[dfwgator]

EVERY major urban area is following in the footsteps of Detroit, Detroit just got a head start.

[Logical me]

Los Angeles is already a dead city. It is made up of the poor class that have lost the ability to reason that they are contributing to the destruction of the working class and in place are the living off government. Most of the real working class do not live in the city of Los Angeles but in the outskirt cities and commute in.

[JohnD9207]

Let the patient die...not on life support like Detroit.

[brownsfan]

Good!

People in urban centers overwhelmingly vote liberal. They deserve to live in crap holes.

[V_TWIN]

“The slow, steady decline of a once great city”

To be followed by The slow, steady decline of a once great COUNTRY.

[justa-hairyape]

Grew up in and around Detroit, so do not get me started. Have an interesting anecdotal story from Los Angeles though. Was driving back from a conference in Vegas back in the 1990's. Was driving a car owned by the owner of the company I was working for. The engine light on the Volvo was coming on, told the owner about it, and he said it would be okay. Well I was going to be driving through the desert, so I made sure I had plenty of water in case I got stranded on the road. Even though the engine light was coming on, made it into Los Angeles. Then as I was driving through downtown LA, the temperature gauge shot up and the car was over heating. Was on the I10 just south of downtown in the area where the freeway was elevated. The engine was getting too hot so I pulled off the freeway with steam coming from the engine. As I was coming down the ramp, a group of latinos, obviously gangbangers, came running toward the car from the other side of the main street and looked very agitated. Apparently they just wait until cars come off the freeway with troubles.

Well the car was not mine, (screw any engine damage), so I floored it and drove pass the gang and continued into the downtown proper area with the high rises. So basically, it was more dangerous for my car to break down near downtown Los Angeles then it was if my car broke down out in the middle of the desert.

[Chuckster]

Is the author any relation the Jerry Dunphy, the LA Newscaster?

[blueunicorn6]

My understanding is that 400,000 people in California run out of unemployment money on January 1. That is the next big test. What will the Democrats and Republicans do?

[Wuli]

I wish authors of these kind of what-ought-to-be-serious articles were less in love with getting in as much of their own story-telling and merely descriptive verbiage, and more in love with getting as seriously and straight-forward-like to the facts, amd more in love with replacing all that useless verbiage with more facts; which in the case of the decline of L.A. there are plenty more of - but the author ran out of space to include them - I guess.

[Nea Wood]

If the writer’s new neighborhood is clean, safe, affordable, and blessed with good schools, I guarantee him it will not be that way for long. Illegals flood into the affordable areas, bringing with them crime, gangs, and blight. It’s happened to many another “nice, clean, safe, affordable” suburb in California, and it will happen to Mr. Dunphy’s as well. If it doesn’t happen fast enough, the government will bring in Section 8 housing to hurry things along. I take no pleasure in saying this, but it happens to be the truth. Enjoy your nice neighborhood while it lasts, Mr. Dunphy.

[Chuckster]

I have an old photograph. In it is a four year old tow headed boy, me, in tiny cowboy boots and jeans, my blond mother wearing a skirt and blouse, my balding father in sport shirt and slacks. The photo is taken in front of a smallish single family house with a smallish front yard. Neat. Tidy. Well maintained. In the driveway is a one year old Murcury sedan. Nothing special. Just an ordinary young family, smiling, in front of their house...

...on 110th street just off Wilmington in Los Angeles.

[rigelkentaurus]

LA was once a great city??? I must have missed that. It’s a city, but great? no way - meets none of the criteria. It is simply a large, rat infested, congested city - nothing great about it.

[EternalVigilance]

I recently spent a week in the LA metropolitan area, and as I traveled around the city, it occurred to me that I couldn’t see much of anything that amounted to any sort of enterprise that involved actually producing anything. Retail and residential, that’s about it.

I mentioned this to a friend I was talking to on the phone, and asked him what in the world this city was running on. His reply was memorable. “Debt.”

He was fundamentally right. And it can’t go on forever.

[riri]

I drove through LA for a wedding about four years ago and hadn’t been there in probably 15 years—I was shocked at the state of the infrastructure and just how bad the place looked. Sad, for such a beautiful locale and so much money there. There is really no excuse for it.

[okie01]

...the city’s political transformation that has seen power shift from business and homeowner groups to those identified with labor and ethnic solidarity — a shift the current civic leadership openly encourages. That way lies trouble, which is why the Dunphy family decamped for a neighborhood that is clean, safe, affordable, and blessed with good schools.

A statement designed to elicit outraged cries of "RACISM!" from our liberal friends.