Socialists offer more of the same decay while LA crumbles in the dark

Los Angeles’ Sixth Street Bridge was supposed to be a triumph. Completed in 2022 after years of delays and cost overruns, the new structure connecting Boyle Heights to downtown LA was hailed as a civic landmark.

At $588 million, it was the most expensive bridge project in the city’s history. Its ten soaring arches and thousands of LED lights led its designers to call it the “Ribbon of Light.”

Today, the bridge is dark. Within months of its opening, thieves began tearing copper wire from its electrical infrastructure to sell for scrap. By one estimate, nearly 7 miles of copper were stripped from the bridge, extinguishing what was meant to be its defining feature.

The city’s new showpiece soon became a monument to broader civic dysfunction. Officials now estimate that repairing and relighting the bridge in time for the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics will cost $2.5 million.

Los Angeles’ Sixth Street Bridge was supposed to be a triumph. Completed in 2022 after years of delays and cost overruns, the new structure connecting Boyle Heights to downtown LA was hailed as a civic landmark. Rafael Fontoura for California Post

This is Los Angeles in 2026: the nation’s second-largest city, the center of a trillion-dollar regional economy and an entertainment industry mecca — yet one that struggles to perform the basic functions of urban government.

And the troubles extend far beyond streetlights. The city seems unable to repair its sidewalks, repave its streets or maintain aging infrastructure. It cannot keep public parks from becoming open-air drug markets or streets from turning into homeless encampments. It cannot build enough housing for its residents or attract and retain businesses. Its most famous industry, Hollywood, is struggling. Families are leaving and school enrollment is falling.

Los Angeles isn’t poor. Its tax base includes some of the most valuable real estate in America, and its economy is larger than that of many countries. The city’s annual budget hovers near $14 billion, larger than that of every American city except New York. Its police department alone spends more than the entire municipal budgets of Pittsburgh, Cincinnati and St. Louis combined. Yet despite its vast resources, Los Angeles is falling into a cycle of visible decay and disorder that threatens its long-term future.

Los Angeles’ decline is readily apparent in an area where city government is least ideological: maintaining streets, sidewalks and other basic infrastructure. The city has turned something as ordinary as cracked pavement into a billion-dollar governance problem. Its basic physical systems — streetlights, sidewalks, streets and curbs — have become growing sources of legal liability and fiscal strain.

This is Los Angeles in 2026: the nation’s second-largest city, the center of a trillion-dollar regional economy and an entertainment industry mecca — yet one that struggles to perform the basic functions of urban government. Andy Johnstone for CA Post

Consider the sidewalks. For decades, Los Angeles allowed its pedestrian infrastructure to deteriorate as tree roots buckled concrete slabs and intersections lacked curb ramps compliant with the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. In 2016, the city settled Willits v. City of Los Angeles — the largest disability-access class-action settlement in American history — by committing itself to spend $1.4 billion over 30 years to repair and upgrade the public right-of-way.

A decade later, the obligation remains largely unmet. At the current pace, the controller warned, fixing all the broken sidewalks could take 500 years.

Meantime, the neglect keeps generating new costs. In recent years, the city received thousands of sidewalk injury claims and related lawsuits, paying out more than $86 million in settlements. In other words, Los Angeles now pays twice for the same problem: first through litigation and then through the repairs it has yet to complete.

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The streets are no better. Los Angeles is famous for its car culture, but it cannot keep its asphalt in decent condition, owing partly to a regulatory trap of its own making. Repaving a street triggers the mandatory installation of modern accessibility upgrades, including ADA-compliant curb ramps. A standard four-corner intersection can run to $200,000 for curb ramps — often more than the price of resurfacing a mile of roadway.

Rather than confront those costs directly, Los Angeles has largely stopped repaving its streets altogether. In the first nine months of the current fiscal year, the city resurfaced less than 10 of the city’s 7,500 miles of roadway. Instead, it uses a workaround, relying on a temporary fix it calls “large asphalt repairs.” These projects patch small sections of roadway without legally counting as full repaving.

This approach reduces short-term costs but leaves the underlying maintenance backlog untouched. Pavement continues to deteriorate; the curb-ramp work remains unfinished. The repair bill could hit $15 billion by 2035 — more than the city’s entire current budget. Instead of paying for smooth roads, the city pays millions of dollars yearly to drivers with pothole-damaged cars.

The repair bill could hit $15 billion by 2035 — more than the city’s entire current budget. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post

Beyond the physical decay, there’s a deeper malaise. Los Angeles is no longer the violent-crime capital it was in the worst years of the late 20th century, but public disorder has become a daily reality.

Homeless encampments line the region’s sidewalks, freeway embankments and public parks. Open-air drug use, discarded needles, human waste and severe untreated mental illness are common sights. According to county health data, drug-overdose deaths in Los Angeles more than doubled over the last decade, driven almost entirely by fentanyl and methamphetamine usage.

At the peak of the drug plague in 2022, a record 3,220 LA County residents died of overdoses. Even after a significant decline in 2024, the county still recorded 2,438 total overdose deaths — nearly seven per day.

The city’s approach is perhaps best illustrated at MacArthur Park, a 40-acre green space a mile west of downtown. For years, the park has functioned as a sprawling narcotics market and homeless encampment, with drugs sold openly at virtually any hour.

