Journal of Urban History

Journal of Urban History http://juh.sagepub.com/ ''Public Benefits from Public Choice'' : Producing Decentralization in Metropolitan Los Angeles, 1954 −1973 Michan Andrew Connor Journal of Urban History 2013 39: 79 originally published online 9 November 2012 DOI: 10.1177/0096144212463544 The online version of this article can be found at: http://juh.sagepub.com/content/39/1/79 Published by: http://www.sagepublications.com On behalf of: The Urban History Association Additional services and information for Journal of Urban History can be found at: Email Alerts: http://juh.sagepub.com/cgi/alerts Subscriptions: http://juh.sagepub.com/subscriptions Reprints: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsReprints.nav Permissions: http://www.sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav >> Version of Record - Nov 27, 2012 OnlineFirst Version of Record - Nov 9, 2012 What is This? Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on January 11, 2013 JUHXXX10.1177/0096144212463544Journal of Urban HistoryConnor 4635442013 Journal of Urban History 39(1) 79 –100 “Public Benefits from Public © 2013 SAGE Publications Reprints and permission: http://www. Choice”: Producing sagepub.com/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/0096144212463544 Decentralization in Metropolitan http://juh.sagepub.com Los Angeles, 1954–1973 Michan Andrew Connor1 Abstract Emergent public choice theory and innovations in suburban local government worked together to create and justify greater inequality among metropolitan places in postwar Los Angeles County. This article examines public choice theory and suburban home rule as mutually depen- dent components of suburbanization. Theorists praised postwar metropolitan fragmentation, challenging a prior consensus for metropolitan political and economic integration. Local governments under the “Lakewood Plan” obtained public services by contract from Los Angeles County at covertly subsidized prices, making government in new suburbs cost effective at the expense of older municipalities. The governments deployed symbols of suburban “home rule” and public choice principles of efficiency to defend their privileges. Movements to incorporate minority-dominated cities in Watts and East Los Angeles and for the secession of the San Fernando Valley from Los Angeles reflected the dominance of the practice and ideology of localism in California metropolitics. Keywords metropolitan, Los Angeles County, California, Lakewood Plan, public choice theory, localism, intergovernmental relations On March 9, 1954, residents of Lakewood, California, a group of housing subdivisions near the city of Long Beach in southeastern Los Angeles County, voted to incorporate a city of more than 71,000 residents. Lakewood exemplified most of the main currents of the history of postwar American suburbanization: it was mass-produced, financed by federal construction and mortgage programs, sustained by employment in nearby defense industries, connected to the metropolis by networks of highways, and built around a large shopping mall. To the extent that suburbs are local manifestations of federal policy and macroeconomy, Lakewood was like its contemporaries—Levittown or subdivisions of the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles— exemplars of the mode of development Dolores Hayden terms “sitcom suburbs.”1 But more local actions and political movements also shaped the particular form the United States took in 1University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington, TX, USA Corresponding Author: Michan Andrew Connor, University of Texas, Arlington, School of Urban and Public Affairs, Arlington, TX 76010 Email: [email protected] Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on January 11, 2013 80 Journal of Urban History 39(1) Figure 1. Incorporated cities in Los Angeles County, before and after Lakewood’s incorporation in 1954. This map reveals the broad range of suburban municipalities in metropolitan Los Angeles, including the older port city of Long Beach (incorporated in 1897), residential communities such as Lakewood, and the commercial entity of Industry (incorporated in 1957). Source: Map by Joshua Been, University of Texas at Arlington Library, from 1980 Census Boundary File, National Historical GIS, University of Minnesota. becoming a suburban society. Lakewood’s residents and elected officials led a transformation of local government and metropolitan political economy that made Los Angeles County a decentralized, politically fragmented, and fiscally unequal metropolitan area and crafted political and ideological frameworks that encouraged similar fragmentation nationwide. Lakewood’s incorporation positioned the new city at the intersection of two transformative metropolitan processes. The first process produced a radical shift in the political and social geography of Los Angeles County. The advocates of Lakewood’s incorporation, who became the new city’s political leadership, pioneered a system of contracting with the county government for nearly all public services. This arrangement, which became known as the Lakewood Plan, inspired a rapid wave of new municipal incorporations in Los Angeles County—four new cities in 1956, five in 1957, twenty-six by 1960, and thirty-two new cities with nearly 700,000 residents by 1970 (Figure 1).2 The contract services plan allowed these cities to obtain services far more cheaply, and with much lower municipal property taxes, than older cities that maintained their own fire, police, and sanitation departments. By 1970, the city of Long Beach levied a local Downloaded from juh.sagepub.com at EMORY UNIV on January 11, 2013 Connor 81 property tax of $1.52 per $100 of assessed value, while the adjacent city of Lakewood charged 8 cents, a discrepancy that was quite typical of the system as a whole. California’s Proposition 13, passed in 1978, capped local property taxes at 1 percent of assessed value. But even before the tax revolt, nearly all of the contract cities charged less than half that amount.3 Though the politics of low taxes, particularly in California, have been typically associated with affluent white residential suburbs, the Lakewood Plan offered significant economies to many kinds of suburban cities, including blue-collar suburbs, wealthy residential enclaves, and single-purpose cities incorporated to shelter valuable industrial property from taxation. The economic diversity of these new contract cities reinforces the collective insight of “new suburban historians” that there is no single universal form or process of suburbanization. Despite their social, economic, or environmental differences, though, political interests seeking incorporation in all of these suburbs used the Lakewood Plan to resolve what Robert Self has described as the central political-economic problem of postwar growth: reconciling demand for public services with the distribution of tax burdens.4 The reorganization of metropolitan political and fiscal geography, however, also supported racial segregation at the municipal scale. Within an increas- ingly diverse metropolitan area, new municipal boundaries enclosed communities from which African Americans and working-class Latinos were nearly entirely excluded. Twenty-eight of the thirty-two Lakewood Plan cities had black populations of 1 percent or less in 1970. The strong correlation of racial homogeneity and political fragmentation provoked contemporary public administration scholars to advocate more consolidated metropolitan government, “which would serve the entire area and unite its common advantages for the good of the whole.”5 The Lakewood Plan endured, however, as a model of government that empowered residents of grow- ing suburban areas to reject metropolitan integration in multiple senses of the term. The reorganization of local government under the Lakewood Plan was also connected to a second transformation, that of ideas about metropolitan governance. During the 1950s, even as public administration experts recommended governmental consolidation, a new school of “public choice” theorists advocated thorough decentralization of political, economic, and fiscal con- trol. They disparaged efforts to create integrated metropolitan governments and argued that material inequalities among municipalities in metropolitan areas might be ethically benign and socially useful.6 Public choice ideas, which ultimately became very influential in urban econom- ics, public administration, and political science, had some of their first empirical tests and institutional applications in southern California. There Lakewood’s overlapping roles as a municipality, a residential community, and a symbol of a new suburban way of life provided a platform for local, county, and state officials who benefitted from decentralization to push for more of it, while deflecting serious questions about equitable access to housing and local political representation with rhetoric about freedom of choice and the efficiency of markets as distri- butional mechanisms. Public choice theory produces economistic abstractions of social behavior that are flawed as historical explanations for suburbanization. However, these ideas still demand attention as historical phenomena. Public choice ideas, combined with social and institutional changes, consti- tuted a governing technology that remade Los Angeles County and other metropolitan regions. Local government officials built and implemented this technology through pragmatic compro- mises between theory and practice, creating an “actually existing public choice” in three phases between 1950 and the mid-1970s.7

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