Building and Rebuilding Los Angeles: How the City’s Development Agencies Shape Regional Growth

Steven P. Erie

Steven P. Erie is a professor of political science at the University of California, San Diego. He earned his Ph.D. in political science at UCLA in 1975, where he studied both under Professor John C. Bollens and Professor John C. Ries. Since that time, he has taught at USC and the State University of New York Albany, and worked as a NASPAA Fellow in the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C.

Professor Erie’s research for the past two decades has focused on problems of urban government and politics, fields in which he is a nationally recognized scholar. He is the author of numerous articles on metropolitan government, particularly on reform politics. His most recent book, Rainbow’s End, published by the University of California Press in 1988, is an imaginative and well-documented historical analysis of Irish political machines in American cities. Widely praised, it received the 1989 Robert Park Award for the best book on urban sociology from the American Sociological Association, while the American Political Science Association recognized it as the best book in the field of urban politics the same year.

Professor Erie’s present research investigates the role public bureaucracies – the Department of Water and Power, the Harbor Department, the Community Redevelopment Agency and the Department of Airports – played in the economic development of Los Angeles. His findings are being published by Stanford University Press in the forthcoming book, Imperial Los Angeles: Public Enterprise and the Politics of Growth, 1800-1992