<nettime> Mike Davis Hoax Expose 1/2

["Brady Westwater" <WWMalibu@earthlink.net>]

The following is an excerpt from a chapter in my forthcoming book: LOS
ANGELES - THE MILLENNIUM CITY; A RX FOR 21ST CENTURY CITIES.


MIKE DAVIS AS THE WIZARD OF OZ

.

Question of the day; name two significant ways Mike Davis, author of the
much acclaimed books about Los Angeles, CITY OF QUARTZ and ECOLOGY OF FEAR,
differs from Clifford Irving, Janet Cooke, Stephen Glass, Patricia Smith,
Bill Clinton and Mike Barnicle.

Give up?

Before answering that question, first some background for those not
familiar with Mr. Davis's charmed career. After publication of his surprise
best seller CITY OF QUARTZ in 1990, he was overnight anointed the prophet
of Los Angeles. With the book's vision of a paramilitary LA as the violence
prone antichrist of American cities, it appeared unusually prescient when
the Rodney King riots took place only two years later. The riots sealed
Davis's fate; from then on was the unquestioned expert on anything Los
Angeles.

His new book, ECOLOGY OF FEAR, is five hundred pages of increasingly dire
predictions of the demise of LA from acts of a vengeful nature (all of
which, of course, Angelinos have brought upon themselves). Unsurprisingly,
it is receiving rave reviews from throughout the world. While some critics
might quibble about the odd point, there are a few items on which they
almost unanimously agree; that Davis's books benefit from his having LA as
his "hometown" (New York Times)), that his books are "prodigiously
researched" (also New York Times), "enormously convincing" (Business Week),
that they have "a multitude of facts, large and small" (NY Times Book
Review), that Mr. Davis "holds the keys to understanding the city of Los
Angeles" (Lingua Franca) and that that they are "heavily footnoted" (almost
everyone mentions this).

There is only one small problem with all these hosannas. None of them are
true (other than the fact there are sure a hell of a lot of footnotes).

Mr. Davis was not only not born in Los Angeles, he was not even raised
anywhere near LA, geographically or culturally. And of the heavily
footnoted and researched facts, not just a handful, not just a few dozen
here and there, but many hundreds (and hundreds) of them - were simply made
up. Or, if not made up, twisted, rationalized and distorted until they bear
as little relation to the truth as does President Clinton's definition of
sex.

To begin with Davis's own paternity, in his CITY OF QUARTZ bio, he did
admit - as he had elsewhere - that he was born in a rust belt small town
(Fontana) in San Bernardino County and raised in a tiny hamlet called
Bostonia in the outback of San Diego County.

For New Yorkers, that is the equivalent of saying someone born and raised
in a dying farming town 60 miles north of Buffalo is a native New Yorker
and thus uniquely qualified to write about the inner workings of Manhattan.

If any writer in New York made that claim, they would be legitimately
ridiculed out of print.

But the geographically challenged reviewers of CITY OF QUARTZ seemed
incapable of looking at a map and realizing Mike Davis's background could
not be further from the reality of anyone actually born and raised in Los
Angeles. Reviewers of his current book will have a harder time, though,
divining the truth of his physical upbringing. In a very recent event
(undoubtedly due to previously undetected paradigm shifts in the earth's
tectonic plates), Davis's birth place (as listed on the book's jacket) has
just been moved - post natal - to the city of Los Angeles.

Much like the Stalinist era creation of non-persons - the communities of
Fontana and Bostonia have suddenly (conveniently in time for Davis's
publication date) become non-places.

Now the alternative reality of Davis's being born and raised in small
desert fringe towns far from LA doesn't mean he can't - or shouldn't -
write about LA, but to sell books - as he does now - on the basis he was
born in LA and to further claim he is a native son with specific first hand
knowledge of LA is.... well, fraud.

But even after taking into account Davis did not live in LA until
adulthood, that still doesn't explain the sheer volume of errors in both
books and an almost total lack of understanding about so many events. Both
books appear - in some places - to have been written by a person with
almost no first hand experience of LA; someone with little first hand
knowledge of the physical much less social geography of Los Angeles.

Some research into the scant biographical data available on Davis may
answer that conundrum. He appears to have arrived in LA for his first visit
in the mid 1960's (he was born in 1946) after leaving the greater Bostonia
area for San Diego and a short stay at Reed College in Oregon. After some
years of political activity throughout the Western United States -
including managing a Communist Party book store - he became a long distance
truck drive for a number of years.

