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.
You didn't mention the Olympics, which are motivating major investments in transit, including the completion of the Purple line to the westside with a station at Wilshire and Westwood serving UCLA. What's going to happen when the city has a flood of international visitors?
It's worth noting that LA and adjacent cities have an extensive bus system, which has always been the primary form of public transit for people who don't drive. But it's in the traffic and therefore slower than driving.
Good point, Virginia...of course, the Olympics is going to require major infrastructure enhancement (and the Purple Line is a major component of that) and it will be imperative that Metro be clean and safe...but if Los Angeles official wants to increase ridership now as they say they do, there needs to be a major effort to make it clean and safe NOW.
I agree. It's just that they use the Olympics as a deadline and a spur, plus this isn't China. You can't clean up a month before the Olympics open. It will take sustained effort.
“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 call it faux activism while they can still be nimybist. All of the moral superiority and virtue without having to answer or live with the hard issues, hell even spend time with helping homeless people in their own towns or cities. This isn't just a left / right issue, its honestly a collective issue. But it's clear that people get the dopamine hit of posting things on social media and feeling like they accomplished something but the world outside hasn't actually changed or been influenced for the better, making real change requires real world effort.
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.
I get the feeling that part of the embrace of urban disorder is the feeling of “toughness” of living in rough environments to counter the traditional rural, conservative portrayal of toughness
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.
That's unfortunate to hear. I took the El a few times on a trip to Chicago in November -- the Red Line and the Brown Line -- and conditions on the trains seemed fine. I did not care for the environment in North/Clybourn station -- there were a number of people basically camped out in the lobby -- but the fact that most of the other stations are outdoors seems to cut against station disorder.
I avoid the red line for the same reason Tom Hayden does, but not from personal observation. It's what I hear, combined with the fact that I don't really have to take it. The blue line, which I take from time to time, can be bad, too, but not as bad as I imagine the red line to be. I occasionally take the brown line, during rush hour, and haven't seen as much pathology there.
The buses seem better, probably because the driver is right there and not in some distant car. I take those when I can.
Fortunately, I can walk most places. I'm only 3 miles from work and I need and enjoy the exercise. (I'm weird.) And except for car drivers, who don't seem to care about pedestrians, and bicyclists (who can be pretty aggressive), I usually feel pretty safe (knock on wood).
I don't know how any of the above compares with LA (it's probably better) or New York City (I assume it's comparable?).
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 should have been more specific about Hilda Solis. She is a county supervisor (not a councilwoman) and, relevantly here, is also a member of the board of Metro (and formerly the chair of the board).
Sometimes the answer to your question is lawsuits. I don't know about Metro, but L.A.'s homeless policies are affected by a Ninth Circuit ruling against using police power to remove homeless encampments from public property, such as sidewalks:
My understanding of Martin v. Boise is that it restricts municipalities from setting a blanket prohibition on sleeping on public property, when there is insufficient shelter space available. It does not restrict municipalities from designating specific public places -- such as a subway system -- where sleeping or camping is prohibited. See the reference to the Jones case within the Martin opinion: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17340329580133284185&hl=en&as_sdt=6,33&as_vis=1
But this goes back to my timing issue. This ruling was from 2019 and the phenomenon Josh is describing is from the last 3-6 months.
I'm sort of flummoxed by Josh's yada yada yada'ing over the zoning issue. I know he reads Matt Yglesias extensively and I'm pretty certain he agrees (at least in broad terms) with Matt's writings on zoning. And I think Matt has done a pretty good job of showing that zoning (and specifically in the case of California, CEQA being used as a cudgel to tie up any and all residential developments in legal hell for an endless amount of time) is a pretty good explanation for why homelessness is such an issue in CA (as well as places like NYC, Boston, D.C. and other high cost blue cities).
It's also weird to me Josh didn't get into the unintended effects of WFH more. One, it seems pretty clear to me now that a pretty big deterrent to crime and disorder is just more people being in a particular area. More "normies" means more eyes and ears on the ground to report issues. But it also means that disorder is much less likely to stand out. Take the train issue again. Let's say pre-pandemic a typical red line train had a 1,000 passengers with 50 of them being either homeless or addicts or both. Or 5% of passengers. Now, due to WFH, the number of passengers is 500 and for a variety of reasons the number of homeless/drug addicts is now 75 people. That small increase in homeless/addicts (20 additional people) translates to 15% of all passengers (whereas if overall ridership had remained the same it would be 7.5%). The actual numbers are obviously different then I have them (Using round numbers to make things easier). But the general phenomenon I'm describing is accurate. Namely, that even a small increase in homeless/drug addicts on public transit is MUCH more likely to stand out when overall ridership numbers are so severely depressed.
