Los Angeles voters are upbeat about the city's quality of life as Eric Garcetti prepares to take over as mayor — even if they remain frustrated by traffic jams, substandard schools, costly housing and the backlog of unrepaired streets, according to a new USC Price/Los Angeles Times poll .
Those long-standing gripes aside, solid majorities said they were satisfied with the city's police, parks, libraries, public transportation, emergency services and healthcare system.
Most were also optimistic that after four years with Garcetti as mayor, Los Angeles will be better off than it is today. The councilman from Silver Lake will hold an inaugural ceremony at City Hall on Sunday and start work as mayor Monday.
Garcetti opens his term with a positive, if undefined, public image: 53% of voters viewed him favorably, 17% unfavorably. The rest offered no opinion.
"Garcetti's still a blank slate with most voters," said pollster Jeff Harrelson of M4 Strategies, the Republican firm on the bipartisan team that conducted the survey for the USC Sol Price School of Public Policy and the Los Angeles Times.
Many know little about the incoming mayor, he said, but "they're willing to give him a chance."
Indeed, at least two-thirds of voters said they were confident in Garcetti's ability to handle crime and transportation. Most also had faith in his capacity to improve schools and create jobs.
Overall, the poll results suggested a significant mood shift from the deep pessimism that took hold statewide and nationally after the 2008 economic crisis. Today's voters were split evenly on whether things in Los Angeles were moving in the right direction or off on the wrong track, but even that represented improvement over state and national poll findings in recent years.
In Los Angeles, the recovery has been slow; the unemployment rate still exceeds 10%. Yet tellingly, job creation ranked not first, but second on voters' priority list for the mayor and City Council over the next few years, just behind improving the school system.
"There is definitely a sense nationwide that things are trending in the right direction, and the worst is behind us," said Amy Levin of Benenson Strategy Group, the Democratic firm on the polling team.
On a quality-of-life scale of 1 to 9, the higher the better, nearly half of the city's voters gave Los Angeles a grade of 7, 8 or 9.
The reasons cited most often were jobs, proximity to family and friends, diversity of the population, entertainment, arts, culture, beaches, parks and the outdoors.
"Angelenos aren't completely satisfied with life in their city, but by and large they're very optimistic and very happy," said poll director Dan Schnur.
Not surprisingly, traffic congestion jumped out as the biggest negative effect on the quality of life, followed by the high cost of housing. Traffic was most irksome to white voters and residents of the Westside, where bumper-to-bumper jams on the 405 Freeway epitomize the downside of life in Los Angeles.
Poll respondent John Jackson, a librarian who lives in Westchester, said in a follow-up interview that he was "very happy" with the quality of life in L.A., especially its cultural attractions. But Jackson, a 31-year-old Democrat, has learned to plan ahead for extra drive time to cope with the chronic slowdowns.
"I've just come to expect traffic is going to be bad," he said.
Voter opinions on other aspects of L.A. life also varied by region and ethnicity. In an era of new rail lines opening across Los Angeles, nearly two-thirds of voters citywide were satisfied with the public transit system. Nearly three-quarters of Latinos were happy with it.
But white voters and Westside residents were less satisfied than others, another sign of their dependence on automobiles and their exasperation over traffic.
The poll showed signs of happiness among voters with the steady drop in crime since the 1990s. Citywide, crime reduction scored low on voters' priority list for the mayor and council members. The poll found that 55% of voters were satisfied with the city's police and crime prevention efforts. But Latinos, African Americans and South L.A. residents, traditionally more vulnerable to crime, were less satisfied than whites.
One source of deep dissatisfaction was street repairs, with two-thirds of voters dissatisfied with the city's performance. White voters were unhappiest about the condition of city streets, while Latinos were less concerned about it. In his campaign advertising, Garcetti promised to "do the basics better, like answering phones, filling potholes and picking up trash."
The high cost of housing was a concern for nearly two-thirds of voters. Black voters were especially unhappy with the availability of affordable housing. On the question of access to hospitals and emergency care, voters citywide were satisfied, but Latinos and African Americans were less so.
By and large, however, Latino voters were more content than others with the quality of life, reflecting an optimism that surfaces regularly in polls. Just over half of Latinos said things in the city were going in the right direction.
For Garcetti, a top challenge will be to get the city's spending in line with its tax and fee collections after years of budget shortfalls. Although most voters were confident in his ability to handle fiscal matters, they had more faith in his capacity to meet crime and transportation challenges, among others.
Given a menu of potential spending cuts, voters' top choice was to reduce city worker salaries and administrative costs, followed by cuts to their health and retirement benefits.
"We're going to go the way of Detroit," said poll respondent Rodrick Su, 43, a computer system administrator who lives in Woodland Hills. The salary and pension obligations approved by city leaders are unrealistic, he said.
"Let's be honest," said Su, a Republican. "And hey — I'm paying for it. It's been going on for quite a while."
The poll found an ethnic divide on slashing the health and retirement benefits of city workers. Only 7% of Latino voters favored that option, but 29% of whites supported the idea. The least favored choice for all voters was to cut the number of police officers, firefighters or emergency dispatchers.
The USC Price/L.A. Times poll of 500 registered voters was taken Monday through Wednesday. The margin of sampling error for the telephone survey was 4.4 percentage points in either direction for the full sample and wider for subgroups.
michael.finnegan@latimes.com
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