L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti had achievements on transportation, seismic safety, COVID-19 management and higher wages but failed to curb homelessness.
. And some basic services did expand under his watch: The number of miles of streets resurfaced more than doubled by last year and the tree-trimming count also jumped dramatically.
“All of us, including me, said to steer clear of it,” recalled one of the aides. “To launch this open-ended front on homelessness seemed quixotic, and unachievable.” His office also touts the city’s success in permitting 100,000 housing units by 2019, two years ahead of the mayor’s goal. Jessica Lall, chief executive of the Central City Assn., a downtown business group, recalled encounters with women in Venice and downtown, both partially naked and in dire straits.
After six years of disappointing progress, HHH construction surged just as Garcetti was leaving office, with more than 800 units due to be completed in December — the most in any single month — and more than 500 expected in January. But the mayor insisted. “I was really impressed by his intelligence,” Jones said. “He understood what was needed to make Los Angeles safe.”
Higher ambitions had slipped, at least temporarily, from view by the time of the last great crisis of his mayoral tenure — the COVID-19 pandemic. Without any official authority over public health, Garcetti nonetheless pushed hard to open testing centers and vaccination sites, turning Dodger Stadium into a landmark for care.
Garcetti pledged that a “Great Streets” program would remake 15 of L.A.’s landmark boulevards. But the mayor’s expansive idea was watered down, with the program ultimately focused on smaller improvements. He signed on to a national campaign to eliminate all traffic fatalities. Instead, deaths among pedestrians and drivers in L.A. climbed.
Garcetti also set a 2035 deadline for getting 35% of the city’s water from recycling, a vast increase from the current 2%. Meeting the water and power goals will require major breakthroughs in funding and technology. The conversion of wastewater to reusable groundwater, alone, will cost an estimated $8 billion.
But he achieved his goal by tapping federal funds that he directed toward homelessness, disappointing some who wanted far deeper cuts in the police budget.“If you want to abolish the police, you’re talking to the wrong mayor,” Garcetti said in his State of the City speech last year. “If you want to move backwards towards a failed us-and-them strategy that made police an occupying force in communities they were meant to serve, you’ve come to the wrong place.
Albert Corado, a one-time candidate for City Council in Garcetti’s old Hollywood-area district, said the city should push resources away from police and toward services like parks, transit and help for homeless people. Said Corado: “More money for the police is not the answer to this problem.” Shortly after President Trump took office in 2017, a group of activists for immigrant rights pressed for a meeting with Garcetti. But when they told Linda Lopez, who headed Garcetti’s office of immigrant affairs, that L.A. should be declared a sanctuary city, they recalled her saying such a stance would “not bode well in the Rust Belt.”
The mayor’s innermost political circle suffered a heavy blow in the summer of 2020, when a member of Garcetti’s security detail said he had been subjected over several years to inappropriate touching and crude sexual remarks by Rick Jacobs, one of Garcetti’s closest confidants.
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