June 8, 2025 • 41 mins
**Editor's Note: Dr. Sonenshein later corrected that West Altadena, not East Altadena, did not receive notifications**
Despite its dysfunction, LA has always been a place where people come to live the good life. So why is it so hard to govern?
Dr. Raphe Sonenshein has spent decades inside LA politics as a teacher, author, and reformer and is the leading expert on LA governance. In this conversation, we discuss the structure of LA’s governance, LA’s political culture, the rare moment of charter reform we’re living through, and why he’s cautiously optimistic about the future. From the fate of the working class to the mysteries of county power, this is a crash course in how LA really works and what might finally make it work better.
As always, make sure to subscribe at californiafuturesociety.com or wherever you get your podcasts
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/california-future-society/id1807612672
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/0zzVSVdCUCTGuZUyl8qZXA
Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCVNumolJuKvqJScBEnhe8hQ
Chapters
00:00 – Intro
04:20 – Unique Challenges of LA Governance
09:16 – Political Culture and Media Landscape in LA
14:19 – Charter Reform: A Historical Perspective
23:02 – The Tangible Impact of Charter Reform
27:18 – The Future of the Working Class in LA
36:17 – Addressing Homelessness in Los Angeles
38:59 – Hope for the Future of California
Keywords
los angeles politics, los angeles culture, los angeles urban development, la governance, fragmented governance, charter reform, city charter reform, county charter reform, la charter reform 2025, who runs la, la government broken, los angeles politics explained, la county mayor, measure g los angeles, los angeles political scandal, city vs county power, working class in los angeles, economic inequality la, working class crisis la, la housing crisis, homelessness crisis la, homelessness in la 2025, homelessness policy, la county government, unincorporated los angeles, la political culture, los angeles media landscape, redistricting los angeles, redistricting los angeles 2025, california governance reform, california political future, california civic identity, california policy crisis, inside los angeles city hall, future of los angeles
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
Despite all the problems LA has,it's always been a place where
people pursue the good life. Well, what makes LA challenging
to governing is that LA was set up to not be like New York City
and Chicago. I've always been struck by how
the culture and the economy are sort of bigger than politics and
government in many ways. Then government sort of breaks
in at key moments. Nobody knows who's in charge of
(00:23):
it, because it has this archaic system which is now, as you and
I will discuss, about to be transformed.
Hello, everyone, and welcome, welcome back to the California
Future Society podcast this week.
I have a great one for you. I have Doctor Rafe Sunshine, who
was actually a professor of minewhen I wanted to take a class,
learning about how LA is governed, managed, and he is the
(00:43):
perfect guest for thinking aboutLA governance.
He has spent his entire career thinking about how LA is
managed. He worked in City Hall under
Mayor Tom Bradley, He's been a professor for 30 years.
He's written books about LA government.
He was involved in past charter reform efforts.
So in our conversation, we talk about why LA is so challenging
to govern in the 1st place and how so many of those factors are
by design. Talking about how LA's political
(01:05):
culture differs from other cities.
We talk about ongoing charter reform at the city and the
county level, 2 ongoing processes that will have major
implications for how our region is governed going forward.
We talk about the phase of the working class going forward in
Los Angeles and how challenging it is given the affordability
crisis. We talked about why he's
cautiously optimistic about homelessness in the near future
(01:26):
and what gives him hope for the future of California.
So I had a lot of fun speaking with him.
He brings a lot of joy and positive energy in the way that
he speaks. He's a storyteller with a wealth
of experience, so I had a lot offun speaking with Rave.
I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun listening to him as well.
As always, make sure to subscribe wherever you're
hearing this or at California futuresociety.com.
(01:46):
With that, here's Rafe. I'm so excited to have you on.
This is a conversation that I'vebeen hoping for ever since I
started this podcast. You're someone I think very
highly of. I I took, you know, a class from
you on LA politics and governance.
So a lot of what I learned is from you.
So excited to talk to you today.And could you introduce yourself
and your connection to California as a way to start the
conversation? Well, before I forget, you were
(02:08):
a very good student, so thank you.
Yeah. What you have to say when you're
on. Camera Yeah, I know it's good to
be connected with you again. So I'm Rafe Sonnenshine.
I'm the relatively new executivedirector of the John Randolph
Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, which funds research
on governance and democracy in the greater LA region, almost
(02:29):
coming up on our 100th anniversary next year.
And before that, I went out whenyou were my student.
I was still executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for
Public Affairs at Cal State LA, and before that 3 decades
teaching political science at Cal State Fullerton.
So that's me. Well, I know you have a heart
for teaching, but you know for you it doesn't just stay in the
(02:52):
classroom or in academic text. You've also been someone who's
been very hands on, not only working in LA City Hall, but
then also on pressing issues like charter reform.
Could you give a quick overview of some of your different roles,
the hats that you've worn outside of academia as well over
the? Years.
Sure. I've always had one foot in, one
foot out. During my Graduate School years,
I moved to LA from New Haven, CT, where I was in a doctoral
(03:15):
program at Yale, interested in Los Angeles, and ended up
working for Mayor Tom Bradley and for a City Councilman whose
chief deputy was somebody named Maxine Waters, who you all know
is a member of the House, was myboss back then.
Eventually I went into teaching and in the late 90s I got
(03:35):
invited to apply to be executivedirector, a position I'd never
held, for the new appointed Charter Reform Commission.
That was eventually to complete the first complete
transformation of the LA City Charter in 75 years.
And that is when I became a charter geek.
And in addition to my previous work on race and ethnicity and
(03:57):
coalition politics, which is still very close to my heart.
But since then I've really written about and talked about
LA government. It's it's problems, it's
illnesses and it's solutions andit keeps me very occupied.
And here I am at a foundation for whom that's the principal
interest. So what could be bad, as my
(04:18):
mother would have said? Exactly.
Well, and let's start on what makes LA unique when it comes to
governance. I know a lot of people talk
about it being really challenge,challenging to govern, and a lot
of people just assume that all cities are the same.
What is unique about LA and whatmakes it challenging to govern?
Well, what makes LA challenging to governing is that LA was set
(04:39):
up to not be like New York City and Chicago.
That's the exact purpose of 20thcentury governance in Los
Angeles, led by the progressive movement with a capital P, which
you learned about in the class that you took with me.
Yes, because the feeling was that New York City and Chicago
were corrupt party machines withparty bosses, which was
certainly true, although there were many virtues in New York
(05:03):
and Chicago that weren't valued when LA government was created.
But they almost created that as an anti Chicago, anti New York
system. They dispersed power instead of
keeping power concentrated. So in New York, the mayor is
everything. There's sort of a City Council.
Chicago has sort of a City Council, but everybody knows the
(05:25):
voice that really matters is thevoice of the mayor.
But when you came out to LA, where I came out in the 1970s, I
actually loved it, as difficult as it was, because there were so
many openings for a new person to get involved.
And I used to tell students likeyourself, this is a place where
anybody can find their way into City Hall.
I walked into City Hall in 1974 a month after I arrived, and at
(05:49):
the end of that month I was working for Tom Bradley.
That could never have happened in New York and Chicago, where
they would basically say, who doyou know?
Or somebody famously said in Chicago, don't send me nobody.
Nobody sent. That's just not the story.
I was a stranger and got hired, but the dispersal meant there's
(06:11):
an amazing number of veto pointsof independent political forces
that can push back against even the strongest mayor.
And I probably worked for the strongest mayor, Tom Bradley.
And Tom Bradley had to deal witha very powerful City Council.
It had a lot of authority. Unlike the New York and Chicago
case, the LA County Board of Supervisors independently
(06:33):
elected, controlling social services in New York City.
The mayor controls those social services.
You had the Board of Education independently elected and the
voters always tell the mayor fixthe schools and the mayor says
absolutely I'm going to do that,no question.
Then they get in and find out they can't because it's
independent. You have all sorts of sub
(06:54):
governments. 87 other cities in LA County along with the city of
LA, you have unincorporated territory.
To me it always reminded me of amenagerie.
Some people would call it worse than a menagerie, but what I
loved about it was that there were so many different people
who could bring their voices to the table.
(07:15):
What I didn't love about it is there some issues where it's
really hard to get anything donewithout collaboration among
these areas of governance. So we're only as good as our
diplomatic ability. No one person can tell everybody
what to do. I love those examples that you
gave. And for anyone who gripes about
(07:37):
the fragmented nature of LA governance, it's also easy to
look to those East Coast cities and and recognize that
centralization doesn't solve allyour problems.
