Los Angeles: The New Ellis Island

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Chamber of Commerce. "All the planning is in think tanks." And planning, after all, has produced urban results as dreadful as any. The "master plan" for L.A. envisions two more international airports to be built—the first one in the desert of Riverside County—to pull Angelenos out into the boondocks, where there is still room to grow and grow. Enzer is dubious: "How is anybody from Watts going to get to a job in Riverside if it opens up there?" Already, though, up north in an arid nowhere, a new, generic tract has sprung up: the development is called Le House.

While the master planners have L.A. sprawling off obediently to the desert, the metropolitan economy is supposed to be juiced up by more high-tech industry and a new era of trade with Asia and Latin America. "The growth in the Pacific rim has just begun," says Planner Mark Pisano. "It's going to take off like an exponential curve in two to four decades."

Yet right now, it is the foreign residents of the Pacific rim, hundreds every day, who take off—take off and land in L.A. Blithe Angelenos cannot afford to depend on luck and the vague promise of another economic boom, 20 or 40 years hence, to take care of the newcomers and smooth over problems. L.A., nature's charmed city, must begin to look after itself.

—By Kurt Andersen. Reported by Benjamin W. Cate, with the Los Angeles bureau