[askafriend]

Doesn't every city feel mismanaged though? If you asked people from SF, Seattle or NYC - they might all say the same. They'd think they were the most mismanaged in America.

I'm genuinely just curious what makes you think LA is uniquely mismanaged in a way that other tier-1 cities in America are not. I don't have too much experience with LA but am familiar enough.

[dgunay]

Maybe "mismanaged" is too harsh. LA's patchwork governmental structure generally inhibits progress and keeps wealth and development concentrated in small areas instead of benefiting the broader metropolitan area. That's part of why you can go a few blocks in LA and your surroundings will change dramatically, often for the worse.

LA is top 1-5 in US cities by GDP (and to be fair so are the others you mentioned except for Seattle), so I personally see it as a hugely negative mark on our local and national character to have large parts of it be dirty, choked to death by traffic, have insanely high rents, etc. I don't know if other cities have quite as many structural aberrations in their governance as LA despite seeing many of the same issues - I don't know whether it would relieve or horrify me to learn that they don't.

[harmmonica]

Had to chime here with a quick thought: I almost see LA's problems as emblematic of California's. I think the populace continues to believe in "big" government and its ability to properly manage the extraordinary amount of tax revenue it takes in despite there being significant evidence that mismanagement is rampant.

Just to give a "small" microcosm of this that's somewhat high profile in the city of LA: there was recently an attempt to audit the city's homeless efforts after years of voters approving, multiple times, billions and billions of dollars to fight homelessness. It recently came out that there have essentially been no institutional controls or tracking of the outcomes resulting from the deployment of those funds. So here you have the populace saying "yes, take my money and let's fix this," over and over again. And then you have the city government attempting to do it so poorly that you can't help but see it as utter mismanagement, at best, or pure corruption, at worst (a combination of both most likely).

Being here on the ground you can almost feel this, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, and then obviously even beyond the city limits. Yet a lot of us, as shown in this very thread, still think it's a great place to be, and somehow can work itself out from these problems. I'm not so sure anymore.

Seminal point, at the moment, I think, with the ICE crackdowns on a significant chunk of the city population, with the aftermath of the fire, a federal government that doesn't seem to want to support its "alpha" blue cities. Not sure if that means something's about to break, or if it's actually a chance for rebirth. I'm pulling for the latter, but think we're going to have to walk through (maybe too soon to say) fire before things materially improve.

Know that has nothing to do with tech in LA, but thought I'd chime in all the same.

[eitally]

I think one of the biggest issues is just how big and sprawling LA is. For bay area folks, it would be roughly the same as if the entire metropolis surrounding the bay was one city (plus unincorporated areas). If that provides any sense of scale.

Fwiw, SJ is bigger than SF and absolutely better managed, but definitely less vibrant. Personally, I would choose San Diego over LA, and if I wanted to keep a tech job there's lots if you're ok with biotech/healthcare or defense.