Right? Those endless veto points are
frustrating, but you still have political divisions and
disagreements regardless of the structure and and the devolution
of power. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, and let's put it this way.Being mayor of any of the three
largest cities of the country, New York, Chicago, and Los
(08:00):
Angeles, you're probably best off thinking of it as your
career ender rather than your career beginning, because it
should top off your career. Like, this will be Karen Bass's
last job. She knows that she's had many
wonderful positions in government before, around the
country, in the House and in Sacramento.
But the best way to be a mayor of these three cities is to say
(08:22):
I'm going to knock it out of thepark now.
Not as a stepping stone to something else because
everyone's going to be mad at meby the time I leave, but it's
phenomenally exciting because you're dealing with some of the
most ingrained problems the system can possibly have.
Examples being homelessness, crime, housing.
(08:44):
And everybody's in your face because they see you.
They see you when you're walkingaround.
They that's what local government is all about, which
is what I love about local government.
But true, in New York, you can get great things done.
You can also make absolutely catastrophic mistakes if there's
nobody to hold you back, nobody to tell you no.
(09:05):
So it's a wild ride no matter what you do.
Now, by the way, it's a much Wilder ride in Chicago and New
York. And the reason is those are much
more political cities than Los Angeles.
Let's talk about that, the political culture of LA because
there's the structural pieces toit, but there's also just a
cultural somewhat lack of engagement.
As one example, you know, the public affairs firm I used to
(09:26):
work at, we had a New York headquarters where the firm is
based. And then I was at the LA
satellite office. And we would often talk about
how just when it came to, for some example of something like
press in New York, you had dozens of papers you could pitch
and different folks on differentboroughs or ethnic groups or
different subtopics versus in LAis like after the LA Times,
there's a pretty big fall off. There's other great reporters
out there, but the culture of consuming news and and studying
(09:49):
local government and knowing whoyour local players were, there's
a huge, massive gap. Can you speak to that in LA?
Oh, heck yeah. I mean, I, I lived in, grew up
in New Jersey and lived in Manhattan after college, and
there were probably 3 or 4 newspapers on a daily basis.
You can get a morning paper, youget an afternoon paper.
Different ideologies. And they all want to know what
(10:10):
the mayor was doing. So if the mayor went to the
Yankee game, all the cameras were there because the mayor was
at the Yankee game. If they went to the Mets game,
then you had a big battle whether it should be the Mets or
the Yankees. The mayor was the most important
cultural figure in the city. Now you've been around LA to
know about Jared, that there's alot of cultural figures that are
(10:31):
bigger than the mayor of Los Angeles.
You know, like, yes, a center ofAmerican.
Culture right here. Kim Kardashian draws a lot more
names than Karen Bass or any other mayor.
Yeah. Well, back in 1961, a scholar
named Charles Mayo studied Los Angeles government, and he said
something that I think is reallyquite wonderful.
He said it's a disconnected political system.
(10:53):
There's much more concern if Koufax has a bad night at Dodger
Stadium than if something goes wrong at City Hall.
It's as true now as it was then,except around crises like the
wildfire or policing issues where suddenly it explodes on a
day-to-day basis. The mayor can travel around
(11:15):
town. When I wrote my first book on
Tom Bradley, it took me forever to get an interview with him.
And I finally just said, can I just ride with you for a day?
And they stuck me in the back ofa little sedan with three staff
members and Tom Bradley sitting in front reading the newspaper
and not even talking to me and me passing my micro, my tape
(11:35):
recorder back and forth. And occasionally I could get a
good answer out of him. And I thought to myself, if this
was the mayor of New York, I'd be.
So I'd be in three cars with reporters everywhere taking
pictures. And Tom Bradley could go and
spend a whole day. It was his day in South, what
was then called South Central LA.
So it's a much more down to earth political culture.
(11:58):
It's sometimes has a little bit of a small town politics
quality. People do have a sense to know
who these elected officials are.But at the same time, part of
his governance, the county Boardof Supervisors, nobody knows
who's in charge of it because ithas this archaic system which is
now, as you and I will discuss about to be transformed by
(12:19):
Measure G passed in November. If something goes wrong, who do
you blame? You've got 5 supervisors.
Nobody's in charge. So if you ask the voters, they
might have a complaint about thefoster care system, but they
don't have a politician to focuson about it.
They just focus on the problems with the people in foster care.
(12:40):
Yeah. So it's the structure does
reduce political visibility because we tend to be a society
politically that focuses on executives, the president, the
governor, the mayor, and there'sa lot of other players in the
system. And sometimes people just throw
up their hands. But a lot of it is that in many
(13:01):
ways, despite all the problems LA has, it's always been a place
where people pursue the good life.
I live in Santa Monica, not far from Rand.
Again, where where you or my student?
What were we about four blocks from the ocean in that class?
I used to teach a class at SantaMonica College and the kids
(13:22):
would bring their surfboards. Now, by the way, it was very
hard to get them to pay attention to the separation of
powers on a really nice day. But there's something to that,
which is the weather, the culture.
All these things are very engaging.
Who is a bigger celebrity if you're out shopping and a person
(13:42):
who walks in is a starting guardon the LA Lakers or your City
Council member? Yeah, the City Council members
kind of important, quite important.
But the other guy's a Laker, forGod's sake.
I mean, you don't need to be a Kardashian to be a celebrity in
LA So I guess I think that it's because there's so many other
(14:06):
things going. Now, New York, of course, has
many other things going, but a long tradition of the mayor
being one of those celebrities being sort of because their
dominance in the system is so great.
Well, let's, let's talk about charter reform.
You said you're a charter geek. And right now we're living
through really important charterreforms.
(14:27):
There's, you know, there's an issue that's been going on
several years now at the city level and like you just said,
but in light of the Measure G atthe county level as well.
And can you just talk about how important this period is?
Because in my mind, charter reform is like, it's like
Haley's Comet, like maybe you see it once, maybe twice in your
lifetime. To have it simultaneously
happened at the city and the county level simultaneously is
absurd. It's truly unbelievable, and as
(14:47):
an expert on charters, I feel a little bit like an expert on
butterflies and nobody can possibly want to talk to me
about butterflies unless there'sa butterfly invasion for all the
butterflies that disappeared. Then suddenly they say, get
sunshine on the phone so we can talk about what happened to the
butterflies. Charters usually emerge and
(15:09):
governance reform emerges from catastrophe.
So in our case, the 1990s, when I was first the charter person,
was the episode was the years ofthe Rodney King beating, the
civil unrest, the attempt of theSan Fernando Valley and the LA
harbor to break away and cut thecity in half, which would have
(15:30):
been a catastrophe. There was all this going on and
what the feeling was, the only way to save the city is to
reform the government. That's what it took to get the
energy for that to happen. There really has been a long
vacuum for the last 30 years of that kind of reform in LA
because there hasn't been something that quite qualifies.
(15:54):
Now we got one, which oddly enough was a surreptitiously
recorded set of discussions at abuilding in Los Angeles where
three LA council members and a labor leader were disparaging
especially African Americans, but in their crudeness basically
(16:14):
went out there just about everybody was almost not a group
they didn't have time for in this discussion.
It blew up and immediately it focus became City Hall because
of the three council members andthere became a huge movement to
change the redistricting system because this is all about
redistricting. It was about which ethnic group
(16:36):
should have priority in redistricting.
I was one of a group of academics who were called upon
by local philanthropy to developan agenda for the City Council
and with the City Council, and alot of it got passed by the
voters, especially redistricting.
So that follows the typical pattern.
The surprising part is that thiswave was so strong that a level
(17:02):
of government that almost never spends 5 minutes on serious
reform, which is county government, got drawn in and a
couple of members of the supervisors board decided to
take a huge leap and reform the county government more
dramatically than the city government.
I don't think there isn't a little bit of, you know, kind of
(17:25):
competition between county and city.
We're not going to get left behind on this.
Reform. And for context, how long had it
been since the last major countycharter reform, roughly?
Never. In 1855, the structure of the LA
County government was as follows.
Five elected supervisors with executive and legislative
(17:48):
authority in 2024. The structure of LA County
government is five elected supervisors with legislative and
executive authority. So during that time, LA adopted
four or five charters. Finally, the big one in 1925.
Then a big reform in 99, the onethat I was involved in changing
(18:09):
the power of the mayor, but it was always a mayor council
system. It wasn't a fundamentally
changed system. There are 58 counties in Los
Angeles. 57 of them have the identical system to Los Angeles.
