City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles

Writing in the late 1980s, Davis argues that the most prophetic glimpse of Los Angeles of the next millennium comes from “the ruins of its alternative future,” in the desert-surrounded city of Llano del Rio (3). The town was established in 1911 when Job Harriman, a Socialist, “came within a hair’s breadth” of becoming mayor (9).

Davis predicts that the Mojave Desert surrounding Llano will eventually join the metropolis to cater to the city’s rapidly expanding population, which is forecast to increase to about 8 million in a generation (6). As “developable land has disappeared throughout the coastal plains and inland basins, and soaring land inflation has reduced access to housing to less than 15 percent of the population,” the desert “has suddenly become the last frontier of the Southern California dream” (4). Income inequality has accompanied the rise in population, as the percentage of mid-range earners has dropped from 61 percent to 32 percent.

As Los Angeles expands, its “new inhabitants will be non-Anglos, further tipping the ethnic balance away from WASP hegemony toward the polyethnic diversity of the next century” (7). Fittingly, when Davis visits the relics of the former Socialist city of Llano, he encounters two young El Salvadorian building laborers who camp there during their search for work.