洛杉矶为何难现纽约式强市长

Mayors have been taking center stage in the national spotlight lately, especially after the election of Zohran Mamdani in New York. In his first 6 months in office, Mamdani has managed to expand access to universal child [music] care, fill 100,000 potholes, and propose a new tax targeting ultra-wealthy owners of second [music] homes. Mayors, who are basically CEOs of their city, are lightning rods for hot-button topics for voters across the country, not just New York.

Affordable housing, senior housing.

My number one priority is public safety.

And lower the cost of affordable and temporary housing.

Build the safest, most affordable big city in America.

And in 2026, all eyes have been on the mayoral race of America's second largest city, Los Angeles. Especially as Nithya Raman, a Democratic Socialist like Mamdani, edged out reality TV star Spencer Pratt to become the candidate running against the sitting mayor.

Her supporters are backing her because they think she is revolutionary, a West Coast version of New York's new mayor, Mamdani.

This is going to be a very competitive

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race.

Mayor Bass in LA faces a lot of challenges. She didn't win the primary by more than 50%.

But realistically, LA may never get its own Mamdani, even if the city manages to vote in a version of him. And that may be by design. There's a lot that makes running New York different from running LA. First, the budget. The New York mayor has a budget of $125 billion, while the LA mayor has a budget of under $13 billion. And that's because of the way the two cities are carved up. New York is basically a city-state made up of five boroughs, each representing its own county, with a population of 8.5 million.

LA, on the other hand,

Los Angeles County is 10 million people. Uh, there are actually 88 cities within Los Angeles County. Obviously, the city of Los Angeles is the largest one of those. It's 40% of the county, 4 million people.

For example, people living in Beverly Hills or Santa Monica, which are part of LA County [music] but not LA City, don't actually vote for the LA mayor.

There are times when you literally cross the city of Los Angeles and you find yourself [music] in another city and within three or four blocks you find yourself back in the city of Los Angeles and three or four more blocks you find yourself in another different city. [music]

So when it comes to tackling issues like homelessness, which spans city and county lines, the mayor of LA faces a lot of roadblocks navigating between [music] the city, the county, the state, independent agencies, and the federal government.

In New York, to solve homelessness, you need to deal with social services, with health, with housing, with public safety. All of those departments [music] report to the mayor of New York. In Los Angeles, for the mayor to deal with homelessness, public [music] health, half of housing belongs to another jurisdiction that [music] they have no control over. And so for the mayor to develop a coherent homelessness policy, they have to cooperate tremendously with the feds and the [music] state, just like in New York, but then with the county, a completely different jurisdiction, which New York doesn't have to do that.

And this is just housing. Changing policies around education and transportation [music] and even raising tax revenue all require a council of decision-makers, making it very hard for the mayor to make sweeping executive changes. But a big part of this fragmentation may have been intentional. [music] LA in some ways was designed to be the anti-New York.

As LA grew and you had so many migrants, not immigrants, but migrants from the East Coast arriving in the city of Los Angeles, they were pretty clear that they did not want to replicate the government that existed in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, etc.

This was the era of corrupt politicians, like Boss William Tweed and his Tammany Hall. It led to the rise of the progressive movement, a period of social activism and political reform triggered by rapid industrialization, urbanization, and corrupt political machines. They developed this new progressive system [music] and that was really decentralizing power and making sure that you couldn't have a central person [music] who could ultimately become somewhat like a boss so New York a boss Tweed or somebody of that nature.

Setting up commissions to run departments, separating basic government functions away from the city so that the the education system is run by one commission and the airport by another commission and the water by another commission and so on. LA is a prime case of reform taken [music] to extremes.

The charter led to the establishment of 15 council members representing different districts.

The charter did create a decently powerful mayor [music] but also a very strong city council and strong city commissions [music] of leading citizens all of which were meant to disperse power and authority.

They were very much about fragmentation, separations of powers and they wanted to weaken that central layer who often times was the mayor.

Which made LA a bit of a lab for good reforms of the 1920s.

On the East Coast these [music] progressive reformers existed as well but they were often marginalized party government and party organizations [music] were so strong but here in Los Angeles they were the political movement that dominated so there were very few [music] party organizations and in California local elections

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became non-partisan in the early part of the 20th century so there was already that basis [music] for for building that system.

On top of being designed as a reaction to the corruption of the East Coast LA is also a much younger [music] city, meaning

The invention of the internal combustion engine had taken the world off horseback and placed it in a fabulous horseless carriage.

Los Angeles exploded during the car era, leading to rapid suburbanization. As farmlands urbanized and neighborhoods became wealthier, some of these communities chose to be incorporated as their own cities to maintain local control over schools, zoning, tax revenue, policing, and housing. This fragmentation allowed affluent neighborhoods to benefit from being part of the Los Angeles economy without having to share governance or tax resources with poorer communities.

They organized themselves to quote-unquote maintain the character of the particular neighborhoods and they [music] wanted control, specific control over the land use.

But this inability to tap into shared tax resources brings us back [music] to the housing crisis that today's mayors of Los Angeles are all desperate to solve.

Homelessness was almost perfectly designed

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to frustrate and increase the the vulnerabilities of LA's regional [music] governance. It it's kind of not brain surgery, but it's particularly complicated cuz you got two different surgeons [music] doing different parts of the operation who may loathe each other from time to time and at other times

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work together beautifully.

One of the reasons why LA mayors also have difficulty creating new housing is because of Proposition 13, a 1978 law that capped property taxes, limiting local revenues that often funded things like housing and schools.

It is it is the beginning of the taxpayers' [music] revolt.

Proposition 13 created powerful incentives for cities to prioritize shopping centers, auto malls, and other commercial development.

That had a tremendous impact on local services that funded itself through property taxes and changed the relationship [music] between the the cities and the state where they needed the state to make up that uh the the lack of revenue.

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So, even if LA got a mayor like Momdani or even Momdani himself, this official would still face an uphill battle of navigating multiple city, county, and state l

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