You're saying cities, right, Notcounties, Yeah.
Did I say cities? OK.
Are you saying counties? You said 58 counties within Los
Angeles, Yeah. Yeah, counties in California,
(18:32):
Yeah. Yeah, 58 counties in California,
57 of them have the exact same system that LA County has had
since 1855. One of them is different because
San Francisco is a combined county city.
I don't think that counts because that goes way, way back.
That's that's deep in history. So by some miracle, you'd have
(18:55):
to assume that the perfect system of government for a local
government is five elected supervisors with executive and
legislative authority. Weirdly, Jared, in the 1910s and
1920s, cities around the countryexperimented with that system
with a different name. It was called the Commission
(19:16):
system because of a flood in Galveston, TX.
That was resolved all the damagebecause they created a
Commission. So everybody put let's create a
Commission. Yeah.
It was such a bad system that almost every city except
Portland, OR abandoned it almostimmediately.
But thank God for our counties, they held on to it forever.
(19:38):
So we have a Commission system. So when people in east side of
Altadena did not receive emergency warnings and that's
where most of the deaths occurred in the fire.
Altadena is what's called an unincorporated territory of the
county. It's not a city even though
people think it is. So it's dependent on the county
(19:59):
to this day. No one's been able to figure out
why E Altadena did not receive that notification.
At the same time, the city of LAhas been embroiled in angry
battles between and among the mayor, the Fire Chief, the City
Council, everybody, because it'sassumed that somebody there is
(20:21):
going to be accountable. Usually the mayor with with the
wildfire situation, so long way of saying it's astonishing.
Now to give you another sidelight on my job, 49 years
ago, the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, my
employer, financed its own Commission on county charter
(20:44):
reform because the county was setting up yet another
Commission that was going to go nowhere.
When the Haynes Foundation set up its own Commission, the
county closed down its Commission and everybody went
with the Haynes Commission and that Commission proposed an
elected County Executive and a nine member Board of
Supervisors, the exact measure 49 years later that voters
(21:09):
approved in November. So I would put it this way,
don't ever think a good deed will never be rewarded.
It just 49 years for it to happen.
Ironically, a couple of people who worked on that report are
still around, you know, in retirement.
So it's pretty incredible. So it gives me, it gives me hope
(21:31):
for some of my Rand reports. I still have, you know, 45 years
or so until to see whether or not they make an impact.
Yeah. You're just starting, you're not
even 49 years old, so you've gotto have youth another 49 years
to see. It does prove the public policy
can be like that. There were people who proposed
the equivalent of Social Security decades before 1935 in
(21:52):
various forms. It takes forever.
But what's so odd is it we're watching this in real time
happen in November, and I'm finding this report on our shelf
that we didn't even remember we had.
And there it was. So.
But the odds of it happening were very slim.
It got turned down by the votersa bunch of times, partly because
(22:14):
they carved it up into pieces that were incomprehensible.
But the wave of reform was so strong this time that it it, it
won not by a lot. I was watching on election
night. You know, everybody else is
watching all the other returns. I'm watching the nerd fest,
which is Measure GI Feel like I'm the only person in
(22:35):
California who's watching it. And they're down by a few
points. And I'm saying, don't get your
hopes up. This is yeah, it always dies.
It always dies. Then they pick up a few points,
Then they pick up a few more points.
They go into the lead and somehow in these elections, once
you go into the lead, it sort ofnever goes back.
(22:56):
And it kept adding and adding and adding and it wins.
Wow. Well, so for if you're an
average voter, right, and maybe in the cases of East Altadena,
these other cases, the nature ofcounty government impacts your
life. But for most people in an
average day, they don't think about county government or
county services. If things go well in charter
(23:16):
reform, what tangible impacts orchanges do you think people in
Los Angeles would notice, whether they're in
unincorporated territory or justanyone who votes in LA County
elections? Well, it's a great question
because a few things should happen.
In an ideal world, the elected executive that I call an
executive, not not an elected mayor, people are going to start
(23:37):
calling them a county mayor. They're not quite a mayor.
They're different than a mayor because the the departments of
the county are just gigantic social service machines that
that elected executive is going to have to get their arms around
us. Now, LA City has lots of
departments, but the whole job of the mayor is not managing
(23:58):
those departments. There's a lot of other pieces of
what the mayor does. The county executives really got
to spend a lot of time because if something goes wrong in
foster Care now you're going to have somebody to blame.
The buck is going to stop somewhere.
That will startle the voters. I think because you said
something about being aware of county government or county
services. People are a lot more aware of
(24:21):
county services than of county government.
They're not. I'm not even sure they think of
the services as part of the government because the
department's public health, foster care, mental health,
they're like governments unto themselves.
Practically, people have a feeling about it.
Probably not a very +1 because very often the people who
utilize the county services are not in a good economic situation
(24:45):
and may be in desperate need of those services.
And the last thing they're thinking about is how am I going
to support somebody for office who's going to help help me deal
with this issue I'm having? They're really dealing with much
more immediate things. What I'm hoping is that this
will open up the county a lot more because to be a successful
(25:06):
elected executive, you're going to have to talk to a lot of
people about a lot of things that have tended to kind of fall
through the cracks in the countygovernment just the way a mayor
does. Even though I'm not going to
call them a mayor, but it's kindof what an executive does.
If nothing else, I think people will have a much better
understanding of what the countydoes because in many ways, for
(25:30):
better or for worse, the people who educate or mis educate us
about government are the electedexecutives because they talk the
most. And talking is a big part of
educating. In fact, you really can't be a
successful elected executive unless you're out there talking,
talking about what's going on, talking about the system,
explaining it. So I don't have the answer to
(25:54):
all of it. I think it'll be quite
interesting for people in unincorporated territory.
Yeah, who usually are the stepchildren of the county
system? In addition, having 9
supervisors instead of five cutsin half the size of the
districts. Yeah, right now there are 2
million people in one district. Now there'll be a little more
(26:15):
than 1,000,000. Yeah.
It's still a lot of people, but it's 50% more attention for you.
And your supervisor is no longeran administrator.
Yeah, with executive authority over departments.
Their job is to keep you in mindall the time.
It's going to be more of a representative job.
(26:36):
Somebody once said, maybe I forgot who it was, that when you
go off to the county supervisorsafter being an elected council
member in LA, you become more powerful and more forgettable
because nobody knows what you'redoing.
Yeah, if you're. A City Council member, You don't
have nearly the power of a supervisor, but everybody knows
who you are in your district, and they come and they yell at
(26:58):
you. Yeah.
You know, if there's things theydon't like, they they'll throw
you out of office. So those offices will be more
visible and yet less powerful. Yeah, that's OK, because power
without visibility is not very good for people's civic
engagement. Yeah, I want to pivot a little
(27:20):
bit. You talked about people who are
in need of county services oftenbeing desperate for that.
And I know during COVID at the Pat Brown Institute, you did
research on the state of the working class in Southeast LA
and how different people were faring.
And one question I have for you is someone who's thought a lot
about the makeup of LA and how different people are faring
across the county is what do youthink of when you think about
(27:41):
the future of the working class in LA?
Because early you talked about people come to LA for the good
life and we think about the glitz and glamour version of
that. But for a lot of Angelenos, it's
a much more like nuts and bolts,just kind of like place for
economic opportunity. You know, they're not seeking
Hollywood. They're seeking a good job and a
place to live and good weather and a nice lifestyle.
But since COVID, between price inflation and, you know, housing
(28:04):
going up 20 plus percent or whatever, it seems like it's the
working class is in really toughspot and will be for the
foreseeable future in that LA isnot the bastion of opportunity
that it used to be. Can you speak to that and how
you think about what things are going to look like going
forward? It's a great question.
You know, there's a lot of different types of, of
experiences in LA. One is the person from the
(28:26):
Midwest who got tired of the cold weather and came out here
and think they're in paradise basically.
And weather's nice. And in the days when housing
costs were a lot lower, you know, in the 40s and 50s, they,
they got a small house somewhere.
There's a whole history in the African American community of
this being one of the biggest home ownership communities for
(28:48):
African Americans in the 1930s, Yeah, when it was very rare and
people migrated from the South for for that good life.
A lot of the working class struggles are indeed now people
who came for economic opportunity.
Very often immigrants and went into industries that were were
(29:10):
difficult were with difficult jobs with low wages.
