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23 Urban Political Conflicts and Alliances: New York and Los Angeles Compared John Hull Mollenkopf ECONOMIC RESTRUCTURING and demographic change have transformed the social geography of New York, just as they have that of Los Angeles, creating new fault lines of intergroup competition and conflict and posing significant new challenges to the local political system. Despite differences between the two cities (Los Angeles has more high-tech industry and Latino residents, while New York specializes in advanced corporate services and has more African Americans), the similarities between the two cities' economies and populations are striking. The nation's largest and second-largest city are key centers of the global culture industry, house large complexes of financial and corporate service firms, and provide comparable images of what the nation's twenty-first-centUly cities will be like. Both are multiracial cities where no one group constitutes a population majority . Although their white populations have d.iminished and their ethnic minority communities have grown, neither city is becoming predominantly black; indeed, in both cities middle-class blacks have joined middle-class whites in leaving the city. Los Angeles joined, but d.id not replace, New York as an Ellis Island: the two cities now house 18 percent of the nation's foreign-born, while their metropolitan areas account for 40 percent . As a result, the two cities have become more ethnically diverse as they have become less white. Hispanics and Asians are the most rapidly growing groups in both cities. Because the same larger forces of change are affecting both cities, and because they are both key nodes in global systems, these similarities are not unexpected. Indeed, both have been strongly affected by other aspects of the postindustrial revolution, such as the feminization of the labor force, changing family organization, and growing income inequality. These changes have produced broadly similar kinds of tensions in both cities, both in terms of relations between whites and native-born minority groups and between natives and immigrants. If race relations appear to be bad in Los Angeles and growing worse in the wake of the Rodney King trial, the ensuing civil d.isorders, and the O. J. Simpson trial, matters seem little better in New York. In that city blacks assailed Hasid.ic Jews in Crown Heights in 1991, Dominicans in Washington Heights rioted on the eve of the 1992 Democratic convention, black nationalists boycotted a Korean merchant in Flatbush, and a black protester shot white and Latino employees and torched a Jewish-owned clothing store in Harlem in December 1995. James Johnson, Walter Farrell, and Chandra Guinn (this volume) report high levels of negative racial stereotyping in Los Angeles, particularly regard.ing the attitudes of whites and Asians toward blacks and Hispanics, and high levels of perceived racial d.iscrimination. Survey research confirms that similar patterns exist in New York City (Setlow and Cohen 1993). Yet it can be argued that the two cities have substantially d.iffered in the degree to which these tensions have exploded beyond control and native whites (and blacks) have responded with anti-immigrant sentiment. In Los Angeles the massive rioting after the King trial showed that these tensions would burst social constraints and evoke a widespread reaction against immigrants (and indeed native minorities), as represented in Propositions 187, 209, and 227. New York, by contrast, did not experience a widespread breakdown of civil order, despite the possibility that events in Crown Heights and Washington Heights could reach such proportions. Instead, authorities contained these and other conflicts. Indeed, in contrast to the anti-immigrant sympathies and actions of the voters and many political leaders in California , New York City'S residents show more sympathy toward immigrants (an absolute majority of most groups think immigrants add to rather than detract from the city, accord.ing to Setlow and Cohen [1993], and even a plurality of Hispanics hold this view) and New York's political elites have Urban Political Conflicts and Alliances 413 adopted a strongly pro-immigrant stance. For example , in contrast to the neutral positions that Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan has taken toward anti-immigrant measures, New York's Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, also a relatively conservative Republican , has denounced the termination of immigrants ' entitlement to federal benefits and launched a costly effort to promote naturalization among immigrants. This chapter seeks to compare the sources and trajectories of new forms of intergroup conflict in New York and Los Angeles and to explain why the political systems of the two cities...

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