Rather than crack down on the disorder, the city has largely sought to manage it. Under LA County’s “harm-reduction” framework, public-health agencies and contractors distribute naloxone, sterile syringes, smoking supplies and other materials — including sheets of aluminum foil used to inhale vaporized fentanyl — in an effort to reduce overdose deaths and disease transmission.

The situation came to a head this spring. In May, federal law enforcement targeted the park’s open-air fentanyl and methamphetamine market linked to the 18th Street Gang. Authorities charged 25 defendants and arrested 18. Yet, within days, local reporting found that drug activity and chaos had already resumed.

Homeless figures are seen in Downtown Los Angeles, CA, on Thursday, July 23, 2026. Homeless figures in Los Angeles have risen as Mayor Karen Bass points fingers at others for the issue. Andy Johnstone for CA Post

Just east of downtown, Skid Row demonstrates the catastrophe on a larger scale. It covers roughly 50 square blocks adjacent to downtown L.A.’s office towers. In 2024, Los Angeles County estimated that about 3,800 people were homeless there, roughly 70% of them unsheltered, with some of the county’s highest rates of substance abuse, mental-health crises, HIV/AIDS and overdose mortality.

The breakdown of basic civic order is further evident in the city’s emergency services. The LAPD answers just 57% of 911 calls within the 15-second window that state law requires. Nonemergency callers can wait 40 minutes to over an hour.

Despite years of rhetoric about compassion, affordable housing and social justice, no major city tolerates as much human misery on its streets as Los Angeles. The city now has more unsheltered homeless people than anywhere else in the country.

The Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority’s 2025 count found 72,308 homeless people countywide and 43,699 in the city of Los Angeles; most were unsheltered. Even as LA has claimed progress, rough sleeping — without a tent, vehicle or any shelter — rose 20% in 2025 to its highest level in four years. Los Angeles has built a vast homelessness bureaucracy, yet the crisis remains one of the city’s defining realities.

Living in Los Angeles has long involved a certain implicit bargain. Residents tolerated high taxes, extensive regulation and steep housing costs because, in return, the city offered economic opportunity, natural beauty and cultural prestige. But as public disorder spreads and basic services worsen, that bargain looks like a bad deal.

The commercial fallout has hit retail and tourism just as hard, even in upscale beachfront areas. Santa Monica’s Third Street Promenade, a pedestrian mall that once generated a substantial share of the city’s sales-tax revenue, now has a ground-floor storefront vacancy rate of 30%, with boarded-up windows and private security teams stationed outside remaining businesses.

Over 142,000 pounds of human waste, 24,000 pounds of discarded syringes and sharps, and more than 107,000 pounds of flammable liquid have been removed from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, California, on Saturday, July 18, 2026. The park is located just over two miles from City Hall. Andy Johnstone for CA Post

The entertainment industry, the source of Los Angeles’ global identity, has also seen better days. Film and television shooting days in Hollywood have fallen by roughly half since 2018. Productions are moving to Georgia, New Mexico, Canada and overseas to the United Kingdom, where costs are lower and headaches fewer.

The January 2025 Palisades and Eaton Fires made the city’s governance failures harder to ignore. The blazes consumed more than 16,000 structures, displaced tens of thousands of residents, and exposed failures of prevention and response. A year later, only about 12% of destroyed homes had received permits to rebuild, paralyzed by bureaucratic red tape.

Just getting permission to build in the city is a notorious hassle. A recent index ranked LA 492nd out of 500 American cities for permitting efficiency.

Local policies intended to expand housing supply have often reduced it. Measure ULA, approved by voters in 2022, imposed a steep new transfer tax on high-value real-estate transactions. The law was written so broadly that it applies not only to mansions but also to apartment buildings, commercial properties, industrial parcels and development sites.

The unintended consequences were immediate and severe. The tax effectively froze the commercial real-estate market. UCLA researchers found that the measure reduces multifamily housing production in Los Angeles by roughly 1,900 units per year — an 18% decline compared with a pre-policy baseline.

A measure designed to fund affordable housing, in other words, made it less attractive to build housing of any kind.

City Councilmember Nithya Raman greets supporters before the first general election runoff debate on Wednesday, August 19, 2026, in Van Nuys, California. Jonathan Alcorn for CA Post

When conventional governance breaks down, challengers of all kinds gain traction. In June’s mayoral primary, anti-incumbent sentiment split in two directions. From the right came Spencer Pratt, a former reality-television personality and Palisades Fire victim who ran an openly anti-establishment campaign. From the left came City Council member Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist and former ally of incumbent Mayor Bass. Pratt briefly looked poised to advance to a runoff before late-counted ballots pushed Raman into second place. Raman will now face Bass in the November general election.

Raman has tried to position herself as a reformer. Yet she is hardly detached from the city’s failures. Raman has served on the city council since 2020, chaired its Housing and Homelessness Committee, and has had a hand in the very policies that have defined LA’s deterioration, from homelessness to housing regulation.

Raman offers a Los Angeles version of the socialist urban politics now ascendant in New York and Seattle. To her supporters, Raman represents the chance to make progressive government finally deliver on its promises. To her critics, she comes across as a more ideological version of the same politics that helped produce the city’s failures.

LA retains extraordinary advantages — wealth, beauty, history and cultural power. Few cities are so richly endowed. Yet the City of Angels seems to have lost sight of the ordinary work of governing. Before promising grand transformations, its leaders must prove that they can do the basics. 

Shawn Regan is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. A version of this article first ran at City Journal.