It's important to stick up for those 425 (by your calculation) "normies" whose commutes and jobs were not affected by WFH and are still relying on the trains. It's not like they don't deserve to have a good experience on public transit anymore.
My point was more observational. To reiterate, like Josh I ride the NYC subways and have supported greater police presence and feel like it has made a difference. I support the idea that enforcing public nuisance laws on LA trains is probably something that needs to stepped up; including taking action against people who are actively doing drugs on the train itself.
Maybe because I'm primarily in NYC, I became very used to seeing intersections and city streets being absolutely full of people at any one moment pre 2020. And while there are plenty of people on the streets now it certainly is lower than it once was. My point is that even a small increase in homeless encampments becomes that much more noticeable in this scenario. Not that an increase homeless encampments (or homeless on the subway) isn't a problem that requires a solution.
Not sure how this contradicts my general point. You are pointing the finger directly at the "far left" and their unwillingness to want laws to be enforced. It's a centerpiece of your argument. And to be clear, I agree with you in principal; there really has been an unwillingness from too many people on the far left to confront the fact that disorder on the trains and public spaces is a problem and the crime is a real issue that calls for some real enforcement of existing laws (and I saw your follow up that the public official in question is the County Supervisor which is an important clarification in that this is someone more powerful than a local council member).
But I think maybe I should emphasize again my issue is more I think you're trying to explain too much by pointing the finger at the "far left". That this is phenomenon of increased disorder on the train goes back more than 3-6 months means mistake on my part and I'll cop to misreading. But again, disorder and crime rise is not just a blue city phenomenon. Crime increase in very "red" rural areas is very real as well (https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251)
I'll give maybe an example from the most recent business news to help maybe clarify my point. There were a lot of takes about why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. One of the takes was that this was the fault of the Fed for raising rates so rapidly (as an aside, like you I agree with the Fed actions). The reality is of course that while Fed raising rates is a factor, the collapse doesn't happen absent SVB putting all it's eggs in the long term bonds basket, having a disproportionate amount of deposits from Silicon Valley start ups that were most directly affected by rising rates and who therefore needed cash and Peter Thiel deciding SVB was in trouble (given how much sway he has with the VC world more generally, makes sense that his actions creates "follow the leader" mentality). Pointing the finger at the Fed while not entirely inaccurate is seeking to explain way too much of what actually happened.
Hope I'm clarifying where I'm coming from here. As a more personal anecdote about maybe why I'm saying what I'm saying. I live in Nassau County and commute into Manhattan. My job also takes me to a variety of locations throughout NYC. Like you I very much noticed the increase in "disorder" on the subway. Like you, I've welcome what I think is increased focus on safety and like you I feel like I've noticed a difference. But the number of people who I've interacted with who live in Long Island who think the subway has turned into a Taxi Driver/Death Wish/Escape from New York hell scape is eye opening to say the least. So while I think it's important to fight against misinformed narrative from the far left that we somehow a) don't need police and b) any and all enforcement of public nuisance laws is authoritarianism/racism or just not a big deal. I also want to make sure to note the right wing counternarrative is also pushed back against. I'm thinking specifically of someone like Andrew Sullivan, who as far as I can tell, seems to blame the rise in crime entirely at the feet of BLM.
I'm technically working right now (had to take a couple phone calls while I wrote this) so apologies if my thoughts are a bit disjointed. Hope you can at least get the gist of what I'm trying to say.
I think Colin is making a good point here. The relative emptying out of urban public spaces since the pandemic reduces the rewards of urban life and in particular makes public nuisances of various kinds stand out more.
But putting pressure on city government to enforce laws and norms for public space is the one lever of action that we have to improve them.
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 appreciate this comment for explaining why Covid changed the population of Metro riders. Because it rarely connects where I live with where I want to go, I haven't taken Metro since before Covid. I didn't realize what a mess it had become until the LAT piece, which was reminiscent of earlier articles on how Union Station has become a terrifying place for its workers. (See https://www.latimes.com/homeless-housing/story/2022-04-29/assaults-at-union-station-strike-fear-in-janitors-and-retail-workers and https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-05-07/union-station-workers-to-get-more-security-after-outcry-over-attacks.)
