The rise of the, "The expectation that disorder and crime should be controlled by law enforcement is fascism and if you expect that then clearly you're suburbanite with no experience in REAL city living" line of thought, best exemplified by erstwhile San Francisco DA candidate John Hamasaki's recent Twitter spree on the subject, is what's behind these issues. It's what led to the decline of America's cities in the 60s and 70s and the subsequent flight of residents to the suburbs and it's what's leading to the same thing now. The tolerance of intolerance leads in one direction only.
Your piece is spot-on, Josh...I moved to LA from NYC almost 40 years ago and have grown to love LA for all the reasons you have stated in previous posts. Now in my senior years I work part-time for a tour company based in New York, and I do hiking and walking tours here...I use the Metro to get to my meeting points Downtown and in Hollywood. During the lockdown years LA suspended fares on busses and trains, and the trains, especially the Red Line, became, literally, a mobile homeless shelter...even now there is almost no fare enforcement, police presence is haphazard, and the city is now posting "Ambassadors," unarmed metro employees, mostly young people, who say "Thank you for riding Metro!" with cheery faces as you move through stations...that does nothing to ameliorate the conditions on the train...the sleeping, drugged-out people, the verbal fights, the smoking, eating and throwing food on the seats and on the floor, on and on...On my tours most of my American guests Uber around the city, but my foreign guests often take the public transportation system, because that is what they are used to doing when traveling through Europe and Asia...many of them have told me how disgusted and appalled they were at the nightmare they encounter on the LA Metro System...for a great city like LA it's a major embarrassment and the choice you laid out at the conclusion of your piece is exactly right...would that any of our local politicians would have the courage to confront that reality.
“I also think this exposes a key contradiction that leftists need to resolve. Do they care about the provision of high-quality public services? Or is their primary objective to ensure that the coercive force of the state is never used to enforce rules?”
As an LA native and now OC resident, I can confirm all this. 20 years ago, the subway was one of the best kept secrets of LA (a fact frequently bemoaned by transit advocates). The gold line was still new and now enabled you to go from North Hollywood to the tourist part of Hollywood, Wilshire, Westlake, DTLA, Union Station, and up into Pasadena, all on public transit and without driving or getting stuck in horrific traffic on a bus (worst of both worlds). Rush hour on the red line was short but significant - lots of people crowded on those trains from 4:30-6 after work. Red Line from DTLA/Union Station to the Valley where your car was parked was a fantastic way to avoid the worst of the traffic. It was also a great way to get to big public events with terrible parking, like the Hollywood Bowl or the Rose Bowl.
The last time I rode the system - post COVID reopening - was eye-opening. I definitely noticed that the gold line was much better than the ones in LA proper. But all were generally abandoned by commuters and tourists and overrun with obviously troubled people. As Josh said, contra Freemark the solution *to the problems of the subway* actually is throwing vulnerable people off of it. Because vulnerable, troubled people can also be people who make the quality of life for everyone else worse. Leaving them on the trains won't solve their problems. Throwing them off the trains *also* won't solve their problems. But it *does* solve the problem of the trains being flophouses on rails.
The left is afflicted with this weird holier-than-thou stockholm syndrome condition where they think that experiencing crime and dysfunction burnishes their street cred, to the point that they begin glorifying those things. "I had my car broken into 17 times while living in SF eventually I just started leaving the doors open so nobody would break the windows, if you don't like it feel free to move to Salt Lake City." You know what I've observed visiting most of the places the left considers workers's paradises? A notable lack of public dysfunction. Sure there may be graffiti and some public intoxication. I never feared for my safety on public transit or in touristy parts of European cities like I do riding the subway in LA or even walking down the touristy streets of Hollywood. Somehow the left never notices this contrast. Right now I would never recommend my sister, my mother, or anyone planning to get more than mildly intoxicated to ride the LA subway at *any* time of the day. Which is a sad change from the past. It's no longer LA's best kept secret, just a very sad open secret.
The problem is that leftists prize their pet victims above the well-being of the public. An unholy alliance of causehead leftists (“oh no muh pet victims may be ‘harmed’”) and fiscal conservatives (“government spending money is bad”) are the reason why the lunatic asylums closed and why we don’t have enough treatment facilities for the vagrants. The types that make public transit unpleasant are like environmental pollutants. We have rules to deal with those.