But their goal in places like SELA was to have a time when their
children could have a better life.
It wasn't so much them having the better life as their
children having a better life. We know that Cal States,
including where I taught to my school, Cal State of LA, my
(29:31):
former school was the number onesite in the country for upward
mobility of their students. Wow.
And also had one of the largest immigrant populations and 1st
generation populations in California, maybe in the
country. So there's a difference between
coming so one can enjoy the goodlife or what appeared to be the
(29:54):
good life in Southern Californiaversus as you say, coming for
economic opportunity. And when that opportunity is
restricted, when tariffs hit Southern California, they're
going to hit, they're hitting the port, the port of Long Beach
and Los Angeles. Those are a lot of those are
blue collar jobs, including trucking and warehousing.
(30:14):
It's going to have a very big impact.
It's going to be very difficult for people.
So I think it is important to say who's good life and for a
lot of people it's the good lifeof their children.
And I think that's that's where the class difference is really,
really sort of shine and and come out in Los Angeles.
(30:36):
It's as the economy was doing well over the last few years.
You know, LA, you know, had somereal resurgence of employment
and wages were going up, but still it wasn't keeping up with
housing costs. Yeah.
So I'm not sure what, you know, housing.
We all know we have to build a lot more housing.
(30:57):
It's our governance system makesit really hard to do that
because there's so many veto points.
Yeah. With so many governments with 88
cities, you know, each with their own desire for land use
control, housing is really the crisis.
But now, if the economy goes into a recession, the people at
the working class level will experience it the worst.
(31:21):
It'll hit them the hardest. And it, you know, there's A at
least a decent chance that that's on the horizon, or at
least an economy that's not verysolid because it's good one day,
not so good the next day. Yeah, depending on the whims in
Washington. So it's a tough time.
It's a really tough time right now.
(31:42):
Yeah. Well, that's helpful to think
about because I think like you're saying, whose dream?
I think it is important. And there's a perception of LA
that the rest of the country has, that the rest of the world
has as the global city of Hollywood and excitement on the
beach. But I mean, I grew up in the
Inland Empire and there's other parts of the Southern California
region that's much more, yeah, blue collar or working class or
(32:05):
people who are just looking for,hoping for a home with a yard
and a nice life and a quality existence.
So it's helpful to think about that.
Well, it's also interesting. It's becoming kind of a dividing
line in the Democratic Party. Yeah.
If you've noticed, there were some articles recently about
Antonio Villaraigosa running andhoping to be running against
Kamala Harris, who I think, I think he he will not defeat.
(32:29):
But his argument is that he represents the people in the
second group, which is people who are struggling economically
and and don't really have time for a lot of the issues that
animate better off Democrats, etcetera.
And he's trying to pigeonhole Harris as being in that
category. I don't know that it'll work,
but it's kind of a debate going on in the party right now.
(32:53):
Now, personally, I think intraparty debates are a
complete waste of time and that they ought to just say there's
plenty of room for both points of view because all the public
picks up is you're not doing well because you're a losing
team that whose locker room is filled with recrimination.
But nobody's asking my advice onthat except you.
So But I think, you know, Los Angeles is such an interesting
(33:21):
place because LA survives partlyby its portrayal of itself.
Even the worst stuff is actuallygrist for the latest iteration
of Harry Bosch, you know, which is AI don't know if you've seen
in a wonderful series about an LA detective.
(33:41):
And the scenes are shot at places where I've eaten lunch,
you know, maybe ate that day. And, you know, this whole noir
thing of LA is also marketable. People sell books.
They sell movies. You go overseas and you say
you're from California and. And they'll say things now.
(34:02):
They say the fires, the fires, you know, and other times
they'll say the Lakers, the Lakers, you know, it's sort of
all over the place. Yeah, but that's part of the
history of LA, which is LA was not a natural site for a city.
So in order to build the great city, the idea was to encourage
people to move from the Midwest.So they said that land is cheap,
(34:26):
which it was. This is in the 1870s and 1880s.
They could get free rail travel out there because the railroads
wanted people to be out there sothat more people would come
visit them on the railroads. And then when they get there and
they found a kind of a dusty town, not a lot of services, not
quite New York and Chicago. But now they're committed.
(34:47):
They're there. And then they begin to tell
everybody it's heaven. Yeah.
The land is dirt cheap, so come on out.
And the theory being if more people come out, it will become
great. Yeah.
But to get them to come out, it has to kind of be great.
So there is this mixed thing of kind of feast and famine about
(35:09):
what is LA. Yeah.
And you just after a while, you just live with it, you know,
catastrophe followed by fabulous, incredible things.
And I don't know any other placein the country, maybe in the
world that that is like that. But people think they know all
about LA, who have never set foot here.
They know everything about it. They in the 90s, they knew it
(35:32):
was all gang violence in then something changed and they
thought something else about it.In the 40s, it was the movies
and Hollywood. Yeah.
So it's, I've always been struckby how the culture and the
economy are sort of bigger than politics and government in many
(35:54):
ways. Yeah.
And then government sort of breaks in at team moments.
Obviously, government still keeps the lights on.
I mean, they're still operating.Yeah, but government's not
dominant as it is where I grew up in New Jersey and New York,
where knowing the mayor was kindof the key to everything.
You know, the mayor, maybe you got a shot.
(36:15):
Yeah. Otherwise, don't send me nobody.
Nobody. So.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Well, I've two more questions towrap up.
And 1 is that you talked about the waves of what people
identify with LA on the negativeside recently, a lot of people
identify homelessness as one of the things with LA and earlier
talking about levels of desire for change in City Hall, in
(36:38):
county government. Obviously, there was kind of the
scandals with the tape recordingand other things like that.
But I think of frustration with homelessness, particularly after
voters approved big measures to fund, you know, housing of
different types, affordable housing, and not seeing a
massive increase. That seems to be like one of the
major issues that people are most frustrated with when it
comes to LA governance. Do you see that issue
(37:01):
meaningfully changing in the next 5-10 years, or what will it
take to see major progress? I do.
For one thing, astonishingly, voters again approved a very
large ballot measure, Measure A,to provide substantial funding
for addressing homelessness. It's it's, it's a very big deal.
So on the one hand, voters are very distraught about
(37:23):
homelessness. Oddly enough, there's been some
progress made, and sometimes making some progress is even
more frustrating because then you think, how come we can't do
the whole thing? There's been some recent
developments where the city and county have collaborated a bit
and there's more of a focus on metrics, on really measuring
(37:46):
things correctly. Because if you don't do that,
imagine if you were doing the COVID crisis as public health
and you don't know how many people have tested positive.
You have to know the state of things, and I think they finally
made some progress on that. Now they're under a lot of
external pressure. The governor who's obviously
thinking of running for president is, you know, talking
(38:09):
about eliminating all encampments, homelessness.
That's a very popular position, not that easy to carry out.
The city has been reducing the encampments by quite a bit, and
that helps, helps in areas like Venice and a few other areas.
They're going to have to move faster, and I think that the
(38:30):
wildfire, of course, took everybody off.
The progress that was being madeon homelessness.
I actually think the next year could be a promising one on this
because of the new funding, the better data structure they're
using. They've got some good governance
structures in place between the city and county.
(38:51):
I'm modestly hopeful I'll take it.
I'm willing to go. I'm sure other voters will take
that as well. I'll take modestly hopeful
after. Yeah, that's something.
It's something that could be worse.
OK, well I I realize we're at time and the conversation I
always like to rather the question I like to end
conversations on is, is what gives you hope for the future of
California. Well.
(39:12):
It it's just impossible not to, you know, because California has
always had crisis, tragedy, hopeand success and all kinds of
things. And I figure we're due, you
know, I think it's time for another round of some good
things happening. Somehow.
The Olympics have a way of focusing the mind, you know, and
sort of around something that actually people kind of kind of
(39:36):
agree on, that sports is one of the few things where your effort
is really rewarded and measured.Whoever does the best wins.
It's a great way to show off theLA region because unlike
everywhere else, you could have things in 20 different venues,
as happened in 1984, and get kind of a tour of the region.
(39:57):
So I think the next few years, if we can get through the next
few years, I mean, there's a lotgoing on in the country that I
don't have to tell you. It is very, very perilous.
LA is due for some good times. It's it's time.
I love it. It's like baseball, right?
You're due, right? And the player's not.
Showy hasn't hit a Homer and a few at bats?
