The Victors

Not just physical production, not just sets and stages, but the whole business is leaving California for Nashville. The comparison that comes immediately and naturally to mind is Detroit.

Once upon a time, every single aspect of the automotive industry flowed out of Detroit. And it was a prosperous, self-contained economy. And piece by piece, the industry left Detroit until all that remained was ceremonial office. And as a result, Detroit paid the ultimate price. It lost its entire population, it lost its wealth, and it was the first American city to go bankrupt. Now, it has finally begun to climb out, but it took almost 60 years of decay just to begin the turnaround.

What we are witnessing in Los Angeles is that Detroit moment from 60 years ago. The decay is only beginning, not healing.

Now, the one critical difference is that the coast of Southern California will presumably always be a physically attractive location. But there are plenty of cities in the world that are just parking spots for wealthy real estate and/or tourists and not local economies. Something like Venice, which only has a native population of 50,000 but 3 million annual visitors. And that is pretty plainly and pretty clearly at this point the future of Los Angeles.

Another example might be Buenos Aires. Around 1910, Argentina was one of the ten richest countries on earth per capita, richer than France, richer than Italy, and Buenos Aires was the reason. It was the port, the banks, the exchange, the place where every dollar of beef and wheat money flowed through on its way to Europe. They built the city to look like Paris because they could afford to. The Teatro Colón, the Avenida de Mayo, the Recoleta mansions. There was a phrase in Paris at the time, "rich as an Argentine." It was the Los Angeles of its hemisphere. A young, glamorous, self-confident city that had turned one industry into a global brand and a way of life.

And then the money left. Not all at once and not the way it left Detroit. The politics went sideways in 1930 and never came back, the economy turned inward, the currency collapsed every fifteen years or so like clockwork, and the country defaulted on its debts so many times it became a punchline. A hundred years of that.

Buenos Aires never truly emptied. The population of the city proper has been about three million since the 1940s. The weather is mild, the city is beautiful, the food is great, the culture is real. It's still the theater capital and publishing capital of the Spanish-speaking world, it still produces filmmakers and writers and footballers, and people still fall in love with it. But what changed is that every generation has been a little poorer than the last relative to the rest of the world. The middle class shrank. The professionals with an Italian or Spanish passport left in waves every time the peso blew up. The grand buildings are still there, but they're crumbling, and the people who own the nice ones increasingly don't live in the country. It became a place that's wonderful to visit and hard to build a life in.

That's the version of the story I think Los Angeles is headed for. Not the level of abandonment that befell Detroit, because the coast and the climate will always be a reason for someone to stay. Something slower and in some ways sadder: the coast stays beautiful, the culture stays alive on momentum, and the economic engine that made it matter to the rest of the world relocates.

(speech to text)