You didn't mention the Olympics, which are motivating major investments in transit, including the completion of the Purple line to the westside with a station at Wilshire and Westwood serving UCLA. What's going to happen when the city has a flood of international visitors?
It's worth noting that LA and adjacent cities have an extensive bus system, which has always been the primary form of public transit for people who don't drive. But it's in the traffic and therefore slower than driving.
Good point, Virginia...of course, the Olympics is going to require major infrastructure enhancement (and the Purple Line is a major component of that) and it will be imperative that Metro be clean and safe...but if Los Angeles official wants to increase ridership now as they say they do, there needs to be a major effort to make it clean and safe NOW.
I agree. It's just that they use the Olympics as a deadline and a spur, plus this isn't China. You can't clean up a month before the Olympics open. It will take sustained effort.
“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.
I call it faux activism while they can still be nimybist. All of the moral superiority and virtue without having to answer or live with the hard issues, hell even spend time with helping homeless people in their own towns or cities. This isn't just a left / right issue, its honestly a collective issue. But it's clear that people get the dopamine hit of posting things on social media and feeling like they accomplished something but the world outside hasn't actually changed or been influenced for the better, making real change requires real world effort.
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.
I get the feeling that part of the embrace of urban disorder is the feeling of “toughness” of living in rough environments to counter the traditional rural, conservative portrayal of toughness
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.
That's unfortunate to hear. I took the El a few times on a trip to Chicago in November -- the Red Line and the Brown Line -- and conditions on the trains seemed fine. I did not care for the environment in North/Clybourn station -- there were a number of people basically camped out in the lobby -- but the fact that most of the other stations are outdoors seems to cut against station disorder.
I avoid the red line for the same reason Tom Hayden does, but not from personal observation. It's what I hear, combined with the fact that I don't really have to take it. The blue line, which I take from time to time, can be bad, too, but not as bad as I imagine the red line to be. I occasionally take the brown line, during rush hour, and haven't seen as much pathology there.
The buses seem better, probably because the driver is right there and not in some distant car. I take those when I can.
Fortunately, I can walk most places. I'm only 3 miles from work and I need and enjoy the exercise. (I'm weird.) And except for car drivers, who don't seem to care about pedestrians, and bicyclists (who can be pretty aggressive), I usually feel pretty safe (knock on wood).
I don't know how any of the above compares with LA (it's probably better) or New York City (I assume it's comparable?).
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 should have been more specific about Hilda Solis. She is a county supervisor (not a councilwoman) and, relevantly here, is also a member of the board of Metro (and formerly the chair of the board).
Sometimes the answer to your question is lawsuits. I don't know about Metro, but L.A.'s homeless policies are affected by a Ninth Circuit ruling against using police power to remove homeless encampments from public property, such as sidewalks:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2019-12-16/homeless-boise-ruling-case-supreme-court
My understanding of Martin v. Boise is that it restricts municipalities from setting a blanket prohibition on sleeping on public property, when there is insufficient shelter space available. It does not restrict municipalities from designating specific public places -- such as a subway system -- where sleeping or camping is prohibited. See the reference to the Jones case within the Martin opinion: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case?case=17340329580133284185&hl=en&as_sdt=6,33&as_vis=1
But this goes back to my timing issue. This ruling was from 2019 and the phenomenon Josh is describing is from the last 3-6 months.
I'm sort of flummoxed by Josh's yada yada yada'ing over the zoning issue. I know he reads Matt Yglesias extensively and I'm pretty certain he agrees (at least in broad terms) with Matt's writings on zoning. And I think Matt has done a pretty good job of showing that zoning (and specifically in the case of California, CEQA being used as a cudgel to tie up any and all residential developments in legal hell for an endless amount of time) is a pretty good explanation for why homelessness is such an issue in CA (as well as places like NYC, Boston, D.C. and other high cost blue cities).
It's also weird to me Josh didn't get into the unintended effects of WFH more. One, it seems pretty clear to me now that a pretty big deterrent to crime and disorder is just more people being in a particular area. More "normies" means more eyes and ears on the ground to report issues. But it also means that disorder is much less likely to stand out. Take the train issue again. Let's say pre-pandemic a typical red line train had a 1,000 passengers with 50 of them being either homeless or addicts or both. Or 5% of passengers. Now, due to WFH, the number of passengers is 500 and for a variety of reasons the number of homeless/drug addicts is now 75 people. That small increase in homeless/addicts (20 additional people) translates to 15% of all passengers (whereas if overall ridership had remained the same it would be 7.5%). The actual numbers are obviously different then I have them (Using round numbers to make things easier). But the general phenomenon I'm describing is accurate. Namely, that even a small increase in homeless/drug addicts on public transit is MUCH more likely to stand out when overall ridership numbers are so severely depressed.
