Post-Riot L.A.

This week marks the 10th anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, which claimed 55 lives, caused around $1 billion in property damage, and helped cement the city's reputation as a hopelessly strife- and misery-ridden hellhole.

Things have gotten better since then, though not, as many claim, because the riots served as a wake-up call for massive public-sector spending. Whatever economic recovery there has been in the most riot-torn neighborhoods has been more a result of private entrepreneurship and loans than government action. Despite a lot of good news, of course, crime and murder rates are still higher around the epicenter of the riots than most people would be comfortable with.

The revival and renewal of L.A. since the riots--and a natural tragedy, 1994's Northridge earthquake--shows the wonderfully dynamic qualities of arguably the most cosmopolitan American city (sorry, New York). The awful choices made by so many people on those nightmarish nights a decade ago don't mean Los Angeles was some existential or sociological trap whose only escape was through mayhem; it merely meant that those people did wrong things.

The most important lessons to learn from the riots and the decade after are that lives, and cities, are resilient; that people's choices matter; and that Los Angeles is still (and even more so) a great place to live. It's a city rich, diverse, exciting, with all the cultural, culinary, and economic resources of a dense urban metropolis combined with spread-out, suburban ease and almost always perfect weather (whose alternately soothing and energizing effects cannot be overestimated). The chaos of 1992 was a momentary aberration; this grand experiment in multicultural urbanity succeeds every day.