In the 1970's he spent two more periods in LA - both times as a student at
UCLA, but for much/most of the decade he was in Europe, particularly
England, Northern Ireland and Scotland. The 1980's were spent in London,
but he returned to LA in 1987 and in the following two years, he appears to
have written CITY OF QUARTZ (it was published in 1990). Our 'native son'
wrote the 'ultimate insider book on LA' after just two years in LA, a city
in which he had not lived since the early 1970's other than two stints in
the ivory towers of UCLA.

It is not surprising, then, that QUARTZ appears to have been written in the
research stacks of UCLA; it probably was. Davis not only did not know LA at
all until adulthood, but he also spent most of the 70's and all of the 80's
prior to writing the book studying Marxism in Europe which does explain a
lot about his unique insider knowledge of Los Angeles. Almost everything he
describes in and about LA happened while he wasn't even on the American
continent, much less in LA.

So much for the alleged native son advantage.

As for examining the work itself, it is hard to know how or where to begin.
To fully detail the extent of the error, deception and mistakes in each
book would require far more words than either book contains. The most
economical way may be to take a handful of pages and demonstrate just how
flawed each aspect of the research, analysis and writing is on those few
pages.

The main trust of QUARTZ and an important part of ECOLOGY is his thesis
that the public spaces of LA are being replaced by heavily controlled,
gated environments which exclude the bulk of the citizenry and,
furthermore, that this process has speeded up since the riots of 1992.

His poster child for the new BLADE RUNNER LA is Bunker Hill; a decaying
slum which was replaced with new office buildings, museums, the Music
Center, hotels, schools, and apartments from the 1960's until today. On
Page 364 of ECOLOGY he claims that after the 1965 Watts Riot, the downtown
property owners decided to abandon plans to redevelop the old Spring Street
Financial District and formed a secretive 'Committee of 25' which then
manipulated the city to condemn Bunker Hill (a claim he elaborated upon in
an essay this chapter was based upon). The Committee then had the city
clear the land of structures so they could buy the land a far below market
value, thus having the city bail them out of their failed downtown
investments.

The only problem is, not one of these 'facts' has any resemblance to the truth.

The Committee of 25 was formed in 1952, not in 1965. It was not 'secretive'
- it's existence was well known by anyone involved in local affairs. It was
also not a landowner's association, but was a committee of the largest
corporations in the city. And it was not the driving force behind the
Bunker Hill redevelopment; that was the Central City Association. Lastly,
the riots were actually the beginning of the Committees' end as leader of
the city's power structure, not it's genesis.

As for abandoning any plans to redevelop the old Spring Street Financial
District (located in the older east side of downtown), Davis is referring
to a plan called Centropolis which was proposed in the area south of Bunker
Hill long after the Bunker Hill redevelopment had already been approved and
physically started. And even that new plan did not call for the financial
district staying on Spring Street; the Bunker Hill project was always
scheduled to be the new headquarters area for downtown.

The Centropolis plan only showed a grand total of two buildings - which
hardly constitutes a financial district - actually being built on Spring
Street, and even they were barely in the conceptual stage. The drawing
Davis shows of projected high rises were actually proposed in the newer
western portion of downtown - not the old Spring Street financial district.
That new area, by the way, has since been redeveloped with high rises; the
plan he claims was 'abandoned' was actually later largely realized in
spirit if not exact form.

As for 'saving' the bank's 'investments', all the buildings on Spring were
30 to 60 years old, functionally obsolete and had long been fully
depreciated. The only post war bank building was the 1959 California Bank
Building and when that much merged bank did finally move - it bought a lot
at fair market value on 6th St. outside of the Bunker Hill redevelopment
area.

And as for the claim Bunker Hill land was sold for far below market value,
by law each parcel was auctioned off to the highest bidder to ensure that
they were sold at market value as required by law.

Lastly, as for his statement the downtown business interests had gotten the
city to condemn Bunker Hill to 'save' them in 1965, the real decision to
redevelop Bunker Hill had first been made clear back in the 1930's and
finally activated in 1959. The clearing of buildings started in 1961 and by
the time of the 1965 riot, most of the land had been bought by the city,
the bulk of the buildings had been cleared, the Music Center was under
construction, the infrastructure was going in place and the lots were
getting ready to be auctioned off to builders.

There as no way the property owners could have 'gotten' the city to condemn
Bunker Hill in 1965 for the simple reason the city already essentially
owned Bunker Hill.