It's important to stick up for those 425 (by your calculation) "normies" whose commutes and jobs were not affected by WFH and are still relying on the trains. It's not like they don't deserve to have a good experience on public transit anymore.
My point was more observational. To reiterate, like Josh I ride the NYC subways and have supported greater police presence and feel like it has made a difference. I support the idea that enforcing public nuisance laws on LA trains is probably something that needs to stepped up; including taking action against people who are actively doing drugs on the train itself.
Maybe because I'm primarily in NYC, I became very used to seeing intersections and city streets being absolutely full of people at any one moment pre 2020. And while there are plenty of people on the streets now it certainly is lower than it once was. My point is that even a small increase in homeless encampments becomes that much more noticeable in this scenario. Not that an increase homeless encampments (or homeless on the subway) isn't a problem that requires a solution.
I don't think you read very carefully, Colin. This is a phenomenon over the last three years -- it arose with COVID.
Not sure how this contradicts my general point. You are pointing the finger directly at the "far left" and their unwillingness to want laws to be enforced. It's a centerpiece of your argument. And to be clear, I agree with you in principal; there really has been an unwillingness from too many people on the far left to confront the fact that disorder on the trains and public spaces is a problem and the crime is a real issue that calls for some real enforcement of existing laws (and I saw your follow up that the public official in question is the County Supervisor which is an important clarification in that this is someone more powerful than a local council member).
But I think maybe I should emphasize again my issue is more I think you're trying to explain too much by pointing the finger at the "far left". That this is phenomenon of increased disorder on the train goes back more than 3-6 months means mistake on my part and I'll cop to misreading. But again, disorder and crime rise is not just a blue city phenomenon. Crime increase in very "red" rural areas is very real as well (https://www.wsj.com/articles/violent-crime-rural-america-homicides-pandemic-increase-11654864251)
I'll give maybe an example from the most recent business news to help maybe clarify my point. There were a lot of takes about why Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. One of the takes was that this was the fault of the Fed for raising rates so rapidly (as an aside, like you I agree with the Fed actions). The reality is of course that while Fed raising rates is a factor, the collapse doesn't happen absent SVB putting all it's eggs in the long term bonds basket, having a disproportionate amount of deposits from Silicon Valley start ups that were most directly affected by rising rates and who therefore needed cash and Peter Thiel deciding SVB was in trouble (given how much sway he has with the VC world more generally, makes sense that his actions creates "follow the leader" mentality). Pointing the finger at the Fed while not entirely inaccurate is seeking to explain way too much of what actually happened.
Hope I'm clarifying where I'm coming from here. As a more personal anecdote about maybe why I'm saying what I'm saying. I live in Nassau County and commute into Manhattan. My job also takes me to a variety of locations throughout NYC. Like you I very much noticed the increase in "disorder" on the subway. Like you, I've welcome what I think is increased focus on safety and like you I feel like I've noticed a difference. But the number of people who I've interacted with who live in Long Island who think the subway has turned into a Taxi Driver/Death Wish/Escape from New York hell scape is eye opening to say the least. So while I think it's important to fight against misinformed narrative from the far left that we somehow a) don't need police and b) any and all enforcement of public nuisance laws is authoritarianism/racism or just not a big deal. I also want to make sure to note the right wing counternarrative is also pushed back against. I'm thinking specifically of someone like Andrew Sullivan, who as far as I can tell, seems to blame the rise in crime entirely at the feet of BLM.
I'm technically working right now (had to take a couple phone calls while I wrote this) so apologies if my thoughts are a bit disjointed. Hope you can at least get the gist of what I'm trying to say.
I think Colin is making a good point here. The relative emptying out of urban public spaces since the pandemic reduces the rewards of urban life and in particular makes public nuisances of various kinds stand out more.
But putting pressure on city government to enforce laws and norms for public space is the one lever of action that we have to improve them.
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.
You could Waterboard me and I would still never admit to being a Nextdoor app moderator.
LOLz
Are you suggesting that “leftist” is pejorative? All the leftists who call themselves that would likely disagree.
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.