expensive and environmentally harmful solutions like ocean desalination
plants and the building of additional dams and aqueducts to become solutions of last resort.
Another antiquated idea is wasting water to irrigate grass, which accounts for nearly half of
urban water use in Southern California. Programs to incentivize residents to switch to natural
landscaping resulted in the removal of more than 200 million square feet of irrigated lawn in
the last period of mandatory water restrictions. California’s network of emergency management
agencies are already under intense pressure to prepare for imminent environmental disasters,
with the most difficult being the “the big one”–the earthquake everyone knows is coming,
but are powerless to stop. According to the USGS, California currently has a 99% chance of at
least one 6.7+ - or greater - magnitude quake in the next 30-years. A 6.6 mag in 1971 killed
65 people and caused over $500 million in damage. This motivated the state to update building codes
and retrofit older structures. But even with these improvements, a high-magnitude quake in the
network of faults that runs beneath downtown LA would likely have devastating effects on citywide
infrastructure: rupturing gas lines, downing power lines, sparking fires, cutting off water,
and making many roads and freeways impassible. But these threats are unlikely to change the fact
that, for many, LA is the most desirable place to live in the entire world. The advantage this
megacity has to attract the world’s best and brightest will continue. The question is whether
Los Angeles can reverse its troubling slide toward economic inequality and remain a global
beacon of opportunity and tolerance for all. Like this video, if you enjoyed it, and subscribe
to get the next episode in this series–a profile of Kinshasa, Congo. And if you missed
it, we looked at Shanghai last time. And a special thanks to LA’s KCET, the best
channel I’ve ever come across covering a single region; and to Ben Wilson and his book
Metropolis. Both sources are linked below.