Then why not? Yeah, well, when I used to go to
(40:19):
Yankee games with my dad and my brothers, Yogi Berra would get
up Yankee, great Yankee catcher and hasn't been doing very well.
And my dad would lean over and said Yogi's due and you don't
most always get a hit, so we're due.
LA's do well. Rafe, thank you so much for your
time. I think so highly of you.
I think back to your class often.
I just had fun pulling out your old book.
(40:40):
Yeah. You mentioned it earlier and
you're talking about getting therecordings with, with Mayor
Bradley. So I appreciate you taking time
to speak with me today and, and enlightening me and, and the
listeners on on LA governance. And congratulations on your
podcast. I'm really thrilled for you.
And I think it's going to be I'll become a a watcher and
listener to your program. Wonderful.
(41:01):
Thank you so much, Rafe. OK, Jared.
Bye bye.
Despite all the problems LA has,it's always been a place where
people pursue the good life. Well, what makes LA challenging
to governing is that LA was set up to not be like New York City
and Chicago. I've always been struck by how
the culture and the economy are sort of bigger than politics and
government in many ways. Then government sort of breaks
in at key moments. Nobody knows who's in charge of
(00:23):
it, because it has this archaic system which is now, as you and
I will discuss, about to be transformed.
Hello, everyone, and welcome, welcome back to the California
Future Society podcast this week.
I have a great one for you. I have Doctor Rafe Sunshine, who
was actually a professor of minewhen I wanted to take a class,
learning about how LA is governed, managed, and he is the
(00:43):
perfect guest for thinking aboutLA governance.
He has spent his entire career thinking about how LA is
managed. He worked in City Hall under
Mayor Tom Bradley, He's been a professor for 30 years.
He's written books about LA government.
He was involved in past charter reform efforts.
So in our conversation, we talk about why LA is so challenging
to govern in the 1st place and how so many of those factors are
by design. Talking about how LA's political
(01:05):
culture differs from other cities.
We talk about ongoing charter reform at the city and the
county level, 2 ongoing processes that will have major
implications for how our region is governed going forward.
We talk about the phase of the working class going forward in
Los Angeles and how challenging it is given the affordability
crisis. We talked about why he's
cautiously optimistic about homelessness in the near future
(01:26):
and what gives him hope for the future of California.
So I had a lot of fun speaking with him.
He brings a lot of joy and positive energy in the way that
he speaks. He's a storyteller with a wealth
of experience, so I had a lot offun speaking with Rave.
I'm sure you'll have a lot of fun listening to him as well.
As always, make sure to subscribe wherever you're
hearing this or at California futuresociety.com.
(01:46):
With that, here's Rafe. I'm so excited to have you on.
This is a conversation that I'vebeen hoping for ever since I
started this podcast. You're someone I think very
highly of. I I took, you know, a class from
you on LA politics and governance.
So a lot of what I learned is from you.
So excited to talk to you today.And could you introduce yourself
and your connection to California as a way to start the
conversation? Well, before I forget, you were
(02:08):
a very good student, so thank you.
Yeah. What you have to say when you're
on. Camera Yeah, I know it's good to
be connected with you again. So I'm Rafe Sonnenshine.
I'm the relatively new executivedirector of the John Randolph
Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, which funds research
on governance and democracy in the greater LA region, almost
(02:29):
coming up on our 100th anniversary next year.
And before that, I went out whenyou were my student.
I was still executive director of the Pat Brown Institute for
Public Affairs at Cal State LA, and before that 3 decades
teaching political science at Cal State Fullerton.
So that's me. Well, I know you have a heart
for teaching, but you know for you it doesn't just stay in the
(02:52):
classroom or in academic text. You've also been someone who's
been very hands on, not only working in LA City Hall, but
then also on pressing issues like charter reform.
Could you give a quick overview of some of your different roles,
the hats that you've worn outside of academia as well over
the? Years.
Sure. I've always had one foot in, one
foot out. During my Graduate School years,
I moved to LA from New Haven, CT, where I was in a doctoral
(03:15):
program at Yale, interested in Los Angeles, and ended up
working for Mayor Tom Bradley and for a City Councilman whose
chief deputy was somebody named Maxine Waters, who you all know
is a member of the House, was myboss back then.
Eventually I went into teaching and in the late 90s I got
(03:35):
invited to apply to be executivedirector, a position I'd never
held, for the new appointed Charter Reform Commission.
That was eventually to complete the first complete
transformation of the LA City Charter in 75 years.
And that is when I became a charter geek.
And in addition to my previous work on race and ethnicity and
(03:57):
coalition politics, which is still very close to my heart.
But since then I've really written about and talked about
LA government. It's it's problems, it's
illnesses and it's solutions andit keeps me very occupied.
And here I am at a foundation for whom that's the principal
interest. So what could be bad, as my
(04:18):
mother would have said? Exactly.
Well, and let's start on what makes LA unique when it comes to
governance. I know a lot of people talk
about it being really challenge,challenging to govern, and a lot
of people just assume that all cities are the same.
What is unique about LA and whatmakes it challenging to govern?
Well, what makes LA challenging to governing is that LA was set
(04:39):
up to not be like New York City and Chicago.
That's the exact purpose of 20thcentury governance in Los
Angeles, led by the progressive movement with a capital P, which
you learned about in the class that you took with me.
Yes, because the feeling was that New York City and Chicago
were corrupt party machines withparty bosses, which was
certainly true, although there were many virtues in New York
(05:03):
and Chicago that weren't valued when LA government was created.
But they almost created that as an anti Chicago, anti New York
system. They dispersed power instead of
keeping power concentrated. So in New York, the mayor is
everything. There's sort of a City Council.
Chicago has sort of a City Council, but everybody knows the
(05:25):
voice that really matters is thevoice of the mayor.
But when you came out to LA, where I came out in the 1970s, I
actually loved it, as difficult as it was, because there were so
many openings for a new person to get involved.
And I used to tell students likeyourself, this is a place where
anybody can find their way into City Hall.
I walked into City Hall in 1974 a month after I arrived, and at
(05:49):
the end of that month I was working for Tom Bradley.
That could never have happened in New York and Chicago, where
they would basically say, who doyou know?
Or somebody famously said in Chicago, don't send me nobody.
Nobody sent. That's just not the story.
I was a stranger and got hired, but the dispersal meant there's
(06:11):
an amazing number of veto pointsof independent political forces
that can push back against even the strongest mayor.
And I probably worked for the strongest mayor, Tom Bradley.
And Tom Bradley had to deal witha very powerful City Council.
It had a lot of authority. Unlike the New York and Chicago
case, the LA County Board of Supervisors independently
(06:33):
elected, controlling social services in New York City.
The mayor controls those social services.
You had the Board of Education independently elected and the
voters always tell the mayor fixthe schools and the mayor says
absolutely I'm going to do that,no question.
Then they get in and find out they can't because it's
independent. You have all sorts of sub
(06:54):
governments. 87 other cities in LA County along with the city of
LA, you have unincorporated territory.
To me it always reminded me of amenagerie.
Some people would call it worse than a menagerie, but what I
loved about it was that there were so many different people
who could bring their voices to the table.
(07:15):
What I didn't love about it is there some issues where it's
really hard to get anything donewithout collaboration among
these areas of governance. So we're only as good as our
diplomatic ability. No one person can tell everybody
what to do. I love those examples that you
gave. And for anyone who gripes about
(07:37):
the fragmented nature of LA governance, it's also easy to
look to those East Coast cities and and recognize that
centralization doesn't solve allyour problems.
Right? Those endless veto points are
frustrating, but you still have political divisions and
disagreements regardless of the structure and and the devolution
of power. Is that fair to say?
Yeah, and let's put it this way.Being mayor of any of the three
largest cities of the country, New York, Chicago, and Los
(08:00):
Angeles, you're probably best off thinking of it as your
career ender rather than your career beginning, because it
should top off your career. Like, this will be Karen Bass's
last job. She knows that she's had many
wonderful positions in government before, around the
country, in the House and in Sacramento.
But the best way to be a mayor of these three cities is to say
(08:22):
I'm going to knock it out of thepark now.
Not as a stepping stone to something else because
everyone's going to be mad at meby the time I leave, but it's
phenomenally exciting because you're dealing with some of the
most ingrained problems the system can possibly have.
Examples being homelessness, crime, housing.
(08:44):
And everybody's in your face because they see you.
They see you when you're walkingaround.
They that's what local government is all about, which
is what I love about local government.
