The Blue Model, the Bowser Pivot, and the Trump Inflection

A significant moment is arriving. Donald Trump is causing more change than we’ve recognized yet, with a bunch of that change still just over the horizon. But give me a moment to tell this story from the beginning.

I’ve been writing about the hard and steady decline of the blue zones, and the performative political culture that has prevented practical policy efforts and shaped the decline. For just one recent example, I discussed the filthy and dangerous RV encampment that hangs off the edge of Compton, bringing crime and destruction to an important industrial area in unincorporated Los Angeles County. And I suggested that readers who are nearby take a drive from that encampment in the West Rancho Dominguez neighborhood up Avalon Boulevard, all the way into Downtown Los Angeles, calling it a chance to see a fifteen-mile favela. The Blue Zones, summarized.

Last week I wrote about the long history of the giant homeless encampment in the Sepulveda Basin, and the hundreds of fires that the Los Angeles Fire Department has responded to in the last year and a half. Look, I said, there’s a giant homeless encampment in the Sepulveda Basin now, with constant fires, and there was a giant homeless encampment in the Sepulveda Basin ten years ago, with constant fires. “The blue zones are Groundhog Day,” I concluded. “Nothing ever changes. No problem is ever solved. No one knows how, anymore. No one is trying to know how.”

But then!

The most remarkable thing happened yesterday, after many years of persistent neglect. Bizarrely, you wouldn’t know it from the local news in the last 24 hours:

…and the LAPD hasn’t mentioned it. But after yet another large fire in the basin last week, the city cleared the encampments. You could possibly found a new religion on the fact of this event, because it’s a miracle.

The helicopter footage in this social media post is from KTLA News, though the KTLA News website somehow doesn’t have this story today (screenshot below, click the link to see the video):

As you can see from the footage, many agencies did this enormous thing, clearing hundreds of homeless people from one of the most-established encampment cities in Los Angeles.

I struggled to believe it, so I drove over.

This asphalt path between the basin and the 405 freeway is frequently covered in tents and tarps, but look at it last night:

HALLELUJAH, cried Chris Bray. I have SEEN it, brothers and sisters, with my own eyes, with signs that the encampments were just occupied but are no longer:

Rats hide when you shine lights at them, by the way, but wow were there a lot of rats crawling all over that trash. If you live near an encampment and frequently find that your mail goes missing, especially when you get stuff in boxes, it’s there. I have never found a homeless encampment that wasn’t full of OPM: Other People’s Mail.

So a long-established and long-ignored problem, with severe effects, causing extraordinary unhappiness in an urban neighborhood, is suddenly just fixed. See also the sudden calm and order at the long-troubled Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles. Years of deep and thoroughly ignored trouble, suddenly solved. We’ll see if they bother to sustain this, and there was no police presence at all last night while I walked through these encampment sites for a couple of hours. And I passed a couple of very quiet men in the dark basin, out sneaking around in the place they lived until yesterday. Without continued effort, the encampments will fill up again. But for now, miraculously, they’re gone.

In D.C., local officials exploded into a fit when Donald Trump announced that he would no longer tolerate the city’s crime, disorder, filth, and ubiquitous homeless encampments. City officials sued to stop the federal intervention. Democrats raged about the cruel militarization of the city. And then, from Mayor Muriel Bowser:

1. This is intolerable

2. You’re a bunch of Nazis

3. It’s working

4. Thank you.

Trump, by simply refusing to tolerate ruin and misery, is making the Blue Zone tolerance of decline untenable. He’s solving longstanding and tremendously serious problems by the simple expedient of signaling that I’ll fix it if you won’t. It’s becoming impossible for Democratic politicians to just put up with the crushingly obvious ruin of the places they govern.

While the discussion in mainstream media is about Trump’s authoritarianism, I argue with considerable confidence that we’re setting out on the opposite course. Blue Zone officials have intervened in everything, constantly. As I’ve said many times, the city council in my little suburban town, where the streets are crap, has fiercely debated the war in Ukraine, and debated a Gaza ceasefire resolution, and considered a plan to firmly rebuke Big Tobacco, and on and on and on. If you live in a Blue Zone and pay attention to your local government, you’ve seen them ignore your streets and sidewalks while passing bold resolutions STANDING PROUDLY WITH THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES OF PERU IN THEIR STRUGGLE AGAINST THE LEGACIES OF COLONIALISM, or whatever. All government thinks that they run all things. The South Pasadena City Council sends angry letters to Vladimir Putin.

Trump is narrowing the focus of government with an insistent set of demands about local, street-level order. Clear the encampments, reduce the number of carjackings. That’s not more government — it’s less government, focused on the real and limited goal of basic local order.

He’s fixing a decades-old illness in the political culture.

If you don’t believe that, notice that Los Angeles is bothering to fix things that Los Angeles has never bothered to fix. At the very least, it’s a development that bears watching.