You can have the beautiful, mixed use, diverse, green urbanism of your dreams, or you can have lax enforcement of the laws. You can't have both. Been mentioned by a previous commenter already, but Hamasaki's rants on the subject - you're a loser with bad politics and even worse taste if you are at all upset about property crime (and, presumably, other types of crimes) in the city - is perverse and nihilistic.
Even pre-pandemic (which is when I lived in Los Angeles) I felt the city needed a Hamsterdam: a few places where public disorder would be tolerated combined with strict enforcement everywhere else, ideally one with an indoor and outdoor component. I'm reminded of a tweet by Gabriel Rossman that if the city wants to create a squat for people to smoke fenty, it's pointlessly expensive to have that also be the train system. The problems:
- Unlike Baltimore, there is no truly abandoned part of the city, and there's a lot of troubled people in Los Angeles.
- The same nonsense that makes everything expensive in the city would making building Hamsterdam facilities expensive.
- It's a bleak logic. Even if most people would agree that it's better that a few parks and community centres function as masturbation/smoke fentanyl/die of overdose sites rather than the status quo, which is that this is the entire city, it's hard to admit defeat like that. It involves aspects that both the left and right find anathema.
I won’t even take my kid on the Red Line here in Chicago anymore. I was on the train the other day at 3pm and there were more panhandlers than riders, some high school kids were just smoking in the open, a homeless guy was shooting up, and the panhandlers were just going from front car to back car over and over again. I realize there is always some level of stuff on public transit but it is out of control. I now understand why everyone here got a hardon for Vallas.
Unless you're all but forced to take public transportation then people generally have a very low tolerance for bullshit and disorder while using it. My experience in using DC's Metro system over the last year has included some slight public disorder but combine that with low quality service (15 minute headways, GTFOH) and my willingness to use it goes way down unless it's all but necessary (e.g. going to a Nats game).
Terrific post, Josh, and please keep beating this drum. The San Francisco Bay Area’s BART system is having the same struggles and head-in-the-sand reaction. I’ve voted for god knows how many BART bonds over the years because I believe public transportation is essential public infrastructure, and now they’re just letting it die because someone might get mad if a person of color smoking fentanyl is hauled off of a train, so better just to pretend it’s fine and everyone just needs to toughen up instead.
Around 2010, I as a conservative Republican was afraid that my party was utterly out of touch, representing an older declining share of America as a rising culture and property values soared in coastal cities--many of which were barely touched by the Great Recession. If Obama and the Dems just didn't screw things up, they'd be in power for a long long time.
But now I see that liberal and Democrats have really learned nothing at all from the massive failures of urban governance of the 60s and 70s...that the Urban Renaissance that seemed so secure in 2010 was brittle and fragile and that the sources of chaos and disorder were still there biding their time waiting to take back control of public spaces again...and liberals, with their warped sense of compassion or actual masochism wouldn't be able to resist indulging them again.
Though we may be 5-10 years away, the backlash against crimes of disorder and quality of life--the streetcrime the "encampments", public libraries and transportation taken over by homeless, the pervasive stench of marijuana--the backlash is coming. I have no doubt of it
I take LA Metro a lot and this post is spot on. It's so much worse now it makes me fear a death spiral.
I will say that the problems afflicting the system vary a lot by line. The Red Line is a horror show, as described. The Expo (or "E") Line that goes from downtown to Santa Monica is nowhere near as bad.
But the real conundrum is that the population may not rise up in anger and demand changes, like tough love and more enforcement. They will (as this post notes) more than likely vote with their feet (or cars) and abandon the system, leaving LA with a hugely expensive white elephant and those who have no option but to take LA Metro to suffer.
I have to say, I have a hard time believing that people on the "far left" are responsible for deteriorating conditions on the "red line" train. Or to clarify, as responsible as you make them out to be. Quite frankly, the math and timing doesn't make sense to me.