Since literally every single 'fact' in his scenario is dead wrong, I was
really curious to see where the footnote for all this misinformation would
lead; what source could have gotten everything so totally ass backwards. A
quick turn to the back of the book revealed that Mike Davis's so unreliable
source was.... none other than... Mike Davis. An essay he had written some
years earlier.

He had footnoted an essay he had written about redeveloping downtown LA in
a collection of essays, OUT OF SITE. Now here's where things get really
interesting; the facts he cites in his essay are completely different than
the facts he cites in his book he refers to in his footnote. I'll repeat
the two key words... completely different.

In the essay he correctly lays out the scenario for the redevelopment of
Bunker Hill starting in the 1930's and finally approved in 1959 (not 1965
as it says in the book). He also correctly identifies the Central City
Association as the supporters of the group - with no mention of the
'secretive Committee of 25' and correctly cites that the organization was
formed in the 1920's (actually 1922) - and not in 1965.

Better yet, in yet his third version of the 'truth' (there could be fourth
and fifth versions, too, but I've only managed to find three so far) - a
draft of the ECOLOGY chapter which appeared as an essay goes even further
field from the truth when he claims that the Committee of 25 - only AFTER
the 1965 riots - used the city's power of eminent domain to condemn and
raze neighborhoods and create a new financial core west of the then
financial district.

This despite his knowing - and previously writing about and even citing in
that essay - that all these decisions all this had happened years before.

This is where it becomes obvious that Mr. Davis has a problem. Why would
anyone so blatantly falsify data and then hand over to his readers the
smoking gun - complete with fingerprints, stained dress, Bruno Magli shoes
and DNA samples - to discover how he falsified his facts? This happens so
often it's almost as if either Davis somehow wants to get caught or has
some kind of mental pathology which requires him to distort the truth.

His writings are prime examples of someone having a point of view they wish
to promulgate, and then writing not to find the truth, but to support their
case, cherry picking their facts. Which is fine. But in Davis's case, he
goes far beyond that. Whenever he needs a 'fact' to booster some
preformulated hypothesis, rather than going to all the messy bother of
actually hunting them down and picking them, it seems as if he simply grows
and rolls his own, and then assigns them whatever moderately plausible
footnote happens to be lying around.

Even in his essay in OUT OF SITE on downtown redevelopment where he starts
with some of the correct facts, his complete lack of understanding of basic
economics, real estate development, simple geography and the political
process renders his thoughts on the subject impotent.

To give just one example of how flawed his analysis is, he cites how a main
goal of Bunker Hill redevelopment was to separate the new business district
from the old east side of downtown partially by making Hill Street (which
he claims was a thriving commercial street prior to redevelopment - which -
are you sitting down? - it wasn't) an insurmountable barrier to keep the
downtown proletariat at arm's length. He cites the LA Times as a prime
backer - and beneficiary - of the project to protect their own real estate
holdings by turning Hill Street into a demilitarized zone separating rich
from poor.

But there is, somehow, one very minor fact he neglects to mention - (or,
scarier, yet, somehow probably doesn't even notice); the LA Times happens
to be located on the 'wrong' side of the barricades he claims they have
erected. Since it's founding in 1881, the Times was and is east of Hill
Street - the proletariat side; the very zone he claims will be cut off from
the new downtown, left to decay in the abyss they themselves created.

One of two things has happened here. Either the LA Times created this huge
conspiracy, but just happened not to notice that they were accidentally
conspiring against themselves by walling themselves off from the new
business district, or, the entire 'Bunker Hill/Hill Street as the Berlin
Wall' conspiracy Davis has concocted is absolute and total fiction.

Your call.

But our home town boy is still in first gear. Shifting into second gear
(and remember, all these 'minor adjustments to the truth' are still from
one single page in his book), he rhapsodizes into an Orwellian wet dream
about how Bunker Hill is now a fortified city cut off from traditional
pedestrian access from the rest of downtown. His fantasy breathlessly
continues with visions of all entrances to the new buildings being cut off
with giant steel doors shutting with a push of a button, the once public
sidewalks being replaced by building to building security controlled
pedways and fortress like structures designed to keep all nonwhites at bay.

The only problem is that - surprise - none of this is true. Absolutely zero
truth. Nada. Total fabrication.

Let's put it this way. If Davis's books were TV shows, right now we'd be
hearing, "De plane, Boss... De Plane!" as Mr. Roarke walks out to greet his
guests to Mike Davis's FANTASY ISLAND.

To dispose of his daydreams one by one, his main claim is that all Bunker
Hill pedestrian access has been cut off from Hill Street (the LA Times
doing this, of course, so it could totally cut itself off from the new
downtown and ensure it's economic doom) and all other parts of the old
downtown.

