If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you live in Los Angeles. But do you live in the city of L.A.? An unincorporated area of L.A. County? Or do you actually live in another city entirely, such as Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Inglewood or Culver City?
There are 88 cities in the county, but not every patch of land under the L.A. County umbrella is a city. Some places have their own police forces. Some don’t. Some have their own fire departments. Some don’t.
Why are things like this? We've been looking into it, and it seems one of the answers is — drum roll — water.
More than a hundred years ago, the city of L.A. was already one of the ‘it’ places for development and population growth. Sunshine, open land and a manufacturing boom ruled. Between 1890 and 1900 alone, the city of L.A. more than doubled in size to over 100,000. And it kept doubling in the decades after.
There were other cities around. The city of L.A. was the forerunner, of course, incorporated in 1850, and cities like Pasadena (1886), Santa Monica (1886) and Long Beach (1897) came after. By 1901, there were 12 cities in L.A. County.
But with more people in L.A. came the need for more water. The L.A. River was a reasonably viable water source for the city until about 1900, according to William Deverell, the director of the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West. To truly become a metropolis, though, city leaders had to get planning.
A city is a municipality that has the power to self-govern, meaning they have their own elected leaders, like a mayor and city council. It becomes an incorporated city once a majority of community voters approve it.
For neighborhoods that don’t have locally elected leaders, these areas are unincorporated and under the leadership of the L.A. County Board of Supervisors.
Find out what type of area you live in by putting your address into Mapping L.A.
Civil engineer William Mulholland (yep, that Mulholland), who led the municipal water bureau, was sent to evaluate new and bigger water sources, which is how he came up with the idea of an aqueduct running from Owens Valley in eastern California to Los Angeles.
To do that, L.A. had to secure the rights to the Owens River water, which was a choice that was both fought against and supported. This siphoning, which cost millions of dollars and took years to implement, drained Owens Valley of a vital resource and caused lasting economic and environmental problems.
The aqueduct exists to this day.
“[It] basically sticks a straw into the Owens River up in the Owens Valley and draws that water 250 miles down to L.A. by gravity,” Deverell said.
But when the aqueduct opened in 1913, it ended not in L.A. but in San Fernando, a fair distance away.
So to get that water to L.A. in an easier way, two years later city leaders annexed most of the San Fernando Valley. This annexation put the aqueduct in incorporated L.A. city boundaries.
This meant if you lived in the city of L.A, you had access to this water. If you didn’t — well, that was unfortunate. No Owens water for you! And because of a legal provision, officials were not allowed to sell the newly available resource to places outside the city.
So, smaller incorporated cities and unincorporated areas nearby clamored to be annexed by L.A., who were, among many reasons, infatuated by the potential of abundant water access.
The city expanded to include the beach areas, like Venice in 1925, and other areas like Eagle Rock and Hyde Park in 1923. The rush to annex made it seem like the city of L.A. would eventually engulf the entire county.
But that came to an end in 1928, when Mullholland’s St. Francis Dam burst, killing nearly 500 people. Annexations pretty much stalled.
“It raised the question in a number of people’s minds whether the city had engineering competence and capability to manage such a large project — in spite of the fact that they built the Owens River Aqueduct,” said Samuel Nelson, a general manager and chief engineer of LADWP, in the historical interview Water for Los Angeles.
Surrounding cities, including Burbank, Pasadena and L.A., formed the Metropolitan Water District, which jointly funded the Colorado River aqueduct.
From then on, being absorbed by the city of L.A. was out of favor. Instead, areas looked instead to become incorporated cities.
It wasn't easy. They had to secure support, which generally meant getting authorization from the county and winning a community vote. They also had to show that the city could stay afloat with taxes and budgets, and provide services like police and fire — a big undertaking.
But if places didn’t become cities, they’d stay under the management of L.A. County, governed by the five-member Board of Supervisors, which would mean a small group of elected leaders making decisions for a vast number of diverse areas stretching from the coast to the Eastside.
And that was problematic as many people didn’t want Big Brother to tell them what to do, according to Tom Sitton, retired curator at the L.A. County Museum of Natural History.
“Usually what you have is a group, an organization or just a group of people who… don’t want the county or anybody else having all of the answers for changing things,” he said.
In 1954, when Lakewood incorporated as an independent municipality, it came up with a different plan, which would be a landmark change. Instead of creating vital services from scratch, it would contract them from county agencies. Since then, 41 other cities have followed that model, including Cerritos, Downey, and South El Monte.
A Lakewood plan city, for example, likely doesn’t have its own police department. Instead, it gets that service from the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department. The same goes for road maintenance and libraries — services contracted from the county.
The city of Lakewood’s website describes how the plan helped communities stop having to pick between resources and local control: It “began with the conviction that unincorporated communities didn’t have to choose between annexation by a big city or building a municipal infrastructure from scratch.”
And it keeps evolving. L.A. County’s newest city is Calabasas, incorporated in 1991. It also follows the Lakewood plan.
So if you ever wondered why you might see LAPD, the Sheriff's Department and, say, Santa Monica PD as you drive around the county — well, now you know.
