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In the fall of 1973 home prices in Southern California were $1000 below the national average; six years later they were $42,400 higher (fifteen years later, $143,000 higher). If in the flatlands of the Valley home values only doubled, they tripled or quadrupled in the hills or near the beach. In Be…

An obvious result of growing financial integration is that control over the Los Angeles economy is being alienated, with incalculable consequences, to power centers six thousand miles away. The Downtown ‘renaissance’, after all, is only a perverse monument to US losses in the global trade war. When…

The second factor, helping define the mode of recycling, has been the differential in land prices across the Pacific. If land inflation in Los Angeles has radically transformed the economics of local urbanization, it remains yet minuscule compared to the neutron-star densities of property values in…

As we shall see in more detail in the next chapter, all this started changing during the Vietnam boom as developable coastal land – the raw material of the Southern California dream – began to disappear. Resulting land inflation, which went ballistic in the late 1970s and again in the late 1980s, p…

Where did the money to buy such power come from? Although some of the new wealth on the Westside arose from the military aerospace boom of the later 1950s, the locus of power, as in previous generations, remained real-estate speculation. But, as we have stressed, the game was now played within the …