But true, in New York, you can get great things done.
You can also make absolutely catastrophic mistakes if there's
nobody to hold you back, nobody to tell you no.
(09:05):
So it's a wild ride no matter what you do.
Now, by the way, it's a much Wilder ride in Chicago and New
York. And the reason is those are much
more political cities than Los Angeles.
Let's talk about that, the political culture of LA because
there's the structural pieces toit, but there's also just a
cultural somewhat lack of engagement.
As one example, you know, the public affairs firm I used to
(09:26):
work at, we had a New York headquarters where the firm is
based. And then I was at the LA
satellite office. And we would often talk about
how just when it came to, for some example of something like
press in New York, you had dozens of papers you could pitch
and different folks on differentboroughs or ethnic groups or
different subtopics versus in LAis like after the LA Times,
there's a pretty big fall off. There's other great reporters
out there, but the culture of consuming news and and studying
(09:49):
local government and knowing whoyour local players were, there's
a huge, massive gap. Can you speak to that in LA?
Oh, heck yeah. I mean, I, I lived in, grew up
in New Jersey and lived in Manhattan after college, and
there were probably 3 or 4 newspapers on a daily basis.
You can get a morning paper, youget an afternoon paper.
Different ideologies. And they all want to know what
(10:10):
the mayor was doing. So if the mayor went to the
Yankee game, all the cameras were there because the mayor was
at the Yankee game. If they went to the Mets game,
then you had a big battle whether it should be the Mets or
the Yankees. The mayor was the most important
cultural figure in the city. Now you've been around LA to
know about Jared, that there's alot of cultural figures that are
(10:31):
bigger than the mayor of Los Angeles.
You know, like, yes, a center ofAmerican.
Culture right here. Kim Kardashian draws a lot more
names than Karen Bass or any other mayor.
Yeah. Well, back in 1961, a scholar
named Charles Mayo studied Los Angeles government, and he said
something that I think is reallyquite wonderful.
He said it's a disconnected political system.
(10:53):
There's much more concern if Koufax has a bad night at Dodger
Stadium than if something goes wrong at City Hall.
It's as true now as it was then,except around crises like the
wildfire or policing issues where suddenly it explodes on a
day-to-day basis. The mayor can travel around
(11:15):
town. When I wrote my first book on
Tom Bradley, it took me forever to get an interview with him.
And I finally just said, can I just ride with you for a day?
And they stuck me in the back ofa little sedan with three staff
members and Tom Bradley sitting in front reading the newspaper
and not even talking to me and me passing my micro, my tape
(11:35):
recorder back and forth. And occasionally I could get a
good answer out of him. And I thought to myself, if this
was the mayor of New York, I'd be.
So I'd be in three cars with reporters everywhere taking
pictures. And Tom Bradley could go and
spend a whole day. It was his day in South, what
was then called South Central LA.
So it's a much more down to earth political culture.
(11:58):
It's sometimes has a little bit of a small town politics
quality. People do have a sense to know
who these elected officials are.But at the same time, part of
his governance, the county Boardof Supervisors, nobody knows
who's in charge of it because ithas this archaic system which is
now, as you and I will discuss about to be transformed by
(12:19):
Measure G passed in November. If something goes wrong, who do
you blame? You've got 5 supervisors.
Nobody's in charge. So if you ask the voters, they
might have a complaint about thefoster care system, but they
don't have a politician to focuson about it.
They just focus on the problems with the people in foster care.
(12:40):
Yeah. So it's the structure does
reduce political visibility because we tend to be a society
politically that focuses on executives, the president, the
governor, the mayor, and there'sa lot of other players in the
system. And sometimes people just throw
up their hands. But a lot of it is that in many
(13:01):
ways, despite all the problems LA has, it's always been a place
where people pursue the good life.
I live in Santa Monica, not far from Rand.
Again, where where you or my student?
What were we about four blocks from the ocean in that class?
I used to teach a class at SantaMonica College and the kids
(13:22):
would bring their surfboards. Now, by the way, it was very
hard to get them to pay attention to the separation of
powers on a really nice day. But there's something to that,
which is the weather, the culture.
All these things are very engaging.
Who is a bigger celebrity if you're out shopping and a person
(13:42):
who walks in is a starting guardon the LA Lakers or your City
Council member? Yeah, the City Council members
kind of important, quite important.
But the other guy's a Laker, forGod's sake.
I mean, you don't need to be a Kardashian to be a celebrity in
LA So I guess I think that it's because there's so many other
(14:06):
things going. Now, New York, of course, has
many other things going, but a long tradition of the mayor
being one of those celebrities being sort of because their
dominance in the system is so great.
Well, let's, let's talk about charter reform.
You said you're a charter geek. And right now we're living
through really important charterreforms.
(14:27):
There's, you know, there's an issue that's been going on
several years now at the city level and like you just said,
but in light of the Measure G atthe county level as well.
And can you just talk about how important this period is?
Because in my mind, charter reform is like, it's like
Haley's Comet, like maybe you see it once, maybe twice in your
lifetime. To have it simultaneously
happened at the city and the county level simultaneously is
absurd. It's truly unbelievable, and as
(14:47):
an expert on charters, I feel a little bit like an expert on
butterflies and nobody can possibly want to talk to me
about butterflies unless there'sa butterfly invasion for all the
butterflies that disappeared. Then suddenly they say, get
sunshine on the phone so we can talk about what happened to the
butterflies. Charters usually emerge and
(15:09):
governance reform emerges from catastrophe.
So in our case, the 1990s, when I was first the charter person,
was the episode was the years ofthe Rodney King beating, the
civil unrest, the attempt of theSan Fernando Valley and the LA
harbor to break away and cut thecity in half, which would have
(15:30):
been a catastrophe. There was all this going on and
what the feeling was, the only way to save the city is to
reform the government. That's what it took to get the
energy for that to happen. There really has been a long
vacuum for the last 30 years of that kind of reform in LA
because there hasn't been something that quite qualifies.
(15:54):
Now we got one, which oddly enough was a surreptitiously
recorded set of discussions at abuilding in Los Angeles where
three LA council members and a labor leader were disparaging
especially African Americans, but in their crudeness basically
(16:14):
went out there just about everybody was almost not a group
they didn't have time for in this discussion.
It blew up and immediately it focus became City Hall because
of the three council members andthere became a huge movement to
change the redistricting system because this is all about
redistricting. It was about which ethnic group
(16:36):
should have priority in redistricting.
I was one of a group of academics who were called upon
by local philanthropy to developan agenda for the City Council
and with the City Council, and alot of it got passed by the
voters, especially redistricting.
So that follows the typical pattern.
The surprising part is that thiswave was so strong that a level
(17:02):
of government that almost never spends 5 minutes on serious
reform, which is county government, got drawn in and a
couple of members of the supervisors board decided to
take a huge leap and reform the county government more
dramatically than the city government.
I don't think there isn't a little bit of, you know, kind of
(17:25):
competition between county and city.
We're not going to get left behind on this.
Reform. And for context, how long had it
been since the last major countycharter reform, roughly?
Never. In 1855, the structure of the LA
County government was as follows.
Five elected supervisors with executive and legislative
(17:48):
authority in 2024. The structure of LA County
government is five elected supervisors with legislative and
executive authority. So during that time, LA adopted
four or five charters. Finally, the big one in 1925.
Then a big reform in 99, the onethat I was involved in changing
(18:09):
the power of the mayor, but it was always a mayor council
system. It wasn't a fundamentally
changed system. There are 58 counties in Los
Angeles. 57 of them have the identical system to Los Angeles.
You're saying cities, right, Notcounties, Yeah.
Did I say cities? OK.
Are you saying counties? You said 58 counties within Los
Angeles, Yeah. Yeah, counties in California,
(18:32):
Yeah. Yeah, 58 counties in California,
57 of them have the exact same system that LA County has had
since 1855. One of them is different because
San Francisco is a combined county city.
I don't think that counts because that goes way, way back.
That's that's deep in history. So by some miracle, you'd have
(18:55):
to assume that the perfect system of government for a local
government is five elected supervisors with executive and
legislative authority. Weirdly, Jared, in the 1910s and
1920s, cities around the countryexperimented with that system
with a different name. It was called the Commission
(19:16):
system because of a flood in Galveston, TX.
That was resolved all the damagebecause they created a
Commission. So everybody put let's create a
Commission. Yeah.
It was such a bad system that almost every city except
Portland, OR abandoned it almostimmediately.
