Are Zoos Better Than Malls?
Billionaire Politician Rick Caruso Doesn't Think So
There was recently an article in the New York Times Magazine about the rebuilding of the Pacific Palisades after January’s fires in Los Angeles. Prominently featured in the piece was Rick Caruso, the mall magnate who’s both an unofficial mayor of the Palisades and an attempted actual mayor of Los Angeles, having lost the most recent election to current Mayor Karen Bass.
When visiting Caruso at his office in the Grove, the outdoor mall cosplaying as the downtown from Hulu’s Paradise, the article’s writer Jesse Barron caught Caruso in a minor hot mic moment of sorts.
Making small talk before the interview, I mentioned that my girlfriend and I had recently taken our 2-year-old son to the zoo. “The L.A. Zoo is a dump,” Caruso said cheerfully.
Caruso has never particularly bothered me—he mostly reads like the proprietor of an overpriced Beverly Hills restaurant, greeting every customer with a warm handshake and a promise of the best table in the house—but this comment really rubbed me the wrong way. It was an offhand remark but Barron shrewdly identified its implications. He writes:
“The L.A. Zoo is a dump” would actually be a fair gloss of Caruso’s politics, and his appeal. It captured the frustration that many voters felt about deteriorating street conditions and city services, a frustration that the fires only intensified. Caruso offered a pleasing alternative. His malls were a sanitized, functional, scaled-down replica of city life.
It’s a smart analysis but, in my opinion, too generous to Caruso, for one simple reason: the Zoo is not, in fact, a dump. It’s not the Grove so there’s no valet parking or vocal standards blasted through the speakers and both the lion and bear seem to have rather suddenly died in the last couple years, but people like the Zoo. Caruso did not accidentally speak a truth believed by a silent majority of Angelenos as much as reveal a very rich man’s smug contempt for a popular public institution.
There appear to be some governance issues with the Zoo, which has been embroiled in a bitter but confusing feud with the nonprofit that has managed its fundraising for the last six decades, but I don’t think that’s what Caruso was talking about. As my wife and I spent a lovely day last week with our daughter at a totally packed Zoo, I couldn’t stop thinking about what it was about the place that would make Rick Caruso think it’s a dump.
I don’t know when he was last at the Zoo—it’s quite close to the Americana, his mall-but-you-can-also-live-there in Glendale—but if he’s visited any time in the last ten years I’ve been taking my kids, Caruso would surely see what we always see: a diverse clientele of families that looks a lot like the population of the city he wants to serve as mayor. (Or maybe it’s governor now? According to the Times Magazine piece, Caruso is “keeping his options open.”) Also: a snow leopard!
The parents we saw at the Zoo last week certainly didn’t think they were taking their kids to a “dump.” The Zoo has 1,700 animals and interactive exhibits and knowledgeable staff members and volunteers roaming around to share interesting animal facts with enthusiastic six-year-olds who can then shout those facts to every other child who wanders by, making sure they, too, know that, “Cheetahs don’t live in the American rainforest, that’s a jaguar!”
Families love the Zoo because kids love animals and schools in LA seem to have a day off every two weeks, but also because going to the Zoo is relatively affordable. For $150 a year, you can take however many kids and grandkids you have to the Zoo as many times as you want. Unlike the Grove, the parking is always free.
There’s certainly a segment of the electorate who thinks that services provided by the private sector are inherently superior to services provided by the public sector. (They’re called Republicans.) For these voters, perhaps Caruso has “appeal.” The profit motive is certainly great for building nice things, which Caruso’s developments undoubtedly are. But nicer doesn’t always mean better.
Take the summer camp at the Zoo. It’s definitely not the fanciest day camp in LA but it might be the hardest to get into. Every weeklong session of the summer is typically fully enrolled within a few hours—a Zoom webinar that promised an early access code for registration for this summer had more than 700 attendees.
Basic market economics would suggest that the Zoo should be charging more for camp or at least raising money for the Zoo by offering parents used to paying extra to skip their kids to the front of every line the opportunity to do so. But the camp is a public service offered by the City of Los Angeles—so fairness matters.
In that spirit, any child lucky enough to snag a spot at camp will be accommodated. It may not be cost-effective for the camp to employ a full-time inclusion specialist to allow kids with disabilities, including autism, to access the same experiences offered to their typical peers, but it’s definitely a nice thumb in the eye of America’s addled health minister and his ableist agenda.
In many cases, private services are able to operate according to lower standards than public ones. To give one salient example, a public fire department cannot choose to protect only the richest guy’s house. Public schools aren’t allowed to curate their student body—they have to educate every child who walks through their doors, whatever their disabilities and deficits might be. Even with that advantage, private schools aren’t always better than public schools—all of the money donated to Caruso’s beloved USC to give rich kids fake spots on sports teams hasn’t catapulted the private institution past its public rival, UCLA.
Is the Grove “better” than the Zoo? Caruso’s malls do have shockingly clean public bathrooms—his entire platform for mayor should honestly just be “Caruso-style bathrooms on every corner.” Even so, I’d still take the seatless chrome toilets and doorless stalls in Griffith Park over living in a city that looked and felt like the Grove.