Thanks so much to all of our readers for conitnuing to stick with us at The Future of Where. We are able to keep going because of your support — especially the support of paid subscribers. Please consider becoming a free or paid subscriber today so we can continue delivering great content.

It’s been a tough year for Los Angeles. First came the wildfires. Then all the publicity around Hollywood as a struggling industry, followed by tariffs that brought the biggest port on the West Coast to a halt. After that came the city’s billion-dollar budget deficit and, of course, the ICE crackdown on illegal immigrants followed by the Trump crackdown on the resulting protests.

If you’ve been following L.A. for a long time, it’s tempting to say that the city is simply going through one of its periodic apocalyptic episodes. (I’m channeling the late, great Mike Davis here.) But I think something more profound is going on here. The Los Angeles that emerges from the ashes of 2025 – literally and figuratively – will be different from the city we saw before.

L.A. history tends to run in cycles of about 30 years. (I think you could say this about most cities, because that’s the lifespan of a generation of political leadership.)

L.A.’s 30-Year Cycles

From the turn of the 20^th Century up to the Great Depression, L.A. grew from a real estate play to a major American city, with oil and Hollywood emerging as major industries. (This era, especially the 1920s, is brilliantly described in Kevin Starr’s Material Dreams, which for my money is the best entry in his California Dream series.)

From the Depression through the mid-‘60s, we saw the creation of the great postwar boom, fueled by World War II industrialization and the arrival of migrants from the Midwest, commonly (though not completely accurately) known as Okies. This is the world of Chinatown, the aerospace industry, Earl Warren, Pat Brown, and, yes, the Beach Boys. (In my Substack post on Monday, I suggested that July 1965 was “peak” postwar California dream.)

Then came the next era – stretching from the Watts riots in 1965 to about the time of the L.A. riots in ’92 and the Northridge earthquake in ’94. During this time Los Angeles became both a world city and a city of international immigrants. But it was a period of consolidation and, in many ways, decline. The aerospace industry declined, Prop. 13 passed, anti-growth sentiment kicked in, infrastrastructure investment ended, and domestic migration waned. (This is the world I wrote about in The Reluctant Metropolis.)

L.A.’s Westlake district, a center of immigration life.

The post-Reluctant Metropolis era – from the ‘90s to now – set the stage for everything we’ve seen this year. L.A. did become a much less reluctant metropolis. Domestic out-migration grew, especially among whites (and, to some extent, African-Americans), while immigration from all over the world skyrocketed. Undocumented immigrants became deeply woven into L.A.’s fabric. (My friend Mike Madrid wrote a great Substack post about this the other day, arguing that California had no choice but to facilitate this integration because the federal government failed on the immigration issue under both Republicans and Democrats.)

As with so many other cities, the middle class hollowed out in L.A., leaving the rich and the poor. Gentrification was rampant. Though truly international, L.A. became a much more Mexican city than before – and much more left-leaning. Public employee unions became more powerful, which is one of the reasons for the budget hole. Infighting among Mexican-American politicians went public and the local politics, for whatever reason, became more corrupt. Climate change increased the number of natural disasters, especially wildfires. And during COVID the population went down for the first time ever.

Each of these eras ended because events finally caught up with problems that had been swept under the rug. The Depression ended the real estate boom. The Watts riots burst the bubble of the California Dream. The ’92 riots and the Northridge earthquake showed how fragile the reluctant metropolis was. And now the combination of wildfires, economic stagnation, and the Trump immigration crackdown signal the end of the post-Reluctant Metropolis era.

How Can L.A. Reinvent Itself?

All successful cities constantly reinvent themselves every generation or two in order to survive. The example I often like to use is Boston, which morphed over time from a seafaring village to the world’s leading center of higher education with a lot of stops in between, including time during the industrial era as a major manufacturing center.

So L.A., once again, must reinvent itself to succeed. But how?

The biggest things to get a handle on