Well, every access that existed from Hill Street prior to redevelopment -
still exists, except they are now far easier to use since the top of the
hill was cut off. There is a sidewalk up 1st street (the same one which has
always been there), a sidewalk up 2nd street (the same one which has always
been there), there is a staircase up 3rd St. (much improved from the one
which had been there) plus the reactivated Angel's Flight and there is both
a sidewalk and an escalator plus a stair case up 4th street plus a
staircase and sidewalks at 5th Street.

Now, I may be a little slow, but could someone please explain to me exactly
what part of this constitutes the cutting off of all pedestrian access from
the old part of the city?

As for the electronically controlled steel doors and fortress like
mentality, I couldn't recall ever seeing anything like that before, but
decided to check this out first hand (something I would recommend Mr. Davis
try sometime). For two hours I walked the perimeter of every office
building on the hill on a Saturday night when the buildings were shut down
and I could not find even ONE lobby doorway which even had a steel door
which could be used for security. In fact most of the entrance doors wire
revolving doors which could never even accommodate a steel door.

As for the fortress like appearance, virtually every building's public
areas are lined with floor to ceiling glass walls - totally open to the
public visually. At no time in LA's history has a collection of high rise
buildings been so open and unfortress like as the new buildings on Bunker
Hill.

I also found vest pocket parks (not one of which even had gates, much less
locked gates), plazas, a botanical garden, fountains, ample benches for
sitting, numerous diners enjoying sidewalk cafes, brown bag al fresco
dining, skin head Hispanic rappers, joggers, an Asian/white/black roller
hockey game; in short, ethnically and economically diverse Angelinos
enjoying themselves.

The only ghetto I experienced was the one in Mr. Davis's mind.

As for the elevated 'pedways' replacing sidewalks, on Bunker Hill itself
there is not one single pedway between buildings on the hill itself and
every single building is accessible from a public sidewalk. There are,
however, due to grade changes pedways linking buildings on the east side of
the hill to buildings on Figueroa which are further interconnected with
pedways. But none of them replace any sidewalks and none of them are the
primary access for the buildings, only auxiliary accesses from the
adjoining buildings.

And instead of being locked, almost all of them are totally wide open
without any doors (much less locked doors) and the four pedways which open
into the LA World Trade Center, for example, not only do not have
electronically locked doors - the doors don't even have manual locks. They
are open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Davis's lurid scenario of guards in control towers throwing electronic
switches to slam down steel doors over pedway entrances is simply a total,
absolute fabrication.

Lastly, to encourage the public to use the sidewalks, all the heavy cross
traffic has been taken off the top of the Hill by recessing 4th street into
an open air tunnel and keeping 2nd and 3rd in the tunnels they have been in
for many years. By following the example of Olmstead - a personal hero of
Mr. Davis's - in Central Park and keeping the cross town traffic separated
from the pedestrians, Bunker Hill is easily the most pedestrian friendly
high rise area in Los Angeles. Parking and truck accesses have also been
recessed whenever possible to allow for a quiet, walkable Bunker Hill.

Anyone who has walked the Hill before and after redevelopment can tell you
that not only is the Hill which once had no public spaces now filled with
them but that the pedestrian access to Bunker Hill is substantially easier
than it had been. The Bunker Hill Steps - inspired by Rome's Spanish Steps
- in particular are not only one of the great urban public spaces in the
city but replace the truly Orwellian pre-redevelopment access to the hill
from 5th street. If Mr. Davis were to ever visit Bunker Hill, he might
check them out.

Davis demonstrates again that either during his visits to LA he never
managed to drive by, much less walk Bunker Hill before or after
redevelopment or..... just possibly......he might be accused of being
somewhat cavalier with the truth.

As an example of that, one only has to look at the opening and closing of
ECOLOGY. As an exercise, I decided to fact check both the first and last
chapters to see how far before the first 'errors'. In neither case did I
make it past the first (or final) paragraph.

In the opening paragraph of the book, Davis states that a Kona storm front
hitting LA during an El Nino "produces rainfall of a ferocity UNRIVALED (my
caps) anywhere on earth, even in the tropical monsoon belts."

He doesn't state that rainfall approaches tropical levels or says that it
is at monsoon levels, but that tropical monsoons don't begin to rival the
intensity of rain in LA.

