Example Image
Civitas Outlook
Topic
Pursuit of Happiness
Published on
Mar 6, 2025
Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Photo by Henning Witzel on Unsplash

In Southern L.A., These Cities Are Making a Comeback

Contributors
Joel Kotkin
Joel Kotkin
Senior Research Fellow
Joel Kotkin
Summary
The key is governance and a strong local focus.
Summary
The key is governance and a strong local focus.
Listen to this article

Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times. In 1981, the Rand Corporation described it as “an urban disaster area.” In 2015, it was named among the worst cities in America, based on 22 measures of affordability, economics, education, health, and quality of life. In 2019, Business Insider ranked it near the bottom along with several other nearby cities. Founded as a largely agricultural community in 1948, the city eventually transformed itself into a manufacturing hub but was then devastated in the 1980s as aerospace and car companies exited.

Yet today, walking along Paramount Boulevard, one sees not broken-down storefronts but a thriving downtown, full of attractive restaurants and shops. The city has adopted a “broken windows” approach to policing. While crime rates remain above average for the state, they have been trending down. Homicides, down two-thirds from 1990s levels, are well below the L.A. city average and almost half of those in nearby South L.A. neighborhoods. Paramount has also gotten its city finances on a more solid footing than those of its peers. Whereas L.A. was flirting with huge deficits even before the wildfires, Paramount maintained budget surpluses over the past decade.

Perhaps even more remarkable, one sees no signs of the homelessness, graffiti, and urban disorder that’s so common throughout Southern California—a remarkable shift from conditions just a decade or two ago. “In places like Paramount people get things done because that’s where they live,” says former Paramount city manager Pat West. “In L.A., they have meetings.”

Continue reading at City Journal

10:13
1x
10:13
More articles

The “Baneful Practice of Secessions” Returns to Texas

Constitutionalism
Aug 27, 2025

Will California Reform Its Broken Housing Policies?

Economic Dynamism
Aug 26, 2025
View all

Join the newsletter

Receive new publications, news, and updates from the Civitas Institute.

Sign up
More on

Pursuit of Happiness

How to Save Our Urban Centers

What will the future of American cities look like?

Joel Kotkin
Pursuit of Happiness
Jun 26, 2025
National Poll from Civitas Institute: Americans Concerned About AI, Economic Issues

The Civitas Institute Poll, conducted from March 11-20, 2025, asked 1,200 Americans an array of questions about how things are going in the country.

Daron Shaw
Pursuit of Happiness
Jun 11, 2025
Divorce, Family Arrangements, and Children's Adult Outcomes

This paper uses linked tax and Census records for over 5 million children to examine how divorce affects family arrangements and children's long-term outcomes.

Andrew C. Johnston
Pursuit of Happiness
May 22, 2025
Estimating the Productivity of Community Colleges in Paving the Road To Four-Year College Success

Despite a relatively rich literature on the community college pathway, the research base on the quality differences between these institutions has been decidedly thin.

Scott Carrell, Michal Kurlaender
Pursuit of Happiness
Feb 7, 2025
No items found.
The Next Californias

Colorado, Washington, and Oregon have adopted many of the policies contributing to the Golden State’s decline.

Joel Kotkin
Pursuit of Happiness
Aug 25, 2025
The Moral Collapse on Campus Is a Result of the Hollowing Out of the Humanities

Mending a civic and intellectual catastrophe.

Alexander Duff
Pursuit of Happiness
Aug 18, 2025
YIMBYs Are Killing off the Family Home

Forcing everyone to live in high rise apartments isn’t solving the housing crisis. Quite the opposite.

Joel Kotkin
Pursuit of Happiness
Aug 6, 2025
Beware the New Eugenics

Who decides what humans become?

Joel Kotkin
Pursuit of Happiness
Jul 1, 2025

Arthur Brooks on the Secret to a Fulfilling Life

Pursuit of Happiness
Jul 7, 2025
1:05

Populism Unpacked: Voices from the Heartland

Pursuit of Happiness
Mar 4, 2025
1:05

Jeff Rosen on What “The Pursuit of Happiness” Meant to America's Founders

Pursuit of Happiness
Jan 26, 2025
1:05

Arthur C. Brooks on the Pursuit of Happiness in an Unhappy World

Pursuit of Happiness
May 8, 2024
1:05

Arthur C. Brooks on The Art & Science of Getting Happier: Live at The Texas Tribune

Pursuit of Happiness
Mar 29, 2024
1:05
No items found.
No items found.
The French Origins of Urban Renewal

Paris’s drastic transformation, often termed “Haussmannization,” was unprecedented in scope and set the stage for future traumatic episodes of urban renewal in other countries, including America.

Tyler Turman
Pursuit of Happiness
Aug 22, 2025
Diversity, Real and Imposed

Diversity imposed drowns human spontaneity and the shades and gradations of man’s mysterious existence into heartless uniformity, bearing no pulses or imaginations.

Gregory M. Collins
Pursuit of Happiness
Aug 21, 2025
The Education of David Mamet

The inherent complexity of an artist is that he ought to be nationless, placeless, even languageless. But Mamet proves that such a thing is impossible.

Emina Melonic
Pursuit of Happiness
Aug 15, 2025
Ed Feulner, Movement Man

Feulner’s vision of modern conservatism was one of ordered liberty: one that drew as much on classical liberals like Hayek as it did on older traditions that have shaped the American Founding and Western civilization.

Samuel Gregg
Pursuit of Happiness
Jul 25, 2025
No items found.