Why Don't American Cities Burn?. Michael B. Katz
South, West, and overseas. Los Angeles emerged as a major center in the Pacific basin and an important player in the global economy. Philadelphia, on the other hand, could not surmount its place as a second-order city on the international stage.
The contrast between Philadelphia and Los Angeles reflected not only changes in the two cities over time but America’s divergent regional history. Phoenix, Houston, Las Vegas, and other Sunbelt cities more or less followed the Los Angeles model and grew rapidly. Old industrial cities, like Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Detroit, lost manufacturing jobs and population.
Although Philadelphia did not begin to lose manufacturing jobs in the aggregate until after 1950, industrial restructuring had begun to undermine its older manufacturing sectors early in the twentieth century. Philadelphia’s mills started to shift to the non-union South in the 1920s, and shipbuilding, a huge industry early in the century, was a shadow of its former self in 1950. As a share of the workforce, employment in textiles dropped by nearly two-thirds between 1900 and 1940. The experience of the steel, machine tools, locomotive, steam engine, and railroad industries followed the same trajectory.
To some extent, new industries temporarily replaced the old ones. These included consumer-oriented manufacturing, such as auto assembly and food processing, as well as firms participating in the “second industrial revolution” of chemicals and electronics. The Philadelphia region also played an important role in the radio and early computer industries. But these newer industries lacked the local base of the older manufacturing firms. They were, instead, often branch plants of national or international corporations such as RCA and Westinghouse that pulled out of the region to chase cheaper land and labor in the South, Mexico, or Southeast Asia.
Philadelphia never successfully replaced its industrial economy. Service sector growth, while important, never catapulted the Delaware Valley into a competitive spot in the global economy, and its major service sector employers, like its midcentury manufacturers, are usually branch offices of corporations headquartered elsewhere. Public sector employment also became increasingly important. Employment by the federal government multiplied from 1.7 percent to 3.6 percent of the regional workforce between 1950 and 1970 before falling back to 1.9 percent as federal aid to cities declined. To some extent, employment in local government compensated for the federal withdrawal; its share of employment increased from 1.3 percent in 1980 to 1.9 percent in 2000. Where the Philadelphia region grew jobs was in education and health care. Employment in educational services jumped from 1.8 percent in 1950 to 7.9 percent in 2000. Jobs in hospitals multiplied from 1.4 percent of the regional workforce in 1940 to 4.2 percent in 2000. The Delaware Valley’s universities and medical schools, not its factories, had become its anchor institutions—major economic assets. Los Angeles followed a very different economic path in the twentieth century. As happened elsewhere in America, agriculture became less important. By the middle of the twentieth century, it accounted for only 1.2 percent of employment in the city. This straightforward decline, however, masks an important change that distinguished the Southwest from the Atlantic Coast: the rise and extent of migrant labor.13 Mexicans harvested fruits and vegetables; Japanese immigrants dominated the cultivation and trade in flowers. Los Angeles may have acquired the image of an entertainment and leisure paradise, but its reality was industrialization, which included food processing. In the 1920s, Los Angeles’s population more than doubled and then increased even more with the dust bowl migration of the 1930s and the great migration of African Americans in the decades following World War II. By 1935, Los Angeles had catapulted to fifth-largest manufacturing center in the United States. Its major industries included cinema, petroleum drilling and refining, and aircraft and automobile assembly. It was second in the manufacture of tires, and fourth in apparel and furniture. With the Cold War and wars in the Pacific—Korea to Vietnam—Los Angeles emerged at the apex of the military-industrial complex. From 1940 to 1970, as its population tripled to ten million, it led all other metropolitan areas in manufacturing growth. At its peak in 1980, aircraft production accounted for 3 percent of regional employment; with military cutbacks and outsourcing, that fraction had declined to 1.3 percent in 2000. According to one informed estimate, each defense sector job generated 1.5 to 2.5 jobs in other local sectors of the economy. Los Angeles’s manufacturing preeminence resulted not only from high-tech industries. A large local electronics sector consisted of assembly plants paying low wages to documented and undocumented Asian immigrant workers. Southeast Asians dominated electronics, while Latin Americans engaged in low-wage work for new sweatshops in the apparel industry, which elsewhere had largely fled the United States.
By the late twentieth century, however, services dominated Los Angeles’s economy. Banking, insurance, and various other business services became increasingly important, as they did in Philadelphia. Real estate, though, employed a larger fraction of the workforce than it did in Philadelphia, as did entertainment and recreation. Although employment in higher education and medicine also multiplied, Los Angeles—with its robust manufacturing and high-end services—did not depend on educational and health services as much as Philadelphia. Los Angeles also differed from Philadelphia in the role of public administration. In 2000, local public administration employed 1.9 percent of the region’s adults—roughly half the share in the Philadelphia area. In part, the lesser importance of public employment in Los Angeles reflected the city’s more buoyant private sector. In part, too, it grew out of differences in priorities, which resulted in more privatized police forces, garbage collection, and services for gated communities in greater Los Angeles than there were in the Delaware Valley.
Across the twentieth century, Philadelphia and Los Angeles differed dramatically in their ability to attract new residents. Between 1900 and 1940, no more than 26 percent of Los Angeles residents reported being born in California—most of the rest had arrived from the East, the Midwest, and Mexico. In 2000, only 45 percent were native Californians. Migration from elsewhere in the United States had slowed, but more than 16 percent had been born in Mexico, and 5 percent had been born in Central America. In 1900, Los Angeles’s population was, officially, 98 percent non-Hispanic white; in 2000, the majority was Latino. Asians outnumbered African Americans. Spanish was the first language of 35 percent of Angelenos, a close second to English (42 percent), with Chinese (2.8 percent) and Filipino/Tagalog (2.2 percent) third and fourth, respectively. Los Angeles represented the multicolored, multiracial future of America.
Philadelphia, by contrast, remained to a considerable extent black and white, with shades of other hues working their way in after about 1980. The great migrations of African Americans and Puerto Ricans, when Herbert’s parents arrived in the city, were Philadelphia’s principal migration events in the last half of the twentieth century. In the late twentieth century, between seventy and eighty of every one hundred Delaware Valley residents had been born in Philadelphia or New Jersey. In 1900, immigrants from Ireland composed 7 percent of the region’s population, followed by newcomers from England (3 percent) and Italy (2 percent). Although after 1950 no immigrant group accounted for more than 1 percent of the region’s population counted in the census, in the late twentieth century, immigrants from Asia (including India) and Latin America (mainly Mexico) had begun to transform a number of city neighborhoods and even some suburbs. By 2000, 9 percent of the city’s population was foreign-born—a proportion that would be considerably larger with the inclusion of their children and undocumented immigrants. Compared to Los Angeles, Philadelphia was a low-immigrant city, lacking the opportunities that attracted newcomers to the great urban immigrant magnets. Nonetheless, by every indication, immigration, whose presence was increasingly evident, was making itself felt in the city’s neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces, creating tensions not experienced for nearly a century.14
The contrasts between Philadelphia’s and Los Angeles’s economic and population histories played themselves out in space. Population density in Philadelphia, for instance, has always been much higher than in Los Angeles.15 Its downtown high-rises surrounded by vast areas of row houses contrast with the “suburban cities” of the Los Angeles region, the latter of which inspired sociologist William Whyte, author of The Organization Man, to coin the term “urban sprawl.” The Los Angeles region’s suburban central cities have retained a relatively constant share of the area’s population: 51 percent in 1940, 36 percent in 1990. Philadelphia, by contrast, lost population to the suburbs during the entire twentieth century. The fraction of the regional population living in the