"A Leftist Wave Is Cresting Across the Country"

"After the last month, Democratic leadership should be seriously taking stock of their position. The energy is on their left. The people are on their left. Democrats want fighters, and they want a politics rooted in the collective struggles of the masses, not decided in smoke-filled rooms. We still need moderate Democrats to win those pesky median voters, for now. But the party's leadership is deeply out of touch with its base."

Ben Davis at The Guardian considers the results of recent primary elections.

As does George Chidi.

"'I Was in Paradise'"

"For Telegraph's record stores, too, the road has been rocky. The shops have faced a procession of existential threats (eBay, MP3s, Napster, Amazon, Spotify—the list goes on), and many have shuttered. Yet, somehow, Amoeba and Rasputin have weathered it all. The latter celebrated its 50th anniversary last year. The two shops share something in common: a commitment to vinyl, the medium that refuses to die."

In a 2022 California article, Coby McDonald tells the story of Berkeley's record stores.

"You Cannot Solve a Problem You're Unwilling to Name"

"But the failures of liberals to adequately address urban crime—or to appreciate its significance—are much less appreciated. Some went so far as to deny that crime was even rising. Others relativized the crime by pointing out that muggings and thefts—however unpleasant—were trivial offenses compared to the greater injustice of systemic racism. Liberals frequently used crime increases as a rationale to advocate for programs they already favored. Increased funding for education, daycare centers, low-income housing, healthcare, and poverty reduction were all said to be necessary parts of a comprehensive crime reduction agenda.  These pieties about root causes have never been helpful. Most people are not interested in long-term solutions to immediate problems caused by muggers, thieves, addicts, and the bedlamite homeless."

John McMillan at Compact warns Democrats about the politics of crime.

As does Michael Powell at The Atlantic.

"The Predictable Result of Public Policy"

"Until then, the term 'homeless' most often referred to people who had lost their homes in natural disasters or wars. But things were beginning to change in the 1970s, when a sequence of seemingly unrelated events conspired to drive people into the streets."

Mitchell Landsberg and Gale Holland at the Los Angeles Times present "[t]he real story of how L.A. became the epicenter of America’s homeless crisis."

"To Put Down Roots and Then Oppose New Development"

"Glaeser and Gyourko go one step further. They hypothesize that as Sun Belt cities have become more affluent and highly educated, their residents have become more willing and able to use existing laws and regulations to block new development. They point to two main pieces of evidence. First, for a given city, the slowdown in new housing development strongly correlates with a rising share of college-educated residents. Second, within cities, the neighborhoods where housing production has slowed the most are lower-density, affluent suburbs populated with relatively well-off, highly educated professionals. In other words, anti-growth NIMBYism might be a perverse but natural consequence of growth: As demand to live in a place increases, it attracts the kind of people who are more likely to oppose new development, and who have the time and resources to do so. 'We used to think that people in Miami, Dallas, Phoenix behaved differently than people in Boston and San Francisco,' Gyourko told me. 'That clearly isn't the case.'"

Rogé Karma at The Atlantic writes that "[t]he Sun Belt, in short, is subject to the same antidevelopment forces as the coasts; it just took longer to trigger them.

"Blame Jane Jacobs"

"Federal guidelines can make the environment more amenable, but the solutions by and large cannot come from central planning; states and cities and towns will need to reform their rules and processes to allow the housing supply to grow where people want to build. The goal of policy makers, in any case, shouldn't be to move Americans to any particular place, or to any particular style of living. They should instead aim to make it easier for Americans to move wherever they would like—to make it equally easy to build wherever Americans' hopes and desires alight."

At The Atlantic, Yoni Appelbaum asks, "Who Killed American Mobility?"

And Derek Thompson points to similar problems in Britain.

"They Saw Fires as Freak Events"

"'It was a period of almost zero environmental consciousness,' said Philip Ethington, a professor of history, political science and spatial sciences at USC. 'They had a poor understanding of the long, long history of fires, and the long ecological necessity of them. The developers didn't want to dwell on the hazards.'"

Jenny Jarvie at the Los Angeles Times tells the "story of how Los Angeles developed itself for disaster."

Even the Stars Are Ill at Ease

"The more complicated answer is that these fires are an especially acute example of something climate scientists have been warning about for decades: compound climate disasters that, when they occur simultaneously, produce much more damage than they would individually. As the climate crisis escalates, the interdependent atmospheric, oceanic and ecological systems that constrain human civilization will lead to compounding and regime-shifting changes that are difficult to predict in advance. That idea formed a guiding theme of the Biden administration's 2023 national climate assessment."

Eric Holthaus at The Guardian writes that "[c]onditions for a January firestorm in Los Angeles have never existed in all of known history, until they now do."

Also at The Guardian, Oliver Wainwright argues that "[t]he city needs greater urban density, not more firebelt bungalows." (At CalMatters, Ben Christopher also questions how L.A. should or should not rebuild, as does Jerusalem Demsas at The Atlantic.)

And Adrian Daub looks to earlier L.A. writers like Mike Davis.

Dan Walters at the Ventura County Star considers the criticism of Gov. Gavin Newsom and Mayor Karen Bass.

And Mark Z. Barabak at the Los Angeles Times criticizes the critics.

"Harnessing the Power of Populist Grievance"

"It didn't matter how badly things went in Philadelphia under Rizzo. His people wanted him because of his hatred and corruption and the chaos that followed him. And they loved him so much that, even after history had left them behind, they wanted his statue across from City Hall and were willing to fight to keep it there.

Jonathan V. Last at The Bulwark calls Frank Rizzo "The First Trump."

And Last asks, "What If Trump Is Right About America?"

"Whose Venice?"

