Movement Mayor: Can Antonio Villaraigosa Change Los Angeles?
Freer, Regina & Gottlieb, Robert & Vallianatos, Mark & Dreier, Peter
0N A SATURDAY afternoon in March, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood with others leading a march of more than five hundred thousand people protesting anti-immigrant legislation making...
...Are they insiders, outsiders, or both...
...Villaraigosa insists that as a former teachDISSENT / Summer 2006 51 ers union organizer, he is in a good position to tackle school reform...
...can be well managed and serve as a laboratory of progressive policy reform...
...Larry Frank, now deputy mayor, spoke candidly of the challenge...
...The law, drafted by the United Food and Commercial Workers, was designed to thwart the possibility that the Albertsons grocery chain (which has about twenty stores in Los Angeles and whose workers are covered by a union contract) would be sold to a nonunion company...
...City Council...
...Soon after his election, political observers were already predicting that Villaraigosa would someday run for governor or for U.S...
...When Villaraigosa decided to run again for mayor in 2005, most of the city's progressive social movements and constituent groups coalesced around his candidacy...
...They pushed for suburban development, downtown redevelopment, highway construction, aerospace contracts, and a weak labor movement...
...It was an important victory for his agenda when, after months of tense negotiations, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Democrat-controlled legislature agreed in May to put a $37 billion statewide bond measure before the voters in November to finance schools, roads, bridges, levee repairs, and affordable housing...
...The new rules also banned city commissioners from evaluating and recommending contracts that their commissions will eventually vote on...
...During the campaign, Villaraigosa focused on declining public schools, transportation gridlock, neighborhood crime, the shortage of affordable housing and parks, and the need to make the busy port and the airport better neighbors...
...Hahn's electoral coalition included strong support among white homeowners (especially in the San Fernando Valley) and among African Americans, a legacy of the popularity among black voters of his father, Kenneth Hahn, who represented South L.A...
...Moreover, it is too small to accommodate the increasing number of flights...
...Villaraigosa has spent considerable time lobbying in Sacramento and Washington to obtain funding for these needs...
...It confronts a shortage of jobs that pay a living wage and provide access to health care...
...He hired Gail Goldberg, the head of San Diego's planning department, to take charge of LA's moribund planning agency and help him realize his vision of a denser, pedestrian-friendly Los Angeles that relies more on mass transit...
...Clear evidence of this burgeoning movement came in 1997, when the revitalized unions, along with their allies among community groups and clergy, pushed the City Council to pass the living-wage law over Mayor Richard Riordan's veto...
...In 2001, Villaraigosa won only 20 percent of the African American vote...
...Villaraigosa immediately arrived on the scene...
...Despite Villaraigosa's loss, the broad progressive coalition that came together during the campaign helped accelerate the city's reform agenda...
...If we do our job, he can do his...
...Activists now have a friend and ally in the mayor's office, but will access bring major policy change...
...In March, Villaraigosa proposed raising monthly trash pickup fees on homeowners from $11 to $28 over four years to allow Bratton to hire 1,053 more police officers by 2010...
...environmental laws...
...He has to prove to business leaders and high turnout, white, middle-class homeowners that he can carry out the day-to-day civic housekeeping chores...
...The new lease conditions also require that ships use low sulfur fuel while near shore, mandate use of alternative fuel in new yard tractors, and require lower emission trucks and locomotives to be used in the port terminal...
...In the 2001 mayoral race, Jim Hahn, the longtime city attorney, beat Villaraigosa by a 54 percent to 46 percent margin...
...Police said that Brown was driving erratically and that they suspected him of drunk driving...
...Villaraigosa favors a more regional approach that would assign a greater share of anticipated growth in flights to the region's smaller airports...
...This was the largest union victory in the country in more than thirty years...
...The activists intend to wage a grassroots campaign that could include protests and civil disobedience, targeting slum landlords and big developers, anticipating that if they create a climate of crisis and tension, it will give Villaraigosa an opportunity to forge a compromise settlement that would give the activists a victory...
...Instantly, the new mayor's face was everywhere, on the cover of Newsweek, on the network news stations...
...To cut down on these emissions, the mayor's port commissioners adopted new lease requirements in February that mandate shipping lines to use clean Alternative Maritime Power, which plugs ships into shore-side electric power so the huge container ships do not have to run their diesel engines while docked...
...Despite the opposition of the Central City Association, the powerful lobby group for downtown developers and businesses, he named three ACLU leaders to the Homeless Services Authority— the ACLU only a short time before had won a legal settlement from the city over the Police Department's treatment of the homeless...
...Villaraigosa seems well positioned to become a national leader, in no small measure because two issues he has long embraced— the plight of the working poor and immigrant rights—are now moving to the top of the nation's political agenda...
...Developers have ambitious plans for gentrifying the downtown area...
...Among white voters in the suburban middle-class San Fernando Valley, he garnered 48 percent of the vote compared with 34 percent four years earlier...
...Garcia fired ten shots, hitting Brown seven times...
...A third group, a loose coalition of homeowner associations and locally based business groups in the suburban San Fernando Valley, has challenged what it considers City Hall's focus on the central business district and on low-income (predominantly black and Latino) neighborhoods...
...The "bold" and "charismatic" mayor was profiled on National Public Radio and in nearly every major newspaper in the country...
...The stakes are much higher: Can he address the plight of the poor and the struggling lower middle class...
...In 1999, more than seventy five thousand home health care aides won an organizing effort led by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU...
...Villaraigosa won't be judged solely by his ability to take care of the municipal housekeeping chores (such as fixing potholes...
...What good is having power," he frequently says, "if you can't use it to help lift up the poor...
...The new mayor inherited a $295 million structural deficit...
...They also highlighted his early years—as the son of an abusive father, a rebellious teenager, a high school dropout (before returning to get his diploma, then graduating from UCLA)—and described his growth as a progressive activist and elected official...
...In fact, since the unrest, L.A...
...Villaraigosa was elected mayor in May 2005, unseating the incumbent James Hahn, a moderate Democrat, by a 59 percent to 41 percent landslide...
...Villaraigosa and his allies hope to demonstrate that a polyglot city like L.A...
...Villaraigosa signaled his political loyalties by appointing some of LA's most effective activists to key positions in the mayor's office: as department heads and as members of powerful boards and commissions...
...history...
...As the Latino mayor of America's second largest city, he already has a national profile and a bully pulpit...
...The most conspicuous symbol of this trend is the sale in 2000 of Times Mirror, owner of the Los Angeles Times, to the Tribune Company of Chicago...
...After Hahn won, Contreras and his union colleagues pushed the new mayor to support pro-labor and liberal policies...
...That year, Villaraigosa also won a City Council seat...
...And the organizing has been bearing fruit...
...The city's largest private employers are now the University of Southern California and Kaiser 46 DISSENT / Summer 2006 Permanente, a health maintenance organization...
...News reporters wondered whether LA's labor movement—with more than eight hundred thousand members—could come back from the double whammy of Contreras's death and Ludlow's downfall...
...an anti-sweatshop policy...
...The fourth political force has been a network of progressive labor unions, community organizations, and environmental groups...
...Dilemmas and Opportunities As of early May, Villaraigosa had yet to address a number of thorny issues on progressives' agenda...
...and a business community resistant to taxes, living wages, and regulations...
...He emphasizes the positive role that government can play in improving people's lives, but he also promotes the importance of both personal responsibility and grassroots organizing...
...LA's labor movement confronted a dilemma...
...In 2000, a strike by the mostly immigrant janitors won widespread public support and led to a convincing contract victory...
...Nine weeks later, they signed a preliminary pact...
...In April, he launched a Million Trees Initiative, designed to plant one million new trees over a four-year period in order to beautify and shade city streets, parks, and open spaces...
...The Villaraigosa-Ludlow team on the City Council symbolized the potential for a Latino—African DISSENT / Summer 2006 47 American coalition...
...VILLARAIGOSA IS at his best when he uses his personal charm and diplomatic skills to bring contending forces together and resolve a logjam, forging a compromise that results in victories for unions, environmentalists, and community groups but allows the other side to save face...
...Villaraigosa's staff is working on state legislation to allow the mayor to appoint the superintendent and has delegated a task force to make recommendations for improving student achievement in the vast district...
...He installed Cecilia Estolano, an activist attorney involved in environmental and affordable housing efforts, to run the powerful Community Redevelopment Agency...
...But crime is going down, and rents are going up...
...When the votes were counted, Villaraigosa had won majorities of Latino, black, and some white voters, as well as all income groups, from 54 percent among those earning over $100,000 to 67 percent among voters earning below $20,000...
...Villaraigosa gained the endorsement of several unions, including United Teachers of Los Angeles, but Hahn got the lion's share of labor's money and mobilization...
...The second are a wide variety of firms that do business with government agencies—including the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the port, the airport, the municipal utility, and the school district— and also litter the lists of major campaign donors...
...As a result, L.A...
...He supported (albeit reluctantly) an unprecedented city-funded $100 million annual housing trust fund proposed by Housing L.A., a coalition of union, church, and community activists...
...He appointed Thomas Saenz, a former attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and 48 DISSENT / Summer 2006 Educational Fund, as his top legal adviser...
...He has to reassure the business community that he believes in strengthening the city's economy...
...The clash came in the case of Devon Brown...
...has become ground zero of effective union and community organizing...
...He and Ludlow, who left his Council seat to become head of the L.A...
...In the early 1900s, New York City was a cauldron of seething problems—poverty, slums, child labor, epidemics, sweatshops and ethnic conflict...
...Prodded by a series of columns about Skid Row by Los Angeles Times writer Steve Lopez, the mayor targeted half of the funds for housing and social services for the homeless...
...The Los Angeles Police Department is still subject to a federal Justice Department consent decree to overhaul its operations to monitor and discipline rogue cops...
...coalition —which had successfully pushed for a municipal housing trust fund four years earlier —had been lobbying for two years to get the City Council to adopt inclusionary zoning, triggering strong opposition from the developerdominated Central City Association...
...Contreras hoped to orchestrate a dual endorsement of both candidates, but most L.A...
...on February...
...Key to these successes has been the transformation of the L.A...
...Villaraigosa has been working with environmentalists, unions, shipping lines, and nearby communities to "green" the Port of L.A., the nation's busiest...
...He named Larry Frank, a longtime labor and community organizer, as one of several deputy mayors...
...The labor movement also joined Hahn in opposing a 2002 ballot initiative to allow the San Fernando Valley to secede and form a separate city...
...County Federation of Labor into a solid institutional base for organizing, research, coalition-building, and political muscle...
...The incident led Bratton to impose restrictions on officers' shooting at moving cars, but Bratton defended Garcia, saying that Brown's car threatened Garcia's life...
...a president and governor hostile to the plight of cities and the poor...
...In 1973, Los Angeles was the first major U.S...
...union leaders believed that rewarding incumbents for good behavior was a cardinal principle, and on those grounds Hahn got the County Fed's support...
...A feisty organizer who rebuilt the once-lethargic hotel workers' local into a political powerhouse and pushed both the local and national labor movement to embrace immigrant rights, she will be a powerful ally of the new mayor...
...Villaraigosa speaks frequently of "hope" and "opportunity...
...During the past few decades, four major groups have contended for political power to fill this vacuum of corporate leadership...
...If they succeed, they may be laying the groundwork for the next New Deal...
...LA's unions and their community allies have played a key role in changing the political and racial/ ethnic complexion of LA's City Council, state legislative, and congressional delegations, now perhaps the most progressive in the country...
...Critics of the LAPD wanted to see if Villaraigosa would defy Bratton and the powerful police union...
...They fought successfully for workplace, tenement, and public health reforms...
...Ever since, he has been a constant presence at the city's schools, encouraging students to stay in school, resolve conflicts without violence, and get involved in community initiatives, including this year's expanded summer jobs program...
...has more millionaires than any other city, but it is also the nation's capital of the "working poor"— about 1.4 million of its residents are in that category...
...But in March the labor movement's leaders elected Maria Elena Durazo, the dynamic head of the hotel workers' union and Contreras's widow, to head the County Fed...
...But others he walked into with his eyes wide open...
...He carried 77 percent of voters between eighteen and twenty-nine years old and 70 percent of those between thirty and fortyfour...
...But reformers would like the new mayor to support a ban on donations to city candidates from individuals and firms bidding on contracts from city government...
...As he says, "I'm an unabashed progressive, but I'm not a knee-jerk...
...LAPD officer Steven Garcia shot and killed the thirteenyear-old Brown around 4 a.m...
...Similar city campaign finance violations have resulted in fines, not the threat of criminal prosecution...
...In November 2004, Karen Bass, an African American and a longtime community organizer, was elected to the State Assembly to represent a polyglot area with significant black, Latino, and Jewish populations...
...About half the students fail to graduate...
...Every progressive group in the city has projected its hopes onto the fifty-three-year-old Villaraigosa...
...As Villaraigosa assembled his transition team, he requested, as a kind of cautionary exercise, that each person on the team see Crash, a new film (and eventual Academy Award winner) that dramatized day-to-day ethnic and racial clashes in Los Angeles...
...Los Angeles has far fewer police officers per resident than New York, Chicago, and other major cities, and Bratton has been pushing for more...
...and a municipal housing trust fund...
...Because of his close friendship with both Contreras and his widow, Maria Elena Durazo, the head of the hotel workers union in Los Angeles, Villaraigosa was one of the pallbearers at the funeral...
...Among whites, his share of the vote grew from 41 percent to 50 percent...
...We need a similar commitment to fund affordable housing...
...Like one of his heroes, the late New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia, Villaraigosa is staking his political future on tackling tough urban issues that build on an immigrant base but resonate with broader constituencies...
...But Villaraigosa wants to redefine a "healthy business climate" to mean a version of prosperity that is widely shared by working people, one that lifts the working poor into the middle class, provides good schools and affordable housing, and protects the environment...
...Out of that turmoil, activists created a progressive movement, forging a coalition of immigrants, unionists, muckraking journalists, settlement house workers, middle-class suffragists, socialists, and upper-class philanthropists...
...Although the city recently passed a moratorium on razing residential hotels in the downtown Skid Row area, advocates for the homeless fear that the development boom will squeeze out the most vulnerable victims of the housing crisis...
...Much of L.A.'s economy—the tourism sector, the port and airport, HMOs and hospitals, universities, the film and entertainment industry, and firms with government contracts, among others—is tied to the region...
...Villaraigosa brokered a compromise: The guards could join the SEIU but they would do so in their own local...
...But, he warned, "If all you're concerned about is holding your coalition together, you can't push on issues...
...In 2002, they waged a feisty, though ultimately unsuccessful, effort to form a separate San Fernando Valley city...
...The union calculated that a victory over Maguire—whose buildings' janitors are already SEIU members, and whose development projects require city approvals—would be the opening salvo in a campaign to organize an estimated ten thousand security guards, most of them African Americans...
...One poll indicated that in 2005 he received as much as 58 percent, a huge swing...
...attorney, the district attorney, and the city's Ethics Commission found that Ludlow's successful City Council campaign in 2003 received at least $53,000 in secret help from SEIU Local 99 (which represents 38,000 school employees, including classroom aides, bus drivers, and mechanics, but not teachers) in the form of campaign workers, cellphones, computers and phone-banking equipment...
...It resulted in important gains, including a new contract that expires at the same time this year as contracts in other major cities, giving the union key leverage with national hotel chains...
...The city also reached a tentative financial settlement with Brown's family, said to be about $1.5 million...
...He secured federal and state funds to build a new carpool lane on the congested 405 freeway...
...Local government has some power to regulate industries, focus economic development dollars, encourage good development through land use policies, and push sticky industries to be good employers and good neighbors...
...How do you move an agenda forward, and how do you hold a coalition together...
...Then, just weeks before the runoff, the fifty-two-year-old Contreras died unexpectedly of a heart attack...
...And he revived plans for extending a subway line under Wilshire Boulevard toward the coast, while expanding rapid bus service...
...During his first year in office, Villaraigosa has taken steps that reflect the careful balancing act that defines the job of big-city mayor...
...Traffic congestion, inadequate public transit, and emissions from ships and trucks idling at the region's two major ports make L.A...
...Senate...
...has elected a mayor with impeccable progressive credentials—a leader of MEChA (the Latino student group) at UCLA, DISSENT / Summer 2006 45 an organizer with the teachers union, president of the Southern California American Civil Liberties Union, and a longtime ally of grassroots labor, community, and environmental groups...
...During the campaign, he called for mayoral takeover of the Los Angeles Unified School District—with 727,000 students, the nation's second largest...
...The reality is that L.A...
...He has generally supported William Bratton, LA's popular police chief...
...The demographic changes have triggered racial tensions, but the past decade's groundswell of grassroots labor and community organizing has helped refocus much of the frustration in positive directions...
...When Villaraigosa appointed John Mack, former head of the Urban League and longtime LAPD critic, to head the Police Commission, a showdown with Bratton (and the police union) was almost inevitable...
...But there are also many powerful obstacles to meaningful urban reform: a city whose financial needs far exceed its revenue-raising capacity...
...Even before taking office, mayor-elect VilDISSENT / Summer 2006 49 laraigosa demonstrated his political skills and pro-labor sympathies...
...County Federation of Labor after Contreras's death, engaged in shuttle diplomacy to settle a threatened strike by hotel workers, brokering a deal that averted a union lockout at seven major Los Angeles hotels...
...They got their answer in February, when the Police Commission—under previous mayors a rubber stamp for the police chief—ruled by a four-toone margin that Garcia had violated departmental rules and should face discipline for the shooting...
...Once Villaraigosa took office, however, the housing activists backed off, wanting to give the new mayor breathing room and an opportunity to forge a broader coalition for housing reform...
...It is both a major employer and a leading source of air pollution, but largely immune from U.S...
...But the city's unions were shaken in February by a scandal that brought down the mayor's close friend Martin Ludlow, head of the County Fed...
...In the March 2005 preliminary election, Villaraigosa garnered the most votes among the five major candidates...
...Its schools are overcrowded and underfunded...
...Whereas Hahn had appointed a handful of progressives to various boards, Villaraigosa stacked these posts with enough people to change the priorities of key agencies, including the Department of Water and Power, the Harbor Commission, the Airport Commission, the Planning Commission, and the Community Redevelopment Agency...
...Housing prices are skyrocketing...
...In April, Villaraigosa helped SEIU resolve a longstanding dispute with developer Robert Maguire, one of the city's largest property owners...
...In September, Villaraigosa called airport officials, politicians, and residents to a meeting in an airport boardroom and asked them to work out a compromise...
...Even more important, he needs to make sure that racial tensions don't explode into civil unrest...
...I understand why the mayor decided to raise garbage fees to add more cops," said one housing activist...
...In January, the Democratic National Committee picked Villaraigosa to respond to George W. Bush's State of the Union address...
...At the start of the twenty-first century, Los Angeles faces many similar challenges and opportunities...
...At the City Hall press conference, Villaraigosa stood with Latino union leaders, African American clergy, and Maguire to announce the agreement...
...cannot solve many of its problems without funding from the state and federal governments...
...His allies understand that, to be an effective mayor, he needs to build a diverse governing coalition...
...Like the port, the huge Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) is a major economic engine and source of jobs, but also a terrible neighbor, the source of mind-numbing noise, traffic, and pollution for adjacent communities...
...There are no Fortune 500 corporations headquartered in the nation's second largest city...
...He embraces patriotism in every speech and admonishes immigrant activists to carry the American flag at protest rallies...
...port contribute 55 percent of all diesel emissions and 36 percent of all emissions of nitrous oxides, a key component of smog...
...Can he promote what activists call a "growthwithjustice" agenda...
...the threat of capital mobility...
...The economy is booming, as the class divide is widening...
...Can Progressives Fill the Political Vacuum...
...Their victories provided the intellectual and policy foundations of the New Deal three decades later...
...Maguire wanted to keep the janitors' and security guards' unions separate...
...For Villaraigosa, being a "grown-up" means effectively balancing his progressive views with his role as mayor governing a complex city full of economic and cultural crosscurrents...
...He appears frequently on the Sunday talk shows...
...Young African Americans, in particular, turned out for him...
...But some progressive activists were upset when, a few days later, after almost forty thousand high school students staged an immigrant rights walkout and some blocked traffic on major freeways, Villaraigosa urged them to return to class...
...During LA's postwar boom, the city was run by a shadowy handful of white businessmen— the Committee of 25—who spoke with one voice, typically through the then-right-wing Los Angeles Times...
...city with a white majority to elect an African American mayor—Tom Bradley, who served for twenty years...
...52 DISSENT / Summer 2006...
...To address the worst-in-the-nation traffic gridlock that many Angelenos rank as among the most frustrating aspects of life in L.A., Villaraigosa issued an executive order barring street con50 DISSENT / Summer 2006 struction and repair work during rush hour...
...Compared with 2001, Villaraigosa strengthened his base of support among Latinos (he won 84 percent of their vote), union members (60 percent), and Jews (55 percent...
...The U.S...
...For example, Hahn walked the picket lines when grocery workers were engaged in a bitter four-month strike with three national supermarket chains...
...Few people were surprised to see Villaraigosa on the front lines...
...6, 2005, in South Los Angeles, as the African American teenager backed a stolen car toward a police car after a brief chase...
...Almost as soon as the inaugural party had dispersed, violence flared at a local high school that pitted Latino against African American students...
...0N A SATURDAY afternoon in March, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa stood with others leading a march of more than five hundred thousand people protesting anti-immigrant legislation making its way through Congress...
...the nation's most polluted area...
...Good government activists were pleased when Villaraigosa tightened ethics standards by banning lobbyists from serving on city commissions...
...PETER DREIER, REGINA FREER, ROBERT GOTTLIEB, and MARK VALLIANATOS teach at Occidental College in Los Angeles...
...The Housing L.A...
...Under the leadership of the late Miguel Contreras, the federation reached out beyond its membership to forge coalitions with community-based organizations, the clergy, and housing and immigrants' rights activists...
...Despite a declining crime rate, it remains one of America's most dangerous cities...
...During the campaign, Villaraigosa had pledged his support for inclusionary zoning, a policy (already adopted by more than a hundred California cities) to require new residential developments to include at least 15 percent affordable units...
...Villaraigosa Takes Office Despite his overwhelming victory and his broad popularity, Villaraigosa's electoral coalition, like Hahn's before him, is fragile...
...The first are major commercial and residential developers (and their law firms), who seek zoning approvals and tax breaks and who, more than any other constituency, fill campaign coffers with contributions...
...Today, there is no such coherent power structure whose members sit on each others' boards, control the charities and cultural institutions, and lunch at exclusive downtown social clubs...
...He told housing activists that he would push for inclusionary zoning as part of a comprehensive housing agenda...
...In October, Villaraigosa settled a dispute that threatened to derail plans for a new hotel next to the city's Convention Center, guaranteeing that the city-subsidized hotel will be unionized...
...It was the largest demonstration in L.A...
...Some political difficulties have been thrust upon the new mayor...
...This sprawling city of four million people is now 48 percent Latino, 31 percent white, 11 percent Asian, and 10 percent black...
...Mayors Riordan and Hahn had proposed major airport expansion that outraged residents of nearby neighborhoods and led to lawsuits that put expansion on hold...
...His triumph was a victory for LA's progressive movement, which since the 1992 civil unrest has forged an increasingly powerful political coalition of unions, community organizations, environmental groups, religious institutions, and ethnic civic groups...
...A months-long investigation by the U.S...
...Now L.A...
...Conference of Mayors asked him to head a task force on poverty...
...HE IS PROBABLY the most pro-labor mayor in the country...
...This gives Villaraigosa significant leverage to promote a more enlightened view of business's responsibility to the broader community...
...Still, fewer rank-and-file union members, and even staffers, participated in the County Fed's voter registration and turnout campaign for Hahn than four years before...
...And they'd like to see him endorse a proposal, put forward by City Councilmember Eric Garcetti, for public financing of all municipal election campaigns...
...What does it mean to be a progressive at the municipal level...
...has become a city of absentee-owned firms that have little longterm stake in local affairs...
