On a Street Corner, the City’s Future Looks Fogged In

I am an early riser, usually up before the sun. And in recent weeks, that soft, ruminative hour between true darkness and real light has seemed strangely still. Day after day, the fog has extended its damp reach east from the sea, and taken our Mid-Wilshire neighborhood in its gray grasp.

Grudgingly, the fog--like some nagging uncertainty--retreats. In the east, the sudden redness of the sky is celebrated with a chorus of bird song. Finally, there is the vague dull hum of a vast city waking, the sound of a great machine for living being coaxed once more to life.

On one such morning a few days ago, I drove along La Brea Avenue. Hard times and the aftermath of the troubles have left their mark there. From 8th Street south, the rows of storefronts still are punctuated with burned-out shells of businesses. But perhaps more significant, the street corner labor market that for many years has dominated the intersection of Pico and La Brea has now extended north for several blocks.

On every corner, there are groups of Mexican and Central-American immigrants hoping to be hired by anyone with money to pay for a day’s work. Farther down the street, more immigrants and a large number of African-American men cluster around the drive-in restaurant at the corner of Pico and La Brea.

In my truck and denim shirt, I look like a potential employer and, as I stopped for the red light there, men converged not only from in front of the drive-in, but also from across the street, where the charred remains of a check-cashing parlor and an auto-parts store still stand. They wanted a simple thing: a day’s pay for a day’s work. It isn’t easy to come by.

That’s what Salvador Ortiz told me as we talked a few minutes later and several blocks away, sitting on adjoining stools in a corner cafe that advertises “Menudo Every Day� for $1.99. Eight years ago, Ortiz, a carpenter, came north from Michoacan in Mexico in search of work. He found it, married, fathered a child and learned English. He had hoped to find work in a cabinet shop or perhaps win a place in “the union,� where good wages and dignity were to be had. But, in these “bad times,� there are no such jobs.

So he stands on the corner of Pico and La Brea, hopes for a day’s casual labor and is glad his wife, Alicia, has steady work with a company that cleans offices in Hollywood. Without her meager check, they could not afford the $350-per-month rent on their Koreatown apartment. As it is, if he does not get work today, the tripe stew we slurp will be not only his breakfast, but his lunch and supper as well. Somehow, that sacrifice is easier to bear than the lack of work, easier than a system willing to buy so much less than he has to give. That leaves a hole worse than simple hunger.

A couple of blocks away, in the parking lot of a liquor store where he’d stopped for a pack of Salem cigarettes, I met Andre Wilkerson, a middle-aged African-American man whose aging Volvo’s rear window bore a hand-lettered sign: “No Job, No Justice. No Justice, No Peace.� Two years ago, the Downey plant where he worked making electronic switching gear closed down. Because, he said, the owners found they could “make it cheaper in Taiwan.� Since then, he’s been a handyman, taking any sort of work his skilled hands and low prices could win.

It hasn’t been much, and the gap between what he knows he can do and what he has been able to find has made him angry. He’s angry at people like Salvador who take work he thinks ought to be his; he’s angry at the people who he believes make the decisions for them both, and profit from their poverty. They’re the ones who “hire these foreigners� and “send our jobs to China.� They’re “downtown� or in “Washington.� He’s a little vague on that, but he’s clear on his anger.

A few hours later, I was sitting with my friend, the politician. We were talking about the changing of the guard in local politics and the upcoming Los Angeles mayoral election. “Everybody and his sister is going to be in it,� he mused.

It’s hard to believe, I said, that any of them has a clear notion of this city’s problems, let alone their solutions. The difficulty is you have to be elected by one city to govern another. Seven out of every 10 voters here still are middle-class Anglo men or women. But half our people aren’t even eligible to vote. They were born in another country; more than half speak a language other than English in their home. The voters have interests; the rest have needs.

The two most important facts of life with which we now contend--economic decline and immigration--are creatures of federal policy. Over the last 20 years, aggregate federal payments to Los Angeles have declined by 75%, while decisions made in Washington have sent people like Salvador and Andre to their street corners.

Over the past decade, the percentage of jobs paying less than a poverty-level wage has risen from 12% to 18%. Today, nearly half of all the working men from the ages of 18 to 24 in Los Angeles, like the rest of America, live in poverty. We know the situation is particularly bad among African-American men, whose average wages have fallen by nearly 25% over the past 20 years. The situation of Spanish-speaking and Asian immigrants, many of whom are here illegally, is harder to determine, but may be worse. Only a federal policy of full employment is likely to remedy any of that.

Any city that contents itself simply with redistributing scarcity turns government into nothing more than triage.

“What can we do about that here in Los Angeles?� my friend wondered.

It will take someone to convince the people who vote and the people who don’t that we are one city with one future, I said. It’s difficult to see the person who can do that now. But it’s early in the day; maybe the fog will lift.