The Los Angeles City Council asked Mickey Kantor, President Bill Clinton‘s ex-secretary of commerce, to head a commission to assess the shape of American’s second largest city. The report pulled few punches. Los Angeles, said the report, “suffers from a crisis in leadership and direction.” L.A., it says, risks becoming “a city in decline.”
These problems include: a public school system with a high inner-city drop-out rate, where many of those who do graduate are unable to read, write and compute at grade level; the worst traffic in the nation; nearly $30 billion in unfunded pension liabilities (more than Detroit); last in job creation among big cities since 1992 and the only one of the seven largest cities “where the number jobs has actually declined since 1990”; and according to a recent study by the liberal Brookings Institution, now last in job creation for young people in the 100 largest metropolitan areas.