But thank God for our counties, they held on to it forever.
(19:38):
So we have a Commission system. So when people in east side of
Altadena did not receive emergency warnings and that's
where most of the deaths occurred in the fire.
Altadena is what's called an unincorporated territory of the
county. It's not a city even though
people think it is. So it's dependent on the county
(19:59):
to this day. No one's been able to figure out
why E Altadena did not receive that notification.
At the same time, the city of LAhas been embroiled in angry
battles between and among the mayor, the Fire Chief, the City
Council, everybody, because it'sassumed that somebody there is
(20:21):
going to be accountable. Usually the mayor with with the
wildfire situation, so long way of saying it's astonishing.
Now to give you another sidelight on my job, 49 years
ago, the John Randolph Haynes and Dora Haynes Foundation, my
employer, financed its own Commission on county charter
(20:44):
reform because the county was setting up yet another
Commission that was going to go nowhere.
When the Haynes Foundation set up its own Commission, the
county closed down its Commission and everybody went
with the Haynes Commission and that Commission proposed an
elected County Executive and a nine member Board of
Supervisors, the exact measure 49 years later that voters
(21:09):
approved in November. So I would put it this way,
don't ever think a good deed will never be rewarded.
It just 49 years for it to happen.
Ironically, a couple of people who worked on that report are
still around, you know, in retirement.
So it's pretty incredible. So it gives me, it gives me hope
(21:31):
for some of my Rand reports. I still have, you know, 45 years
or so until to see whether or not they make an impact.
Yeah. You're just starting, you're not
even 49 years old, so you've gotto have youth another 49 years
to see. It does prove the public policy
can be like that. There were people who proposed
the equivalent of Social Security decades before 1935 in
(21:52):
various forms. It takes forever.
But what's so odd is it we're watching this in real time
happen in November, and I'm finding this report on our shelf
that we didn't even remember we had.
And there it was. So.
But the odds of it happening were very slim.
It got turned down by the votersa bunch of times, partly because
(22:14):
they carved it up into pieces that were incomprehensible.
But the wave of reform was so strong this time that it it, it
won not by a lot. I was watching on election
night. You know, everybody else is
watching all the other returns. I'm watching the nerd fest,
which is Measure GI Feel like I'm the only person in
(22:35):
California who's watching it. And they're down by a few
points. And I'm saying, don't get your
hopes up. This is yeah, it always dies.
It always dies. Then they pick up a few points,
Then they pick up a few more points.
They go into the lead and somehow in these elections, once
you go into the lead, it sort ofnever goes back.
(22:56):
And it kept adding and adding and adding and it wins.
Wow. Well, so for if you're an
average voter, right, and maybe in the cases of East Altadena,
these other cases, the nature ofcounty government impacts your
life. But for most people in an
average day, they don't think about county government or
county services. If things go well in charter
(23:16):
reform, what tangible impacts orchanges do you think people in
Los Angeles would notice, whether they're in
unincorporated territory or justanyone who votes in LA County
elections? Well, it's a great question
because a few things should happen.
In an ideal world, the elected executive that I call an
executive, not not an elected mayor, people are going to start
(23:37):
calling them a county mayor. They're not quite a mayor.
They're different than a mayor because the the departments of
the county are just gigantic social service machines that
that elected executive is going to have to get their arms around
us. Now, LA City has lots of
departments, but the whole job of the mayor is not managing
(23:58):
those departments. There's a lot of other pieces of
what the mayor does. The county executives really got
to spend a lot of time because if something goes wrong in
foster Care now you're going to have somebody to blame.
The buck is going to stop somewhere.
That will startle the voters. I think because you said
something about being aware of county government or county
services. People are a lot more aware of
(24:21):
county services than of county government.
They're not. I'm not even sure they think of
the services as part of the government because the
department's public health, foster care, mental health,
they're like governments unto themselves.
Practically, people have a feeling about it.
Probably not a very +1 because very often the people who
utilize the county services are not in a good economic situation
(24:45):
and may be in desperate need of those services.
And the last thing they're thinking about is how am I going
to support somebody for office who's going to help help me deal
with this issue I'm having? They're really dealing with much
more immediate things. What I'm hoping is that this
will open up the county a lot more because to be a successful
(25:06):
elected executive, you're going to have to talk to a lot of
people about a lot of things that have tended to kind of fall
through the cracks in the countygovernment just the way a mayor
does. Even though I'm not going to
call them a mayor, but it's kindof what an executive does.
If nothing else, I think people will have a much better
understanding of what the countydoes because in many ways, for
(25:30):
better or for worse, the people who educate or mis educate us
about government are the electedexecutives because they talk the
most. And talking is a big part of
educating. In fact, you really can't be a
successful elected executive unless you're out there talking,
talking about what's going on, talking about the system,
explaining it. So I don't have the answer to
(25:54):
all of it. I think it'll be quite
interesting for people in unincorporated territory.
Yeah, who usually are the stepchildren of the county
system? In addition, having 9
supervisors instead of five cutsin half the size of the
districts. Yeah, right now there are 2
million people in one district. Now there'll be a little more
(26:15):
than 1,000,000. Yeah.
It's still a lot of people, but it's 50% more attention for you.
And your supervisor is no longeran administrator.
Yeah, with executive authority over departments.
Their job is to keep you in mindall the time.
It's going to be more of a representative job.
(26:36):
Somebody once said, maybe I forgot who it was, that when you
go off to the county supervisorsafter being an elected council
member in LA, you become more powerful and more forgettable
because nobody knows what you'redoing.
Yeah, if you're. A City Council member, You don't
have nearly the power of a supervisor, but everybody knows
who you are in your district, and they come and they yell at
(26:58):
you. Yeah.
You know, if there's things theydon't like, they they'll throw
you out of office. So those offices will be more
visible and yet less powerful. Yeah, that's OK, because power
without visibility is not very good for people's civic
engagement. Yeah, I want to pivot a little
(27:20):
bit. You talked about people who are
in need of county services oftenbeing desperate for that.
And I know during COVID at the Pat Brown Institute, you did
research on the state of the working class in Southeast LA
and how different people were faring.
And one question I have for you is someone who's thought a lot
about the makeup of LA and how different people are faring
across the county is what do youthink of when you think about
(27:41):
the future of the working class in LA?
Because early you talked about people come to LA for the good
life and we think about the glitz and glamour version of
that. But for a lot of Angelenos, it's
a much more like nuts and bolts,just kind of like place for
economic opportunity. You know, they're not seeking
Hollywood. They're seeking a good job and a
place to live and good weather and a nice lifestyle.
But since COVID, between price inflation and, you know, housing
(28:04):
going up 20 plus percent or whatever, it seems like it's the
working class is in really toughspot and will be for the
foreseeable future in that LA isnot the bastion of opportunity
that it used to be. Can you speak to that and how
you think about what things are going to look like going
forward? It's a great question.
You know, there's a lot of different types of, of
experiences in LA. One is the person from the
(28:26):
Midwest who got tired of the cold weather and came out here
and think they're in paradise basically.
And weather's nice. And in the days when housing
costs were a lot lower, you know, in the 40s and 50s, they,
they got a small house somewhere.
There's a whole history in the African American community of
this being one of the biggest home ownership communities for
(28:48):
African Americans in the 1930s, Yeah, when it was very rare and
people migrated from the South for for that good life.
A lot of the working class struggles are indeed now people
who came for economic opportunity.
Very often immigrants and went into industries that were were
(29:10):
difficult were with difficult jobs with low wages.
But their goal in places like SELA was to have a time when their
children could have a better life.
It wasn't so much them having the better life as their
children having a better life. We know that Cal States,
including where I taught to my school, Cal State of LA, my
(29:31):
former school was the number onesite in the country for upward
mobility of their students. Wow.
And also had one of the largest immigrant populations and 1st
generation populations in California, maybe in the
country. So there's a difference between
coming so one can enjoy the goodlife or what appeared to be the
(29:54):
good life in Southern Californiaversus as you say, coming for
economic opportunity. And when that opportunity is
restricted, when tariffs hit Southern California, they're
going to hit, they're hitting the port, the port of Long Beach
and Los Angeles. Those are a lot of those are
blue collar jobs, including trucking and warehousing.
(30:14):
It's going to have a very big impact.
It's going to be very difficult for people.
So I think it is important to say who's good life and for a
lot of people it's the good lifeof their children.
