Voters classify the economy and inflation as the most important problems facing the country, and despite the good news on both fronts, the dissatisfaction of wallet problems remains stable. There is a section of South California where, you could say, that it all started: the port and the coast of Los Angeles.
As a center for trade in the American Pacific and Archetype for the exuberant housing markets everywhere, the region's seafront clarifies why so many Americans feel frustrated and under pressure – and how difficult it can be to solve this problem, no matter who becomes the next president.
Returning to the middle of the 19th century, when the United States annexed California in the South of the Mexican Republic, the Americans turned to the Pacific trade and the colonies to the west to stabilize their nation. This is why our local ports have been developed.
In the 1850s, a federal agency, then called US Coast Survey, identified the Bay of San Pedro as a focal point for shipping efforts. Since the 1910s, this has housed the port of Los Angeles and the port of Long Beach, collectively the most occupied expedition center in the Western hemisphere, which makes the region prominent in global supply chains and transpacific trade.
The officials thought that the Pacific trade and colony were a security valve for the Eastern disorders, which on slavery. The results have proven them. Trade and settlers have intensified political conflicts in Washington and California, increasing the issues. Land speculators – in most places that push Aboriginal and Mexicans – have sought to grasp old Rancho complaints near the potential of California, in the enviable climate of southern California. It was a rush to the property by the sea like the region had never seen it. Their actions define the Los Angeles property lines and today's real estate markets from Malibu to Newport Bay.
This story was invisible to me when I grew up around Los Angeles, but its effects were and are everywhere, continuing to reshape the south of California during my life. In the early 2000s, containers, larger than before, accumulated in external waters because the ports were sometimes exceeded. The semi-chips cluttered highways 110 and 710. At the same time, the coastal real estate market has once again exploded. My parents – new arrivals in the region – have really found opportunities. They bought their first and only house, in a subdivision on old Rancho lands, and they paid it while the evaluations exploded around them and their nest egg grew. The region's economy was a dynamo, a security port in more ways than one.
Shipping and competitive real estate – two inheritances of Southern California of the 1850s – remain with us. In addition, they are part of an ongoing history in Los Angeles and its place in American life. The meaning of voters today of their economic well-being is based on the prices of household necessities, mainly imported goods and approximately one third enter the United States by the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach. Historically, the ships and containers that the crowd of San Pedro Bay has widened the affordability, but the pandemic and international crises COVVI-19 disturbed their flow. Suddenly, the transpacific trade has been blamed for the costs of costs, and not credited with making households affordable. Even after the disturbances have decreased, high prices and memories of rarity were persistent. At the national level, politicians and the public came to doubt the virtues of globalization. The confrontation between the great hopes for the ports of Los Angeles and the realities of world trade again contribute in the sense of the Americans of an uncertain world, and once again the high issues linked to the economy of southern California feed tensions on a national scale.
Of course, investments no longer compensate the troubled times. The main investment of the Americans – triumphant in the era of the post -second world war – is the unifamilial house. However, real estate at high prices of the country disrupted this agreement. Rather than absorbing newcomers and providing a path to financial security, it has multiplied the feeling of distress of voters by locking many people to the property. Exceiving prices and low interest rates of the last decades – the profit and safety of buyers of previous houses – now have inflationary pressure on tenants and potential buyers, and on average income, low income or for young voters. This is the most true in Coastal Los Angeles, to the west and south of the 405 motorway. It is also true in the markets further, like Phoenix and Las Vegas, long by migrants in southern California and money.
Residents and visitors to Southland were attracted to the promise of Pacific waters, as well as generations before. And while many in all times have benefited from the region's industries and the assessment of real estate, many others have always been left behind. Remembering these links with history can clarify uncertain times. The recent polarization in American politics has been compared to the era of civil war, but there may be a more appropriate parallel between today and in the 1860s: the economic ideas of trade and land investment, intended to calm political passions and to distribute prosperity, failed in both moments.
The consequences will take place in the coming months, as portfolio problems most likely decide on the presidential election. But whatever the results of the elections, we must understand that southern California is never a place apart from American politics and its dilemmas. Instead, they have deep roots in the region. And today, the region continues to invest in imports and real estate as vehicles for prosperity – even if unfavorable costs accumulate in national policy.
This makes Southern California the appropriate place to resolve these dilemmas of history and direct the United States, whether by political experimentation or new principles on the way in which wealth could be built, sustained and shared. Faced with the best future of the nation will imply difficult choices. Visionaries and daring. However, this too is a legacy of the past in southern California, ready to be recovered.
James Tejani, associate professor of history at Cal Poly San Luis Bishopis the author of “A machine to move the ocean and the earth: The manufacture of the port of Los Angeles and America. »»