"It's a bit heavy-handed, but I like it because Venice is the kind of place where a lot of myths are true but also where many truths are just well-established myths. It is the cradle of skate and surf culture built on the ruins of an aspirationally European entertainment district. Some also consider it the slum by the sea, a home to everything experimental, creative and countercultural. Equal parts hip hop, punk, soul and rock 'n' roll."

At the Los Angeles Times, Frank Shyong visits the Venice Heritage Museum.

"Wasn't Just Read, However. It Was Devoured"

"'When you judge the work of somebody, it's what the work itself did, the ways it makes us think differently,' said historian William Deverell, director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. 'Equally important: How many ships did it launch? And "City of Quartz" launched so many ships—whether it's dissertations or conferences or articles.'"

Carolina A. Miranda at the Los Angeles Times writes an obituary for Mike Davis.

"A Stain on the Constitution"

"In response, the California Real Estate Assn., the forerunner of today's California Assn. of Realtors, put forward a ballot initiative to amend the Constitution to require a public vote before such housing could be built. The campaign argued that voters should get a say because public housing creates taxpayer debts. The effort also relied heavily on anti-communist and segregationist messaging."

Liam Dillon at the Los Angeles Times reports on efforts Article 34 of the California Constitution.

"Nation Time!"

"Some 26 acts hit the two stages set up on the football field that afternoon, and legend has it way more than that were ready to go on. The great songwriter and singer William Bell (no relation to Al Bell) remembers the long runway to the stage, wire mesh barely keeping the crowd back and how he had to race a block and a half from the dressing room to the stage, so vast was the Coliseum. And when he peeked out, it was 'both frightening and exhilarating, that many people listening to a show that we were very proud of.' Bell sang his aching ballad 'I Forgot to Be Your Lover,' participated in a gospel number and emceed throughout the day. All of it, he says with amazement, whipping by as if it was just a minute."

R.J. Smith at the Los Angeles Times marks the fiftieth anniversary of Wattstax.

Get the Lead Out

"Put all this together and you have an astonishing body of evidence. We now have studies at the international level, the national level, the state level, the city level, and even the individual level. Groups of children have been followed from the womb to adulthood, and higher childhood blood lead levels are consistently associated with higher adult arrest rates for violent crimes. All of these studies tell the same story: Gasoline lead is responsible for a good share of the rise and fall of violent crime over the past half century."

In a 2013 Mother Jones article, Kevin Drum lays out the lead-crime hypothesis.

"A Political Backlash Is Brewing"

"The combative resistance is a harsh turn for a group of leaders whom progressives hailed as an electoral success story. Rising homicide and violent crime rates have even Democrats in liberal cities calling for more law enforcement, not less—forcing prosecutors to defend their policies against their own allies. And traditional boosters on the left aren't rushing to their aid, with some saying they've soured on the officials they once backed."

Astead W. Herndon at The New York Times writes that "[w]ith violent crime rates rising and elections looming, progressive prosecutors are facing resistance to their plans to roll back stricter crime policies of the 1990s."

"Nine of the 10 American Cities with the Largest Black Populations Saw Steep Declines Among African Americans Over the Two Previous Decades"

"This includes cities long considered 'Black Meccas,' places where African Americans profoundly shaped American politics, policy and culture: Chicago, New York and Washington. Other places like Philadelphia and New Orleans are also seeing Black population dips."

Brakkton Booker at Politico unveils a new series "The Next Great Migration."

"Too Successful for Its Own Good"

"'They did not anticipate, and did not plan for the promenade to become the kind of economic juggernaut that it became by the late '90s,' Loomis says. 'What happened by the late '90s, early 2000s is that the promenade became so successful that the real estate prices just went skyrocketing, and at that point only national retailers could afford the rent that property owners were expecting. So, you end up losing a lot of the kind of local shops that gave the street a kind of local flavor.'"

In a 2020 Curbed Los Angeles article, Hadley Meares provides an overview of the recent history of Santa Monica's Third Street.

"The Issue of Public Safety May Be About to Play Its Most Significant Role in Our Politics Since the Mid-1990s"

"Black Lives Matter has already been losing support in the polls, while trust in the police has been rising. Things would have to get orders of magnitude worse for crime to become as central an issue as it was in the 1970s. But safe streets is a non-negotiable expectation of all voters. It's why 'law and order,' whether wielded demagogically by George Wallace or much more responsibly by Ronald Reagan, has such power." 

Rich Lowry at Politico warns that "Democrats Ignore the Crime Spike at Their Own Peril." 

"Every City Is Either Vibrant These Days or Is Working on a Plan to Attain Vibrancy Soon"

"History is more than a conflict between bogue millionaires and cool millionaires, however, and once you grasp this, you realize that it doesn't take a whole lot of 'creativity' to come up with real answers to the big problems. You just need to change the questions slightly. How about, instead of serving some targeted fraction of the master class, we chose to give an entirely different group of Americans what they wanted? Even if those Americans weren't cool? What would that look like?"

In a 2012 Baffler article, Thomas Frank takes on efforts by cities to promote their "vibrancy."

"A Kind of Patchouli-Scented Version of Florence During the Renaissance"

"But this book is more interested in how politics and Hollywood ricocheted off each other. One chapter considers Jane Fonda and her left-wing political awakening during her marriage to the activist Tom Hayden. The earthquake they wanted to set off in Washington never came, while in the cultural realm, as Brownstein chronicles, America convulsed with change. More permissive attitudes about sex and drugs, a perception that the American dream was not only unattainable but rotten at the core—this new sensibility charged up the films, music and television that Los Angeles exported to the rest of the country, and the world."

Madeleine Brand at The New York Times reviews Ronald Brownstein's Rock Me on the Water: 1974 The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics.