Content note: Racism
When you’re driving through the Los Angeles area, it seems like suburbia never ends. Downtown LA is pretty obvious, but outside of LA and maybe Burbank (you can tell because of all the movie studios), I have a hard time telling which city I’m in at any given moment. Is this Burbank? Pasadena? Baldwin Park? And why is it not all just Los Angeles?
So I’m digging around on this recently and discover: Los Angeles was a much different city back in the 1930s. With the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct in 1913, which provided it enough water allow its population to increase, it had grown from a backwater town to a real city. The nascent motion picture industry had put down roots in the area, thanks to the city’s dependable weather and its proximity to a wide variety of landscapes, but less well-known is the area’s history of aircraft manufacturing.
As near as I can tell from the admittedly limited amount of research I’ve done, Los Angeles was an ideal place for aircraft manufacturing because its weather permitted flying throughout the year. Douglas Aircraft was founded in Santa Monica in 1921, and Jack Northrop, an engineer who worked there, went on to found a number of aircraft manufacturers in the area, including the Northrop Corporation and the Lockheed Corporation.
During WWII, California manufacturers saw a huge influx of federal defense spending. People looking for jobs surged into the Los Angeles area to work at all these plants, but the available housing wasn’t enough to accommodate them. Housing had to be built quickly. At the time, Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley both existed — I believe I read in Cadillac Desert that Los Angeles was competing with the valley for water back in the 1920s — but Los Angeles was not yet the sprawling megalopolis it is today, and most of its population was centered in the area we’d now consider downtown Los Angeles. Surrounding these areas was farmland and chaparral, with smaller population centers in places like Long Beach and Burbank.
Housing had to be built, and quickly. Previously, communities had grown up piecemeal around a central downtown area, but the most efficient way to get all these houses set up was for the companies to oversee the planning and building of entire communities. They manufactured prefab houses and set them up where the plants were, in areas like Downey and Burbank, far from downtown Los Angeles. Instead of being clustered around a downtown, these communities were clustered around shopping centers that were built at the same time, and then all eventually connected in the frankly ridiculous network of freeways and sprawl we have today.
Because LA wasn’t all that built up at the time, these new communities weren’t cities in their own right, but were all unincorporated Los Angeles County, and received services — police, fire, etc. — from the county. I’m a lot hazier on all the reasons a community would want to incorporate, but one of those reasons is to avoid a hostile annexation by a neighboring city, as was about to happen to the manufactured community of Lakewood. Long Beach had been eyeing it, I guess, and Lakewood could either not protest (and become part of Long Beach, subject to Long Beach zoning and laws), could incorporate as a “real” city (which would cost buckets of money), or could incorporate but contract with LA County to provide all its services.
This had never been done before — cities contracted with counties to provide services, yes, but not all the services. Part of the reason, and amazingly, you’ll find this right on Lakewood’s website, was to keep Lakewood white. In 1948, six years earlier, the US Supreme Court had struck down the validity of restrictive deed covenants keeping people of color out of housing developments, but cities and lenders could still restrict who actually lived there. By incorporating under what was later called the Lakewood Plan, Lakewood was able to continue being an exclusionary racist city without interference from Long Beach. I’m sure there were other benefits, too, but that racism was a pretty big selling point at the time.
At this time, the state government was giving cities a percentage of the local sales tax, too, which was another incentive to incorporate. Something like 80% of the cities incorporated in California since this time were incorporated as contract cities under the Lakewood Plan, and I’ve heard that most of the cities in LA County incorporated after 1954 are also contract cities, though I’m having a hard time verifying.
Southern California is also where homeowners’ associations took off, so you have us to thank for that fine you got after you put up the wrong color blinds, too.
Ada Hardy 