And I think that's that's where the class difference is really,
really sort of shine and and come out in Los Angeles.
(30:36):
It's as the economy was doing well over the last few years.
You know, LA, you know, had somereal resurgence of employment
and wages were going up, but still it wasn't keeping up with
housing costs. Yeah.
So I'm not sure what, you know, housing.
We all know we have to build a lot more housing.
(30:57):
It's our governance system makesit really hard to do that
because there's so many veto points.
Yeah. With so many governments with 88
cities, you know, each with their own desire for land use
control, housing is really the crisis.
But now, if the economy goes into a recession, the people at
the working class level will experience it the worst.
(31:21):
It'll hit them the hardest. And it, you know, there's A at
least a decent chance that that's on the horizon, or at
least an economy that's not verysolid because it's good one day,
not so good the next day. Yeah, depending on the whims in
Washington. So it's a tough time.
It's a really tough time right now.
(31:42):
Yeah. Well, that's helpful to think
about because I think like you're saying, whose dream?
I think it is important. And there's a perception of LA
that the rest of the country has, that the rest of the world
has as the global city of Hollywood and excitement on the
beach. But I mean, I grew up in the
Inland Empire and there's other parts of the Southern California
region that's much more, yeah, blue collar or working class or
(32:05):
people who are just looking for,hoping for a home with a yard
and a nice life and a quality existence.
So it's helpful to think about that.
Well, it's also interesting. It's becoming kind of a dividing
line in the Democratic Party. Yeah.
If you've noticed, there were some articles recently about
Antonio Villaraigosa running andhoping to be running against
Kamala Harris, who I think, I think he he will not defeat.
(32:29):
But his argument is that he represents the people in the
second group, which is people who are struggling economically
and and don't really have time for a lot of the issues that
animate better off Democrats, etcetera.
And he's trying to pigeonhole Harris as being in that
category. I don't know that it'll work,
but it's kind of a debate going on in the party right now.
(32:53):
Now, personally, I think intraparty debates are a
complete waste of time and that they ought to just say there's
plenty of room for both points of view because all the public
picks up is you're not doing well because you're a losing
team that whose locker room is filled with recrimination.
But nobody's asking my advice onthat except you.
So But I think, you know, Los Angeles is such an interesting
(33:21):
place because LA survives partlyby its portrayal of itself.
Even the worst stuff is actuallygrist for the latest iteration
of Harry Bosch, you know, which is AI don't know if you've seen
in a wonderful series about an LA detective.
(33:41):
And the scenes are shot at places where I've eaten lunch,
you know, maybe ate that day. And, you know, this whole noir
thing of LA is also marketable. People sell books.
They sell movies. You go overseas and you say
you're from California and. And they'll say things now.
(34:02):
They say the fires, the fires, you know, and other times
they'll say the Lakers, the Lakers, you know, it's sort of
all over the place. Yeah, but that's part of the
history of LA, which is LA was not a natural site for a city.
So in order to build the great city, the idea was to encourage
people to move from the Midwest.So they said that land is cheap,
(34:26):
which it was. This is in the 1870s and 1880s.
They could get free rail travel out there because the railroads
wanted people to be out there sothat more people would come
visit them on the railroads. And then when they get there and
they found a kind of a dusty town, not a lot of services, not
quite New York and Chicago. But now they're committed.
(34:47):
They're there. And then they begin to tell
everybody it's heaven. Yeah.
The land is dirt cheap, so come on out.
And the theory being if more people come out, it will become
great. Yeah.
But to get them to come out, it has to kind of be great.
So there is this mixed thing of kind of feast and famine about
(35:09):
what is LA. Yeah.
And you just after a while, you just live with it, you know,
catastrophe followed by fabulous, incredible things.
And I don't know any other placein the country, maybe in the
world that that is like that. But people think they know all
about LA, who have never set foot here.
They know everything about it. They in the 90s, they knew it
(35:32):
was all gang violence in then something changed and they
thought something else about it.In the 40s, it was the movies
and Hollywood. Yeah.
So it's, I've always been struckby how the culture and the
economy are sort of bigger than politics and government in many
(35:54):
ways. Yeah.
And then government sort of breaks in at team moments.
Obviously, government still keeps the lights on.
I mean, they're still operating.Yeah, but government's not
dominant as it is where I grew up in New Jersey and New York,
where knowing the mayor was kindof the key to everything.
You know, the mayor, maybe you got a shot.
(36:15):
Yeah. Otherwise, don't send me nobody.
Nobody. So.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly.
Well, I've two more questions towrap up.
And 1 is that you talked about the waves of what people
identify with LA on the negativeside recently, a lot of people
identify homelessness as one of the things with LA and earlier
talking about levels of desire for change in City Hall, in
(36:38):
county government. Obviously, there was kind of the
scandals with the tape recordingand other things like that.
But I think of frustration with homelessness, particularly after
voters approved big measures to fund, you know, housing of
different types, affordable housing, and not seeing a
massive increase. That seems to be like one of the
major issues that people are most frustrated with when it
comes to LA governance. Do you see that issue
(37:01):
meaningfully changing in the next 5-10 years, or what will it
take to see major progress? I do.
For one thing, astonishingly, voters again approved a very
large ballot measure, Measure A,to provide substantial funding
for addressing homelessness. It's it's, it's a very big deal.
So on the one hand, voters are very distraught about
(37:23):
homelessness. Oddly enough, there's been some
progress made, and sometimes making some progress is even
more frustrating because then you think, how come we can't do
the whole thing? There's been some recent
developments where the city and county have collaborated a bit
and there's more of a focus on metrics, on really measuring
(37:46):
things correctly. Because if you don't do that,
imagine if you were doing the COVID crisis as public health
and you don't know how many people have tested positive.
You have to know the state of things, and I think they finally
made some progress on that. Now they're under a lot of
external pressure. The governor who's obviously
thinking of running for president is, you know, talking
(38:09):
about eliminating all encampments, homelessness.
That's a very popular position, not that easy to carry out.
The city has been reducing the encampments by quite a bit, and
that helps, helps in areas like Venice and a few other areas.
They're going to have to move faster, and I think that the
(38:30):
wildfire, of course, took everybody off.
The progress that was being madeon homelessness.
I actually think the next year could be a promising one on this
because of the new funding, the better data structure they're
using. They've got some good governance
structures in place between the city and county.
(38:51):
I'm modestly hopeful I'll take it.
I'm willing to go. I'm sure other voters will take
that as well. I'll take modestly hopeful
after. Yeah, that's something.
It's something that could be worse.
OK, well I I realize we're at time and the conversation I
always like to rather the question I like to end
conversations on is, is what gives you hope for the future of
California. Well.
(39:12):
It it's just impossible not to, you know, because California has
always had crisis, tragedy, hopeand success and all kinds of
things. And I figure we're due, you
know, I think it's time for another round of some good
things happening. Somehow.
The Olympics have a way of focusing the mind, you know, and
sort of around something that actually people kind of kind of
(39:36):
agree on, that sports is one of the few things where your effort
is really rewarded and measured.Whoever does the best wins.
It's a great way to show off theLA region because unlike
everywhere else, you could have things in 20 different venues,
as happened in 1984, and get kind of a tour of the region.
(39:57):
So I think the next few years, if we can get through the next
few years, I mean, there's a lotgoing on in the country that I
don't have to tell you. It is very, very perilous.
LA is due for some good times. It's it's time.
I love it. It's like baseball, right?
You're due, right? And the player's not.
Showy hasn't hit a Homer and a few at bats?
Then why not? Yeah, well, when I used to go to
(40:19):
Yankee games with my dad and my brothers, Yogi Berra would get
up Yankee, great Yankee catcher and hasn't been doing very well.
And my dad would lean over and said Yogi's due and you don't
most always get a hit, so we're due.
LA's do well. Rafe, thank you so much for your
time. I think so highly of you.
I think back to your class often.
I just had fun pulling out your old book.
(40:40):
Yeah. You mentioned it earlier and
you're talking about getting therecordings with, with Mayor
Bradley. So I appreciate you taking time
to speak with me today and, and enlightening me and, and the
listeners on on LA governance. And congratulations on your
podcast. I'm really thrilled for you.
And I think it's going to be I'll become a a watcher and
listener to your program. Wonderful.
(41:01):
Thank you so much, Rafe. OK, Jared.
Bye bye.
Popular Podcasts
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.
24/7 News: The Latest
The latest news in 4 minutes updated every hour, every day.
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.