When I say math, I mean to say that almost by definition, the far left represents a distinct minority of people who happen to be very loud on Twitter, which overrepresents the number of people who hold these views (to repeat the now famous saying; Twitter is not real life). Even in super blue cities like Los Angeles or New York, the far left represents a pretty distinct minority of Democrats in both these cities. If anything, recent election results and events in places like San Francisco** and New York show there are a pretty decent number of people who are hardcore Democrats who have shown themselves to be pretty concerned about crime and willing to support anti-crime policies more associated with the political center right*. I know you highlighted the one LA councilwoman who seemed to have some pretty naïve ideas about what would solve the crime issue on trains. But even "let's make the train stations look nicer as a solution" isn't really a far left solution as much as it's just simply misguided.
Second is the timing issue. The height of "Defund the police"/anti-enforcement of the law generally was summer/fall of 2020. If you want to say that the political impact of this far left anti-enforcement sentiment extended into 2021, I'll grant you that (I'd say the 2020 election being closer then expected with "defund" fingered as the primary culprit was the definitive turn away from more far left ideas about policing.) But as you say, deteriorating conditions on the "red line" seem to be a pretty recent phenomenon. Well after the Chesa Boudin recall**. Well after Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams made safer conditions on the subway a priority (as a fellow subway rider, I agree with your anecdotal observations about the NYC subway). You need to tell me a story here of how far left activists managed to increase their sway and power of the past 3-6 months specifically in Los Angeles.
I state all this to say I agree that a certain amount of additional enforcement of rules and laws regarding public transport is almost certainly warranted and welcome. I'm in favor of more lenient prison sentencing for drug possession and drug crimes in general. But I'm pretty ok with drawing the line at open consumption of hard drugs on public transit. And agree about fare evasion (have a harder time with people asleep on the train if only because people are often asleep on the train for all sorts of reasons not having to do with drug use. Feel like enforcement of "no sleeping on the train" is dare I say a train wreck waiting to happen with over the top harassment of train riders).
To a certain degree, willingness to confront the worst and most destructive tendencies of the Left is a necessary thing. "Defund" was a mistake on many levels. And yes there is definitely a cohort of far left types who are way to blasé or naïve about the need to enforce the law and confront the very real rise in crime. But at a certain point, confronting the left becomes "punching left" as a crutch to not really investigate what solutions may actually be needed to get disorder and crime on public transit under control.
* I specifically say center right and not right because I'm pretty sure most Democrats would blanch at some of the policies advocated by people like Tom Cotton (the debate over the NYT op-ed and the machinations behind the scenes in the NYTimes newsroom actually overshadowed what a patently nutso op-ed that was from Cotton). Even more mainstream figures like say Lee Zeldin were basically advocating or dancing around solutions that seemed right out of the worst parts of the 80s "tough on crime" playbook that likely would turn off the majority of Dem voters. And yet saying that, even he clearly got a significant number of Democrats to vote for him.
**I know one of the theories for the crime rise is the "blue flu" theory. To be honest, I don't know how much stock to put into this theory, but it seems very likely to me that specifically in San Francisco this is part of the story. Not only have there been countless stories of SF residences asking for police assistance and getting essentially rebuffed. But it seems very likely to me that a super Trumpy constituency like police would be especially motivated to "stick it" to SF given how much this city is held up as the ultimate Marxist bogeyman by right wing media.
I agree with the points you make, but "leftists?" Are we channeling maga-speak here? I moderate on our local Nextdoor and it is filled with complaints and vituperative attacks on the "leftists." It smacks of condescension. Though perhaps that is what you intended.
100% Agreed with everything in this piece. The public transportation system in NYC may be annoying some days, but it is noticeably better than public transportation in LA, San Fran and even Philly for that matter.
Your last sentence section sums it up best. If we care having high quality public services it means that there enforcement of rules to maintain the social contract and enforced. Seeing upticks of drug use, violent crimes, rapes, and a general lack of safeness aren't the answer. I'd like to have seen the LA Times get a reply from the Chief of Police, Mayor and some homeless programs on their input on why this is happening and what the short + long term plans are to resolve this issue.
