No one realizes Los Angeles better than D.J. Waldie, the prose-poet laureate of the land and the air and the light. - Lawrence Weschler, author of A Wanderer in the Perfect City

Los Angeles’ elegant observer - Jim Newton, LMU magazine

No more keen observer of life in Los Angeles - Ken Bernstein, The Planning Report

Elements of Los Angeles: Earth, Water, Air, and Fire by D.J. Waldie offers a thoughtful and often poetic exploration of Los Angeles through the lens of the four classical elements. He uses these as a framework to delve into the complex and often contradictory nature of the city, examining its foundations, history, and cultural fabric with his trademark elegance and incisiveness.

Los Angeles as a place of contradictions: Waldie portrays Los Angeles as a place of dreams and disillusionment, civic memory and strategic forgetting, natural beauty and environmental fragility.

The classical elements as lenses: Each element provides a distinct way of exploring the city's multifaceted identity. Earth focuses on the city's physical and historical grounding. Water examines the critical role of water in the city's development. Air considers the city's atmosphere, culture, and shared experiences. Fire addresses the destructive and transformative power of fire in the Los Angeles landscape, particularly relevant in light of recent wildfires.

An interweaving history, memory, and observation: Waldie blends historical facts, personal reflections, and deeply felt observations to create an evocative portrait of Los Angeles. He explores moments like the forgotten legacy of the Hass avocado, the devastation of the St. Francis Dam collapse, and the peculiar endurance contest that left a woman buried alive.

A guide to seeing the city anew: For those who have lived in Los Angeles or simply wondered about its underlying essence, the book offers a fresh perspective and deeper understanding of the city beyond its glittering surface.

D.J. Waldie is an essayist and cultural historian known for his insightful explorations of Southern California life. His other works include Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir and Becoming Los Angeles: Myth, Memory, and a Sense of Place. Called “one of the most respected contemporary voices on life in Southern California,” by the New Yorker and “one of the most artful authors writing about Los Angeles today” by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles, Waldie elegantly blends history, memoir, and contemplative observation, providing a portrait of the elements that illuminates the city as a whole.

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We could have the state we deserve

To see a future for California, look to the past.

One hundred and seventy-five years ago, our state was the prize in an unjust war whose aim was to extend slavery beyond the plantations of the South to the valleys of California. Fifty years later, those valleys were dominated by corporate agriculture (wheat, cattle, cotton, and oranges) and controlled politically by railroad interests. By 1950, the future of California was in the hands of real estate developers. The valleys filled with houses and then with all of us—believers in the golden dream and disillusioned hustlers alike. Fifty years on, at the start of a new millennium in 2000, the dreamers still arrived. Their point of origin wasn’t “back east” but the Global South and the Asian “far west.” Developers still turned square miles of farmland into tract house suburbia. Big, old-style corporations came and went. New technologies boomed and sometimes busted, but overall, the momentum in the systems of industry, finance, and labor that defined California in the mid-20th century had begun to slow.

In 2025, the fractures in California are increasingly visible. Californians today see a future where their state isn’t exactly California anymore, shorn of the golden myths of El Dorado and all the booms that followed and now unable to fulfill the extravagant promise that there would always be enough of whatever Californians wanted: clean air, abundant water, unspoiled nature, social mobility, and endless growth.

What California will be in its bicentennial year of 2050 is subject to unpredictable conditions. The nation becomes ungovernable; the San Andreas rips; drought worsens in the Colorado River watershed; AI-driven technologies deliver worst-case scenarios: social isolation, broken economies, global unrest, accidental war.

Absent these shocks, continuities will dominate California’s tomorrows. Demographic trends underway since 1990 will persist. Californians will be older, with a median age of nearly 42, up from a median age of 38 in 2025. Nearly one-quarter of us will be over 65, troubling the state’s image of youthful hedonism as well as the job market. The state’s ethnic and racial diversity will exceed even today’s—potentially a cause of more polarization, Ethnic and political sorting will continue to send more Californians to red states and bring immigrants—in fewer numbers—to change the makeup of the political and civic organizations through which power is channeled.

By 2050, nearly 50% of us will have Latino roots. The percentage of white non-Latinos will drift down to 25%. This realignment will likely bring to power a California-style Latino populism that will disrupt conventional blue/red political binaries. Distrust of all political parties will continue to erode party identification and scramble elections, but the dysfunctional habits of state politics will probably continue.

1950s California—young, better educated, risk-taking—excelled at turning Cold War defense spending into new industries and the shiny consumer products that defined a better tomorrow. When defense spending declined in the 1990s, university researchers and hedge fund managers stepped in to propel newer and faster technological advances leading to the disruptive potential of AI. The qualities that made California uniquely a leader in innovation in the 20th century are less obvious now, and the global competition is stiffer. Meeting the environmental and social challenges of 2050 could found new industries and generate jobs, but only if California marshals its human resources, restores aging infrastructure, and reinvests in the past’s successful educational, business, and political collaborations.

