Is the Mayor of LA Doing a Good Job?

And Why Is It So Hard To Tell?

I’m on my third mayor of Los Angeles. By now, I thought I’d be able to form clearer opinions on what kind of job any of them have done. I don’t think it’s my fault—I pay close enough attention that every couple years I even consider running for my local neighborhood council, before being overcome by a deep sadness that I might not be able to garner the 75 or so votes I’d need to win a seat.

There’s plenty of energy at the neighborhood level—I’d bet people on my block have stronger opinions on individual members of our Councilmember’s staff than they have of the mayor. And there are certainly activists and organizers and no shortage of passionate citizens who know what is happening in Los Angeles, even as many of us struggle to understand why political events here unfold as they do.

It’s not that people in Los Angeles don’t care about the politics of the city as a whole, but it can feel impossible to know how best to engage. To paraphrase fictional Angeleno, Quiz Kid Donnie Smith, at the end of Magnolia, we really do have love to give—we just don’t know where to put it.

It’s easy to learn about a city like New York by studying its political institutions—the strong mayors, well-oiled party machines, powerful municipal labor unions, and highly competitive media outlets central to the popular conception of a major American city. In Los Angeles, those same institutions are generally much weaker. As one prime example, Los Angeles has had nonpartisan city elections since 1909—candidates don’t run as members of a political party and there are no party primaries—so strong party organizations have never quite developed here.

It’s tempting, then, to try to understand Los Angeles through its culture—civic education that’s more Joan Didion than The Power Broker. As a result, it can be easy to misread Los Angeles’ political culture as simply an extension of outdated stereotypes of its broader culture: beautiful people disengaged from the ugliness of local politics, more focused on self-actualization than the world around them, an electorate that looks like the line for the juice bar at Erewhon.

It’s a caricature completely divorced from both the lived and demographic reality of Los Angeles, of course, but I’d argue that it still lingers in the popular imagination.

Politics in Los Angeles are no less defined by institutions than any other city—it’s just very hard to make any sense out of them. Here’s political scientist Raphael Sonenshein in The City at Stake: Secession, Reform and the Battle for Los Angeles:

Is it any wonder that around Election Day many Los Angeles residents are not quite certain whether they vote in the City of Los Angeles or one of the other 87 cities in Los Angeles County? Or that local television stations find it uneconomical to cover Los Angeles City Hall when there are so many viewers who are not Los Angeles city residents? How can we be surprised at low voter turnout in city elections when the dispersal of governmental authorities makes it difficult to know who does what?

Yes, most people in Los Angeles don’t live in Los Angeles. And that’s actually the simplest part of all of this.

Los Angeles County has 88 different cities, of which the city of Los Angeles is the oldest and largest, in both size and population—around 3.8 million, or roughly forty percent of the total county population of 9.6 million. The other sixty percent is divided between the other 87 cities and a fun third option, no city at all! About a million people live in unincorporated Los Angeles County, which means that the county provides municipal services, including police and fire.

The city of Los Angeles is in there somewhere.

Oh, and cities can also pay the county for any of the services it provides to unincorporated areas rather than having, for example, their own police department or fire department or library system. A little more than half of the cities in the county don’t have their own fire departments and a little fewer than half don’t have their own police departments, but instead rely on the county to provide those vital services.

Still with me? Because we can’t forget schools. There are eighty school districts in Los Angeles County and thirteen community college districts. Neither the city nor the county has operational control over schools, which are independently governed by elected boards.

This is the “dispersal of government authorities” Sonenshein is referencing: all told, Los Angeles County has 373 different entities collecting taxes, managing services and confusing the living hell out of nearly ten million people. Can you blame us for throwing up our hands and spending twenty dollars on a Hailey Bieber smoothie?

This diffusion of responsibility also extends to the city’s own charter. The mayor shares a lot of power with the City Council, which has maintained the same number of single-member districts since 1925—even as the population of Los Angeles has more than tripled. If there’s one way in which city government lives up to a Los Angeles stereotype, it’s in its persistent denial about its age, still squeezing itself into the same-sized City Council it’s had since it was a much younger and slimmer city.

These internal institutional impediments to political engagement are real—but I don’t think they’re what define politics in Los Angeles today. The charter limits the power of the mayor—which is perhaps what makes it harder to judge him or her—but not the city’s itself. The problem is not really that it’s hard to know who’s in control of Los Angeles—it’s that Los Angeles is barely in control of itself.

That’s because the institution that has come to define the politics of Los Angeles is the constitution of California—amended through statewide ballot initiatives by citizen legislators whose libertarian fantasies have created a nightmare of centralized government.

As local governments have been forced to cede their powers to Sacramento, cities like Los Angeles have less and less of a say in determining their own destinies. It’s been a bad few decades in California for our old friend, subsidiarity, the principle that political decisions should be made closest to where they’ll have the most impact.

Last week, I wrote about New York State’s many efforts to bigfoot New York City—just in time for an actual Bigfoot to emerge from the wilds of Westchester to claim the mayoralty and make poor Kathy Hochul long for the days of Eric Adams. Soon, I’ll share what I’ve learned about California’s ever-increasing hold over Los Angeles, what I think it means for the challenges facing LA and the challenges all cities are likely to face from a hostile federal government.