The rise of the, "The expectation that disorder and crime should be controlled by law enforcement is fascism and if you expect that then clearly you're suburbanite with no experience in REAL city living" line of thought, best exemplified by erstwhile San Francisco DA candidate John Hamasaki's recent Twitter spree on the subject, is what's behind these issues. It's what led to the decline of America's cities in the 60s and 70s and the subsequent flight of residents to the suburbs and it's what's leading to the same thing now. The tolerance of intolerance leads in one direction only.
Your piece is spot-on, Josh...I moved to LA from NYC almost 40 years ago and have grown to love LA for all the reasons you have stated in previous posts. Now in my senior years I work part-time for a tour company based in New York, and I do hiking and walking tours here...I use the Metro to get to my meeting points Downtown and in Hollywood. During the lockdown years LA suspended fares on busses and trains, and the trains, especially the Red Line, became, literally, a mobile homeless shelter...even now there is almost no fare enforcement, police presence is haphazard, and the city is now posting "Ambassadors," unarmed metro employees, mostly young people, who say "Thank you for riding Metro!" with cheery faces as you move through stations...that does nothing to ameliorate the conditions on the train...the sleeping, drugged-out people, the verbal fights, the smoking, eating and throwing food on the seats and on the floor, on and on...On my tours most of my American guests Uber around the city, but my foreign guests often take the public transportation system, because that is what they are used to doing when traveling through Europe and Asia...many of them have told me how disgusted and appalled they were at the nightmare they encounter on the LA Metro System...for a great city like LA it's a major embarrassment and the choice you laid out at the conclusion of your piece is exactly right...would that any of our local politicians would have the courage to confront that reality.
“I also think this exposes a key contradiction that leftists need to resolve. Do they care about the provision of high-quality public services? Or is their primary objective to ensure that the coercive force of the state is never used to enforce rules?”
I think it’s worse: they just care about posting.
As an LA native and now OC resident, I can confirm all this. 20 years ago, the subway was one of the best kept secrets of LA (a fact frequently bemoaned by transit advocates). The gold line was still new and now enabled you to go from North Hollywood to the tourist part of Hollywood, Wilshire, Westlake, DTLA, Union Station, and up into Pasadena, all on public transit and without driving or getting stuck in horrific traffic on a bus (worst of both worlds). Rush hour on the red line was short but significant - lots of people crowded on those trains from 4:30-6 after work. Red Line from DTLA/Union Station to the Valley where your car was parked was a fantastic way to avoid the worst of the traffic. It was also a great way to get to big public events with terrible parking, like the Hollywood Bowl or the Rose Bowl.
The last time I rode the system - post COVID reopening - was eye-opening. I definitely noticed that the gold line was much better than the ones in LA proper. But all were generally abandoned by commuters and tourists and overrun with obviously troubled people. As Josh said, contra Freemark the solution *to the problems of the subway* actually is throwing vulnerable people off of it. Because vulnerable, troubled people can also be people who make the quality of life for everyone else worse. Leaving them on the trains won't solve their problems. Throwing them off the trains *also* won't solve their problems. But it *does* solve the problem of the trains being flophouses on rails.
The left is afflicted with this weird holier-than-thou stockholm syndrome condition where they think that experiencing crime and dysfunction burnishes their street cred, to the point that they begin glorifying those things. "I had my car broken into 17 times while living in SF eventually I just started leaving the doors open so nobody would break the windows, if you don't like it feel free to move to Salt Lake City." You know what I've observed visiting most of the places the left considers workers's paradises? A notable lack of public dysfunction. Sure there may be graffiti and some public intoxication. I never feared for my safety on public transit or in touristy parts of European cities like I do riding the subway in LA or even walking down the touristy streets of Hollywood. Somehow the left never notices this contrast. Right now I would never recommend my sister, my mother, or anyone planning to get more than mildly intoxicated to ride the LA subway at *any* time of the day. Which is a sad change from the past. It's no longer LA's best kept secret, just a very sad open secret.
The problem is that leftists prize their pet victims above the well-being of the public. An unholy alliance of causehead leftists (“oh no muh pet victims may be ‘harmed’”) and fiscal conservatives (“government spending money is bad”) are the reason why the lunatic asylums closed and why we don’t have enough treatment facilities for the vagrants. The types that make public transit unpleasant are like environmental pollutants. We have rules to deal with those.
