Lakewood, California

 city, draw only border

Lakewood of the early 1950s was David fighting the Goliath of Long Beach, a city intent on gobbling up its unincorporated neighbor parcel by parcel. The legal turf battles were exhausting Lakewood's defenders, most of whom were transplants drawn to the promise of this sleepy village-turned-postwar boomtown.

Then along came John Sanford Todd, a struggling attorney and proud Lakewood resident, who dreamed up a way to preserve his community's independence without it going broke: It would become a new kind of city, one that contracted out for police protection, trash collection, firefighting -- just about every service a city provides.

That practice is commonplace in the USA today, but it was a revelation a half century ago.
Todd's vision, dubbed "the Lakewood Plan," became a model of local government that informed incorporation drives throughout Southern California and beyond. Suburbia took shape in a rash of "contract cities," including the neighboring Dairy Valley (now Cerritos), La Puente, Bellflower, Duarte, Irwindale, Norwalk and Santa Fe Springs, which sprang up in such rapid succession that some observers began proclaiming the end of big cities. Todd was the architect of this transformation, the so-called father of the Lakewood Plan.
Todd died 31 August 2008 at Fountain Valley Regional Medical Center of complications from surgery following a fall.
His unusual legacy forms an important chapter in the history of the region, as creator of a form of city government that also was (perhaps unintentionally) a social experiment, a mechanism for reinforcing the social and cultural values that shaped community identity.
Lakewood in the late 1940s was largely a collection of bean fields and hog farms, but as servicemen returned home after World War II, it became a magnet for young families. In less than three years, Lakewood's developers -- Mark Taper, Louis Boyer and Ben Weingart -- built 17,500 nearly identical houses, laid out in a uniform grid, with all streets meeting at right angles, each block containing exactly 46 houses, and each house planted on a 50-by-100-foot lot. It was the largest subdivision in the world.
Within that grid was a community that was 95 per cent white. Later generations of historians would take note of this homogeneity and read an exclusionary motive into the incorporation effort, but Lakewood today is racially and ethnically diverse, with whites making up only about half of its 83,000 residents.
Fifty years ago, the identity that the city's fathers wanted to preserve may have been related more to age and class than racial identity. Most of Lakewood's residents were just starting out. When they looked at their big neighbor to the south they saw an older city, they didn't see the mirror of themselves.
Of course, when they looked at Long Beach, they also saw a big-city bureaucracy that might regard Lakewood as a sort of "hinterland" and disregard the special needs of young families.
Born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, on 27 July 1919, Todd moved to Los Angeles as an infant when his father joined the psychology faculty at USC. He earned a bachelor's degree in political science at USC, then served in World War II as an Army Air Forces munitions specialist in Alaska and Guam. He married in 1943, finished law school at USC and moved to Lakewood in 1949, and by 1955 had two sons.
There was one other lawyer in town but the legal business wasn't exactly booming, so Todd began to get involved in civic affairs.
Soon Todd found himself arguing to close down Lakewood's hog farms on behalf of fellow residents, who regarded the farms as a smelly nuisance. In 1950 he was elected managing director of the Lakewood Taxpayers' Association, the main civic organization.
In mid-1951, the city of Long Beach released a detailed report on the feasibility of annexing all or part of Lakewood. Of particular interest were Lakewood's country club and golf course. Todd became the legal advisor to a group of businessmen who wanted to devise a strategy to defeat Long Beach's plan. Petitions were circulated, and irate Lakewood residents showed up en masse at annexation hearings, but it was a long, expensive, wearying process and annexation appeared inevitable.
When Long Beach dangled a carrot (a 10-million dollar proposal to develop parks that would enhance Lakewood) a county official told Todd, "You can't remain unincorporated, and Lakewood can't afford to incorporate."
That's when Todd devised a way to avoid a new city's costly capital outlays for municipal buildings and services.
Arguing for contracting with the county for essential services, he led a grass-roots incorporation drive that featured as its motto "Lakewood, Tomorrow's City Today."
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved the proposed incorporation 10 January 1954, with one member declaring that one day Lakewood would be "showing us a thing or two about government." On 9 March 1954 the people of Lakewood voted in favor of cityhood by a ratio of 3 to 2.
Lakewood became the first city in the United States to incorporate since 1939.
It received national attention in the New York Times, Time, Newsweek, even the Harvard Law Review. The incorporation movement Lakewood spawned was further bolstered by a legislative change in California that allowed cities to partake of sales taxes generated in their jurisdiction, which provided a vital revenue source.
Today more than a fourth of California cities (about 130) are contract cities, including Lake Forest, Mission Viejo, San Clemente and Laguna Niguel in Orange County, as well as Elk Grove in Sacramento County, Camarillo in Ventura County and Solana Beach in San Diego County.