Climate made California a seductive lifestyle product and still does. Forgotten are the cycles of drought that unmade the state’s cattle economy in the mid-19th century and drove titanic projects in the 20th century to bring water to places with little of their own. Climate change has already put these systems under stress. By 2050, we’ll use the water we have better through wastewater recycling, stormwater capture, limits on groundwater extraction, and agriculture fitted to a harsher climate regime. But even with better water management and stricter water conservation, there will always be too little water in the southern half of the state. Fundamental ecological divides—north vs. south, coast vs. inland, temperate upland forest vs. dry chaparral lowland—will still fragment the California landscape and define Californians’ unique sense of place.

Disparities of income and household wealth among Californians are already some of the greatest in the nation. They’re expected to grow worse. The costs of a California lifestyle—particularly the cost of housing—will widen the gap between households at the top and the low- and middle-income families below. Without new and creative housing programs, less than one-third of Californians will be able to finance a median-priced home.

There will be more houses in 2050 and in denser neighborhoods, but despite the state’s efforts there will never be enough affordable housing even as the state’s population declines as a consequence of fewer births and restricted immigration. Sharp differences in the quality of life between one community and another—begun by redlining neighborhoods in the 1930s—will persist. The conditions that predispose some Californians to become homeless aren’t likely to improve very much, although there may be fewer unsheltered people asleep on city streets. Meanwhile, corporate refugees will follow the headquarters of Charles Schwab, Oracle, Northrop Grumman, and Chevron out of the state, along with technology billionaires and their enclaves of unimaginable privilege.

California is home to an economy with a global reach, matched only by some nations. Its foundation is the abundance of the state’s resources, material as well as human—which have, in many cases, reached their limits. Tomorrow’s California will deliver on its economic promises to Californians only if the state’s policies reflect the optimism of immigrant entrepreneurship, the justice of adequate wages, and the genuine need that households have for stable employment.

The biggest challenge for Californians in 2050 will be one of imagination: to see themselves as inheritors of a compromised but still resourceful California. Despite political polarization and social divides amid increased ethnic and racial diversity, Californians display a broad consensus about what the “good life” in California could look like. Popular movements for equity and social justice are maturing. Political initiatives for healthcare, education, infrastructure renewal, homelessness, and housing affordability could follow and deliver returns on job creation and neighborhood quality of life. The dark magic of AI is a threat to middle-income and low-wage earners, but it could become a platform for finding better ways to manage what California is becoming by deepening our understanding of the environment, improving outcomes in education, and rationalizing the planning process at all levels of government. A state with too many unaccountable boards, commissions, and special districts and too many local governments jealous of their prerogatives could learn the hard lesson that a better future will come from regional coordination in providing law enforcement, overseeing water management, delivering services to an aging population, responding to natural and human caused disasters, and planning for economic development.

An optimistic idea of California has always drawn Americans to what they hoped the state could be. That idea alone will not be enough in 2050. Momentum will not carry us into the mid-21st century. Californians need to accept the burdens of their history and to shape their aspirations accordingly. They need to imagine a better kind of California—a California of shared potential—recognizing what they had lost or squandered in becoming Californian and understanding clearly what they can still achieve.

As hard as it will be to realize, the California we deserve is possible.

Part of the series California 175 published by Zocalo Public Square as “Will California Still Be Golden in 2050?” in September 2025

We could have the city we deserve

We need to have by 2050 a shared image of who we are as residents of this place called Los Angeles. As hard as that will be to achieve — a common shared trajectory for the region — it is possible.

We need to imagine a different Los Angeles, one that doesn't look like the city that was on the cover of Time magazine in 1949. We need to imagine a Los Angeles that understands our failures over the past 70, 80 years. What we carried from the mid-20th century is the idea that we can do whatever we want simply because we can, and we could say that our past was meaningless. We have lived on the momentum of the boom years after 1945.

The power of the growth machine of Los Angeles has made it difficult to make wise choices. We built fast, we built cheaply, we built for the view and not for the fire-prone chaparral ecology we were building into.

But we can no longer expect momentum to move us forward. We need to slow down, turn around, look to the past and become fully aware how we have acted poorly in the past. We have to become better builders, wiser custodians and smarter assemblers of resilient, resistant communities if we intend to live here in the numbers that we are.

This means asking hard questions of ourselves and our political leaders. They have, in many ways, failed us for decades. Our leadership must be willing to face up to the growth machine and developer interests and say to them: We will build this way now and not that way anymore.

I would hope that forces — both governmental and communal, both in Los Angeles and outside the city — could reimagine how we live on the land, so that there would be a new way, a different way, of intersecting the built environment of Los Angeles with the natural environment. We could share a vision of what this place has been and what it is now and what it might be. We could get from our political leaders and civic institutions what we need to make a city that is resilient, sustainable and resistant to catastrophe. We could have the city we deserve.

Part of “Fast-forward 25 years: Sharing hopes and dreams for a future Los Angeles” published in the Los Angeles Times, August 10, 2025