...Although they spoke many languages, the movement found its voice through organizers, clergy, and sympathetic politicians...
...in the City Council and County Board of Supervisors...
...is a much more progressive city than it was three decades ago...
...In 2003, Martin Ludlow, who had served as the County Fed's political director and had been Villaraigosa's aide in the state legislature, was elected to the L.A...
...He recruited Torie Osborn, director of the leftist Liberty Hill Foundation and a veteran activist for gay and lesbian rights, as a special adviser with a broad portfolio...
...More than fifty high-rise residential buildings are on the drawing board, all of them slated for high-income residents...
...Many labor activists said the penalties were vastly excessive...
...But Villaraigosa has challenged Bratton over the issue of police abuse...
...At Villaraigosa's urging, the LAX board settled four lawsuits that will allow the airport to implement some modernization, while funding noise and traffic mitigation, and job training, in surrounding communities...
...Over the Chamber of Commerce's objections, Villaraigosa supported (and the City Council passed) an ordinance that made it harder for a company that buys a grocery store to fire employees for at least three months...
...The stories focused on his prominence as a Latino mayor in the country's second largest city...
...Soon after taking office, Villaraigosa made good on his pledge to allocate $100 million for the city's housing trust fund...
...He later explained, "Somebody's got to be a grown-up," an ironic comment given that Villaraigosa had himself participated in the historic Chicano high school student walkout in 1968...
...If the 1992 civil unrest had any positive outcome at all, it was the growing recognition by the city's progressive activists that they had to do a better job at mobilizing grassroots groups to insist on political change, to work across racial lines, and to build bridges between unions and community groups...
...As one veteran organizer explained, "Our job is to make enough noise, mobilize enough support for our issues, and put enough pressure on the City Council and the business community to give Antonio the room to broker a solution...
...They portrayed his ascent— as Villaraigosa often does himself—as an updated version of the American dream...
...Skyrocketing rents (typically over $1,200/month) and home prices (over $350,000) are pushing poor and working-class residents out of the city or forcing them to live in substandard and overcrowded housing...
...Fabian Nunez, who had also served as the County Fed's political director and was a veteran activist for immigrant rights, was elected to the State Assembly in 2002 and catapulted to the powerful position of Speaker two years later...
...Yet housing activists would like the city to identify a permanent source of funding for the trust fund, so that it does not require a political battle each year...
...To avoid a jail term, Ludlow agreed to step down from his County Fed position, which he had held for only eight months, and to stay out of union and electoral politics for ten years...
...Most of his key advisers warned him that school reform was political quicksand, but he insisted that it was a battle he wanted to fight, despite strong opposition from his allies in the teachers union and the seven-member elected school board, and despite the fact that LAUSD serves students from twenty-six separate cities, twentyfive of which had no voice in electing Villaraigosa to office...
...The Republicans' recent efforts to criminalize undocumented immigrants can only help the Democrats—and especially a politician with crossover appeal like Villaraigosa...
...More than forty thousand people are homeless...
...He asked Denise Fairchild, a well-respected planner, to coordinate development in South Los Angeles...
...They are coauthors of The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City (University of California Press, 2005), an updated second edition of which will be published in August 2006...
...And the recent upsurge of mass protests around immigrant rights has lifted Villaraigosa's visibility and natural constituency...
...A stalwart ally of SEIU's Justice for Janitors campaign, Villaraigosa was asked to intervene in the union's effort to win bargaining rights for security guards who work in the same buildings with the predominantly Latino, and unionized, janitors...
...When he served as Speaker of the State Assembly, Villaraigosa surprised many skeptics with coalition-building skills that enabled him to pass progressive legislation to expand funding for urban parks, health insurance, and school construction After a year in office, Villaraigosa's mayoralty raises a critical question...
...He told the Los Angeles Times that the central dilemma was "competing demands...
...Less than a week later, 60 percent of union members voted for Villaraigosa in the runoff...
...The mayor met privately with student leaders, then addressed a rally outside City Hall...
...For example, the city has adopted a living-wage law, an ordinance that effectively stops low-wage, bigbox stores like Wal-Mart from setting up shop...
...Ships in the L.A...
Vol. 53 • July 2006 • No. 3