You can have the beautiful, mixed use, diverse, green urbanism of your dreams, or you can have lax enforcement of the laws. You can't have both. Been mentioned by a previous commenter already, but Hamasaki's rants on the subject - you're a loser with bad politics and even worse taste if you are at all upset about property crime (and, presumably, other types of crimes) in the city - is perverse and nihilistic.
Even pre-pandemic (which is when I lived in Los Angeles) I felt the city needed a Hamsterdam: a few places where public disorder would be tolerated combined with strict enforcement everywhere else, ideally one with an indoor and outdoor component. I'm reminded of a tweet by Gabriel Rossman that if the city wants to create a squat for people to smoke fenty, it's pointlessly expensive to have that also be the train system. The problems:
- Unlike Baltimore, there is no truly abandoned part of the city, and there's a lot of troubled people in Los Angeles.
- The same nonsense that makes everything expensive in the city would making building Hamsterdam facilities expensive.
- It's a bleak logic. Even if most people would agree that it's better that a few parks and community centres function as masturbation/smoke fentanyl/die of overdose sites rather than the status quo, which is that this is the entire city, it's hard to admit defeat like that. It involves aspects that both the left and right find anathema.
This kind of smart, smokable, mixed-use transit is illegal to build in most cities.
I won’t even take my kid on the Red Line here in Chicago anymore. I was on the train the other day at 3pm and there were more panhandlers than riders, some high school kids were just smoking in the open, a homeless guy was shooting up, and the panhandlers were just going from front car to back car over and over again. I realize there is always some level of stuff on public transit but it is out of control. I now understand why everyone here got a hardon for Vallas.
Unless you're all but forced to take public transportation then people generally have a very low tolerance for bullshit and disorder while using it. My experience in using DC's Metro system over the last year has included some slight public disorder but combine that with low quality service (15 minute headways, GTFOH) and my willingness to use it goes way down unless it's all but necessary (e.g. going to a Nats game).
Terrific post, Josh, and please keep beating this drum. The San Francisco Bay Area’s BART system is having the same struggles and head-in-the-sand reaction. I’ve voted for god knows how many BART bonds over the years because I believe public transportation is essential public infrastructure, and now they’re just letting it die because someone might get mad if a person of color smoking fentanyl is hauled off of a train, so better just to pretend it’s fine and everyone just needs to toughen up instead.
Around 2010, I as a conservative Republican was afraid that my party was utterly out of touch, representing an older declining share of America as a rising culture and property values soared in coastal cities--many of which were barely touched by the Great Recession. If Obama and the Dems just didn't screw things up, they'd be in power for a long long time.
But now I see that liberal and Democrats have really learned nothing at all from the massive failures of urban governance of the 60s and 70s...that the Urban Renaissance that seemed so secure in 2010 was brittle and fragile and that the sources of chaos and disorder were still there biding their time waiting to take back control of public spaces again...and liberals, with their warped sense of compassion or actual masochism wouldn't be able to resist indulging them again.
Though we may be 5-10 years away, the backlash against crimes of disorder and quality of life--the streetcrime the "encampments", public libraries and transportation taken over by homeless, the pervasive stench of marijuana--the backlash is coming. I have no doubt of it
And liberals have no one to blame but themselves.
I take LA Metro a lot and this post is spot on. It's so much worse now it makes me fear a death spiral.
I will say that the problems afflicting the system vary a lot by line. The Red Line is a horror show, as described. The Expo (or "E") Line that goes from downtown to Santa Monica is nowhere near as bad.
But the real conundrum is that the population may not rise up in anger and demand changes, like tough love and more enforcement. They will (as this post notes) more than likely vote with their feet (or cars) and abandon the system, leaving LA with a hugely expensive white elephant and those who have no option but to take LA Metro to suffer.
I have to say, I have a hard time believing that people on the "far left" are responsible for deteriorating conditions on the "red line" train. Or to clarify, as responsible as you make them out to be. Quite frankly, the math and timing doesn't make sense to me.