The 'facts' in the obscure footnote he quotes (and Davis is a master of
finding that one inaccurate footnote in a sea of facts to support his
claims) are that the world record for one minute of rain is .64 inches is
held by LA County and that the former world record for decades (also in LA
County) is 26.08 inches for a full day. Both statements are totally,
completely false, and, even they were true, would still not logically
support his claim.

The truth is that in the tropics, the rain comes down so hard during any
storm (much less monsoons), the gauges usually aren't even set up to
register per hour counts, much less per minute counts. Estimates of two,
three inches per minute are common in the literature.

The American record (which for that reason is also the world record) is
1.23 inches in a minute - almost double the LA amount of .64 inches - in
that famous tropical monsoon city of Unionville, Maryland.

As for the truth of the 24 hour record, the 4 hour 30 minute record in the
US is 30.8 inches in Smethport, Penn - far more rain in less than 20% as
much time - was in 1942, one year BEFORE LA's 'for decades the world's
record', making that statement also a non-truth. The real world's 24 hour
record is 73.62 inches in Le Reunion.

After that misleading prologue, he launches into the first section of the
first chapter.

In just one page, Davis first claims that in less than three years the LA
area had three of the ten most costly disasters since the Civil War; he
then goes on to claim that the Northridge Earthquake was far and away the
costliest natural disaster in American history, that the Northridge quake
was more expensive than the next four costliest disasters put together, and
that the Northridge earthquake affected the lives of more people than any
previous national disaster in the United States.

Four very strong claims - each of which is backed up by ample footnotes.
And these are largely the facts his book is based upon.

And every one of his 'facts' is totally false.

To accomplish this deception, Davis first has his multiple 'definitions' of
Los Angeles, the LA Metropolitan area, the greater LA area, Southern
California, the South Coast and here, the Megalopolis - with totally
different populations and characteristics which he picks and chooses to
suit whatever he is trying to prove at the moment.

If that isn't confusing enough, when it comes to his disaster statistics he
isn't so much comparing apples and oranges, but Volvos and skateboards. The
first list - from the NY Times - he uses to prove LA has three of the
largest national disasters since the Civil War. The first problem with that
claim is that the list ignores all post Civil War 19th Century and early
20th Century disasters such as the Chicago Fire, San Francisco earthquake
and many others which dwarf any fire or storm LA has ever had.

Then, this outdated NY Times list he selectively chose, conveniently
predates all disasters after the Northridge earthquake such as the Midwest
floods and other non-LA disasters (even though in the very next paragraph
he mentions the Midwest floods), which again far exceed the cost of any
fire or flood ever to hit LA.

Finally, even if one uses non-inflation adjusted dollars, when one checks
current disaster lists of total costs at the time of the writing of the
book such as the one issued by the Insurance Information Institute, they
all show Southern California as only having one disaster on the top ten
list, not three as Davis falsely claims.

The NY Times chart he cites also shows that Hurricane Andrew was far more
damaging than the Northridge earthquake, but then, when he wants to prove
that Northridge was more damaging than Andrew, that chart suddenly isn't
the one he wants to cite. Instead, he uses a figure ($40 billion) given by
a California disaster agency which takes the actual disaster costs and then
adds various other soft costs such as workman's comp, lost work time and
various other intangibles - which they can not support by actual data when
asked to supply it - which is a totally different criteria than in the
lists Davis is comparing their figure with.

Furthermore, none of those lists take into account the National Climatic
Data Center's more extensive lists of weather-related disasters. Their easy
winner in the disaster sweepstakes is the Central and Eastern US heat wave
of 1988 with it's 5,000 to 10,000 deaths and it's $40 billion dollars in
actual damages.

And those are unadjusted 1988 damage costs - with no inflation or indirect
costs added. That one disaster dwarfs any hurricane or earthquake on
anyone's list. The same general area was hit in 1980 with $20 billion in
damages and 10,000 deaths, in 1996 $5 billion dollars and in 1998 200
deaths and over $6 billion dollars.

Nothing in the history of California can come any near those figures or
frequency of massive disasters. Compared to the Midwest or the South, LA is
an ecological paradise.

And those same parts of the country are regularly hit by flooding (1993 -
$21 billion and 48 deaths) tornadoes (billions in damage each year), ice
storms (1983 - $3 billion in Florida alone), hurricanes (Andrew 1992 - $27
billion dollars) and snow storms (1996 - $6 billion in damages) which again
also cumulatively far exceed the death and damage counts that the LA area
has ever experienced, much less the frequency of disasters.


--------- end of part 1 ---------





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Les faits sont faits.
http://www.fis.utoronto.ca/~stalder 


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