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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 …

But, then again, we do not stand at the gates of Socialism’s New Jerusalem, but at the hard edge of the developers’ millennium. Llano itself is owned by an absentee speculator in Chicago who awaits an offer he cannot refuse from Kaufman and Broad. Setting aside an apocalyptic awakening of the neigh…