When I say math, I mean to say that almost by definition, the far left represents a distinct minority of people who happen to be very loud on Twitter, which overrepresents the number of people who hold these views (to repeat the now famous saying; Twitter is not real life). Even in super blue cities like Los Angeles or New York, the far left represents a pretty distinct minority of Democrats in both these cities. If anything, recent election results and events in places like San Francisco** and New York show there are a pretty decent number of people who are hardcore Democrats who have shown themselves to be pretty concerned about crime and willing to support anti-crime policies more associated with the political center right*. I know you highlighted the one LA councilwoman who seemed to have some pretty naïve ideas about what would solve the crime issue on trains. But even "let's make the train stations look nicer as a solution" isn't really a far left solution as much as it's just simply misguided.
Second is the timing issue. The height of "Defund the police"/anti-enforcement of the law generally was summer/fall of 2020. If you want to say that the political impact of this far left anti-enforcement sentiment extended into 2021, I'll grant you that (I'd say the 2020 election being closer then expected with "defund" fingered as the primary culprit was the definitive turn away from more far left ideas about policing.) But as you say, deteriorating conditions on the "red line" seem to be a pretty recent phenomenon. Well after the Chesa Boudin recall**. Well after Kathy Hochul and Eric Adams made safer conditions on the subway a priority (as a fellow subway rider, I agree with your anecdotal observations about the NYC subway). You need to tell me a story here of how far left activists managed to increase their sway and power of the past 3-6 months specifically in Los Angeles.
I state all this to say I agree that a certain amount of additional enforcement of rules and laws regarding public transport is almost certainly warranted and welcome. I'm in favor of more lenient prison sentencing for drug possession and drug crimes in general. But I'm pretty ok with drawing the line at open consumption of hard drugs on public transit. And agree about fare evasion (have a harder time with people asleep on the train if only because people are often asleep on the train for all sorts of reasons not having to do with drug use. Feel like enforcement of "no sleeping on the train" is dare I say a train wreck waiting to happen with over the top harassment of train riders).
To a certain degree, willingness to confront the worst and most destructive tendencies of the Left is a necessary thing. "Defund" was a mistake on many levels. And yes there is definitely a cohort of far left types who are way to blasé or naïve about the need to enforce the law and confront the very real rise in crime. But at a certain point, confronting the left becomes "punching left" as a crutch to not really investigate what solutions may actually be needed to get disorder and crime on public transit under control.
* I specifically say center right and not right because I'm pretty sure most Democrats would blanch at some of the policies advocated by people like Tom Cotton (the debate over the NYT op-ed and the machinations behind the scenes in the NYTimes newsroom actually overshadowed what a patently nutso op-ed that was from Cotton). Even more mainstream figures like say Lee Zeldin were basically advocating or dancing around solutions that seemed right out of the worst parts of the 80s "tough on crime" playbook that likely would turn off the majority of Dem voters. And yet saying that, even he clearly got a significant number of Democrats to vote for him.
**I know one of the theories for the crime rise is the "blue flu" theory. To be honest, I don't know how much stock to put into this theory, but it seems very likely to me that specifically in San Francisco this is part of the story. Not only have there been countless stories of SF residences asking for police assistance and getting essentially rebuffed. But it seems very likely to me that a super Trumpy constituency like police would be especially motivated to "stick it" to SF given how much this city is held up as the ultimate Marxist bogeyman by right wing media.
I agree with the points you make, but "leftists?" Are we channeling maga-speak here? I moderate on our local Nextdoor and it is filled with complaints and vituperative attacks on the "leftists." It smacks of condescension. Though perhaps that is what you intended.
100% Agreed with everything in this piece. The public transportation system in NYC may be annoying some days, but it is noticeably better than public transportation in LA, San Fran and even Philly for that matter.
Your last sentence section sums it up best. If we care having high quality public services it means that there enforcement of rules to maintain the social contract and enforced. Seeing upticks of drug use, violent crimes, rapes, and a general lack of safeness aren't the answer. I'd like to have seen the LA Times get a reply from the Chief of Police, Mayor and some homeless programs on their input on why this is happening and what the short + long term plans are to resolve this issue.