LA Weekly

Last year, the City of Los Angeles removed more than 27 million square feet of graffiti, enough to squirt a 1-foot-wide swath of Rust-Oleum from Hollywood Boulevard to Fifth Avenue in New York City, then double back to State Street in Chicago.

Against the backdrop of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s big, bold quality-of-life initiatives — he’s gonna win the gang war, he’s gonna plant 1 million trees, he’s gonna reform the public schools, he’s gonna solve the traffic snarl — City Hall is locked in an old battle just to slow down thousands of teenage and young-adult tagger vandals who create the tattered, splattered environment that feeds into the “broken-window syndrome” that drags down neighborhoods and invites crime.

The city says it is throwing what it can at the problem, sometimes cleaning up the vandalism quickly — though never quite keeping up. The taggers tag; the city removes. The taggers tag the same wall again; the city removes again — ad nauseam. Think of a racing greyhound, chasing that lure. Never does catch up.


The failing war on graffiti — a subject Villaraigosa rarely mentions — takes on extra significance against a backdrop of other stalled mayoral efforts to address pressing quality-of-life issues in Los Angeles.

His April 19 budget proposal slashes $18 million from street services — the most-requested public service in Los Angeles — a huge, 11 percent cut that will worsen the city’s staggering, 83-year backlog for basic sidewalk repairs.

Villaraigosa’s administration also concedes it is failing in a five-year battle to remove thousands of illegal and unsightly billboards from neighborhoods citywide, despite a publicly popular removal ordinance approved under Mayor James Hahn in 2002. City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo recently decried the “blight” caused by garish illegal billboards, admitting that the billboard industry refuses to remove them — a situation that leaves City Hall looking toothless.

And then there’s the blight of L.A. graffiti. Other than a rare political scrawl on a wall, Los Angeles graffiti comes in two basic forms: gang and tag.

Gang graffiti marks the boundaries of a specific territory — as well as challenges and disrespects other gangs by “crossing out” rivals, an act that has set into motion countless Los Angeles homicides.

The rest is scrawled by individual taggers known as “oners” and tagging “krews” with up to 20 or 30 members, some of whom pride themselves on their sometimes-colorful, arguably artistic, work. But thousands of other kids — the really destructive taggers — focus on sheer quantity in a practice known as “bombing,” or tagging inaccessible spots, like beneath overpasses.

“Some of those guys must be acrobats,” said Paul Racs, director of the city’s Office of Community Beautification, the city department responsible for graffiti removal. “I don’t know how they get to some of those spots. I swear sometimes it seems like Spider-Man is up there.”



That danger is part of the attraction — and one reason Los Angeles officials still haven’t got a clue how to slow it down, and seem resigned instead to trying to cover it up. Yet it is rare to hear any city official address the core cause of the problem head-on: that these kids are having a blast vandalizing L.A.

“The appeal of risk-taking, the bravado of it, is one reason why there has been an increase in the last few years,” says Christine Anderson, a Caltrans maintenance manager. “Some guys want to better each other by tagging daring sites.”

Some fed-up residents who feel the city is not doing enough act almost as beat cops, for example the vocal whistleblowers in the La Cienega Heights neighborhood between La Cienega and Robertson boulevards once known as Cadillac-Corning.

One of them is Michele Wytko, who has lived in the area for 20 years. “I am not the Lone Ranger, but I’m the one with the loudest voice,” said Wytko, who walks the neighborhood with her dog and calls and e-mails the city when she spots the eyesores. “It’s a whole different world when you walk. The sidewalks are covered with it, but you can’t see that from a car.”

She’s critical of City Hall’s supposed fight to win back neighborhoods, saying, “It’s been out of control. They used to come clean it up fast, now it takes time.”

She is particularly upset that with the recent crackdown on street gangs, much ballyhooed in recent days by Villaraigosa, something as basic as reducing the area’s extensive tagging activity has gone nowhere.

“It ticked me off that Villaraigosa and [LAPD Chief William] Bratton are on this big gang kick, and graffiti is a big part of the gang problem, but nothing seems to be done about it,” said Wytko.

Graffiti experts seem to agree that there is more graffiti now than in the past few years, even though, at least in some areas of the city, there is also much more removal.

The graffiti war is raging even as the Los Angeles Planning Commission, disheartened by longtime “indifference” in City Hall, this week announced 14 planning principles for reducing visual blight, greening the streets — and fighting the growing ugliness that is L.A.

“I don’t think the removal is slower, it is just that more graffiti than ever is popping up,” said Racs, whose office had a budget of $7.5 million for graffiti removal in fiscal 2006. “Our contractors removed a record 27 million square feet of graffiti from 489,000 locations last year.”

So far in 2007, more than 6.7 million square feet of all forms of graffiti has been removed from 139,040 locations, according to Racs, the vast majority of it removed by 14 contractors whose crews drive around, spot graffiti and paint over it.

Not surprisingly, the worst areas are Boyle Heights and South Los Angeles — the neighborhoods with the most gangs, Racs said.