Like many older industrial towns, Paramount, a mostly Latino city of 50,000 located 18 miles southeast of downtown Los Angeles, has been through hard times. In 1981, the Rand Corporation described it as “an urban disaster area.” In 2015, it was named among the worst cities in America, based on 22 measures of affordability, economics, education, health, and quality of life. In 2019, Business Insider ranked it near the bottom along with several other nearby cities. Founded as a largely agricultural community in 1948, the city eventually transformed itself into a manufacturing hub but was then devastated in the 1980s as aerospace and car companies exited.
Yet today, walking along Paramount Boulevard, one sees not broken-down storefronts but a thriving downtown, full of attractive restaurants and shops. The city has adopted a “broken windows” approach to policing. While crime rates remain above average for the state, they have been trending down. Homicides, down two-thirds from 1990s levels, are well below the L.A. city average and almost half of those in nearby South L.A. neighborhoods. Paramount has also gotten its city finances on a more solid footing than those of its peers. Whereas L.A. was flirting with huge deficits even before the wildfires, Paramount maintained budget surpluses over the past decade.
Perhaps even more remarkable, one sees no signs of the homelessness, graffiti, and urban disorder that’s so common throughout Southern California—a remarkable shift from conditions just a decade or two ago. “In places like Paramount people get things done because that’s where they live,” says former Paramount city manager Pat West. “In L.A., they have meetings.”
Much of Paramount’s relative success comes from paying attention to little things. The city has focused on parks, urban space, and landscaping, helping local neighborhoods improve their look by subsidizing flower beds and white picket fences to improve the curb appeal of homes.
Under its elected leadership, Paramount has seen job growth in the hospital, education, small industrial, and retail sectors. The city’s income levels are significantly higher, and unemployment lower, than the L.A. County average. Unlike the dysfunctional L.A. school system, Paramount’s independent school district has improved its graduation rate from 71 percent to over 90 percent in recent years, according to city manager John Moreno.
Much of this success stems from the city’s strong community spirit and close collaboration between local government, businesses, and schools. Moreno notes that Los Angeles operates in a more “siloed” manner. In contrast, Paramount’s tight-knit community—now increasingly led by young families, many of them homeowners or aspiring to be—has driven its turnaround. “We went from a place with shootings and murders to one that attracts young families who see this as an up-and-coming place,” Moreno says. “We had a lot of blight, but the citizens and churches brought it back. When I go to L.A., I’m amazed they’re not doing these basic things.”
The turnaround in Paramount and a host of other South L.A. cities may seem like an obscure data point in the vastness of the Los Angeles Basin. Spreading 1,200 square miles, the basin encapsulates an immense area stretching from Hollywood to Orange County. The area is home to roughly 10 million people and 80 cities, including some of the country’s best-known locales like the Hollywood hills, Santa Monica, downtown Los Angeles, Venice, Koreatown, and East Los Angeles. In the recent fires, several of these communities, notably in the Pacific Palisades and Hollywood, went up in flames.
Read the rest of this piece at City Journal.
Joel Kotkin is the author of The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class. He is the Roger Hobbs Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and and directs the Center for Demographics and Policy there. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute at the University of Texas in Austin. Learn more at joelkotkin.com and follow him on Twitter @joelkotkin.
M. Andrew Moshier is Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Chapman University, where he recently served as the Dean of the School of Communication.
Photo: Ken Lund via Flickr, under CC 2.0 License.
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