LA is doing pretty badly at basic governance these days. We’ve spent the post-pandemic years lurching from one budget crisis to the next. The city can’t repave our potholed streets or fix our plundered streetlights, and it just had to give back $100 million in state transportation grants because it wasn’t able to spend the money. Our planning for the Olympics has been…uninspiring at best. And when momentum for serious government reform finally surged after a series of corruption scandals and the leak of the racist Nury Martinez tape, City Council completely squandered the moment.

It’s fair to blame the current occupants of City Hall for much of this sad state of affairs. But I think a lot of the dysfunction in Los Angeles stems from something that’s been around much longer - our weak civic culture. LA lacks the kind of hometown spirit that unites people and drives them to make this place better.

Think of how the people in other cities came together after tragedy in the last couple decades. New York City after 9/11. Boston Strong after the marathon bombing. In Boston, Red Sox players poured their great affection for their adopted city into iconic moments of civic healing, from firing up grieving fans with famously profane speeches to carrying the World Series trophy to the marathon finish line.

We just experienced our own urban tragedy, and the communities in Altadena and the Palisades have supported each other in beautiful ways. But who created the big, meaningful moments that could unite Angelenos across LA and help us collectively heal? Not our athletes, not our movie stars, and certainly not our political leaders. In the ashes of the fires, we missed an opportunity to truly rise up together as a city.

Don’t blame our leaders for not thinking big. They are products of LA’s weak civic culture.

As I wrote in my think tank piece, LA’s culture privileges the private realm over the public. My family was in San Diego for the Fourth of July, and we could have joined hundreds of thousands of people gathered on the waterfront to watch the Big Bay Boom, the biggest fireworks show on the West Coast. Or watched it live on TV. Instead, we celebrated America’s birthday like stereotypical Angelenos - we climbed a hill and watched a dozen different fireworks displays popping off silently in the distance around the city. I played John Philip Sousa marches on my phone.

Once you look, you start seeing LA’s bias toward the private everywhere. Our biggest foundation by far only funds art, and the main public expression of its generosity is a private museum on a hill. Out of our city’s 450 public parks, only four have been “adopted” by a nonprofit. Our public school choice system sends kindergartners all over the city instead of down the street to the school where they would befriend their neighbors. And even though seven unhoused Angelenos die on the street every night, many still fight to keep housing for them out of their own communities.

Our weak public sphere means politicians can get away with flouting or ignoring the public interest. It’s one of the reasons why the city can settle with disability advocates, committing to spending $1.4 billion fixing sidewalks and curb ramps, and then…just not manage to do it. Or why voters can pass a measure to install critical street safety upgrades by an almost 2:1 margin, and then the city can…just refuse to implement it. Or why Metro can be run by politicians who get to make decisions about transit that will echo for decades, and in crucial moments they…curry favor with special interests.

Our leaders wouldn’t be so quick to dismiss the public interest, or so incompetent when trying to serve it, if they had greater respect for their constituents. That means the public needs to build power. And to build power, Angelenos need more respect for each other.

To set LA on the path to achieving greatness, let’s start changing Angelenos’ sense of connectedness to one another. Let’s get more in the spirit of being together, caring about each other, and caring about the public fate of our city, not just the private fates of the people we know. One organization already fostering this connection is CicLAvia, which regularly draws out tens of thousands of folks on a Sunday afternoon to bike, walk, eat, play, and celebrate on open streets. Moments of connection and shared experience like CicLAvia give people the space to imagine themselves as part of something bigger and more meaningful. That collective imagination is the first step in building a stronger civic culture.

CicLAvia only happens a few times a year in certain neighborhoods. How do we build a stronger public spirit that calls in every Angeleno? We could start with one of the most open-hearted moments in a person’s life - when they move to a new city.

Inspired by this wonderful article about “onboarding” new residents of a city, I propose that the City of LA send every person who moves here a welcome package - the Angeleno Box! The purpose of the box would be to connect the recipient to other individual Angelenos, to the community they just moved into, and to the city as a whole. You can probably already think of things the city should put in. Here are just a few ideas to connect people to the city as a whole:

There would also be more local information, based on the recipient’s address, to connect them to their community:

Finally, an idea from my genius wife to connect people on an individual level: a baseball cap (or other highly visible swag) of a certain color that is changed every year, so that all the people who move to the city in a given year get the same color cap. When you see someone at the grocery store or on the bus wearing the same color cap as yours, you know they moved to LA around when you did, and you have an instant point of connection. “Hey, I see you moved here in 2027 like me! What brought you here?”

What would you want to get in your Angeleno Box? Let me know!

There would be, of course, legal and logistical issues to figure out. Where would the city obtain the addresses from? “New mover list” aggregators? LADWP account openings? Would people moving from one LA address to another get a box? How would privacy issues be worked out? Would the data be anonymized? I can already hear every lawyer reading this hemming and hawing, and there may turn out to be some insurmountable obstacle to bringing this idea to life.

But we should give it a shot! If you’re a transplant like me, imagine your own first days in this sprawling, oddly unknowable city. How did you start to get your arms around it? How long did it take you to find your people? Wouldn’t it have been great for the city itself to have given you a leg up, a link to your community, and maybe even an upcoming block party to go to? And for those who grew up here, whose families have perhaps been here for generations, wouldn’t it be great if all of us could access the rootedness and sense of pride that you were raised with?

I always tell people who move here to give LA five years. It’s a city that reveals itself slowly. But maybe we can speed it up. Maybe we can connect people to the bigger picture right off the bat. And maybe if we do, we can start to build the kind of public spirit here that will lead to - will demand - a city that works better for us all.