With the 2018 legislative session now concluded —Governor Brown’s last—share your assessment of its notable public accomplishments for the state of California and your Los
(Editor’s Note from David Abel; on Wednesday, August 17, leaders of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative and a representative array of community leaders met with Mayor Eric Garrett in
Darrell Steinberg, Mayor-elect of Sacramento, is the biggest cheerleader for his city. Steinberg served on the City Council, in state Assembly, and was the California Senate
Southern California Edison recently decided to shut down the San Onofre nuclear power plant after trouble with faulty generators. This month, The Planning Report consulted Long
Crossposted on The Planning Report Bruce Katz is the director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institute, which “aims to provide decision makers
Cross-posted at Planning Report.
Author, internationally-recognized authority on global, economic, political and social trends, and a frequent TPR contributor, Joel Kotkin has recently been studying the economic recovery of regions and cities. What he has found may surprise the most ardent city of Los Angeles apologist: the West Coast’s largest city has been outperformed during the recession and over the past decade in the U.S. in almost every possible category of prosperity. In the following TPR interview, Kotkin details L.A.’s decade of secular decline, while also noting that, with adult leadership, a path to economic competitiveness is still open.
You have been speaking and writing about regions and metropolitan areas for some time. You have focused recently on L.A.’s position vis-à-vis other regions around the globe and in the United States. How well is L.A. doing?
L.A. is in the midst of a secular decline, which can be reversed, but before we reverse a decline, we have to know what the problems are and where we stand. You can read accounts by organizations like the LAEDC—the last effective business group in town—and have no sense that time is running out. There is very little public discussion or recognition of what’s going on. Not that we were unique in suffering from the recession, but we have actually underperformed compared with both our old rivals and some new ones over the past decade.