LASANTI Project: Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana

The Vast, Rich, Profoundly Unequal Megalopolis Called LASANTI

This policy paper asks: can leaders in business, academia, research and policy take the Southern California-Baja California region to its next stage? LASANTI (Los Angeles, San Diego, Tijuana region) by itself is now the 11th largest economy in the world and critically important to the economies of California, the U.S. and Mexico. We are each other’s most important trading partner and we are interdependent in many ways. We are at a cusp of large changes that could be transformative if there were strong leadership to undertake the effort.

The LASANTI Project Description

CRP's LASANTI Project explores many dimensions of social and economic change and inequality across the huge bi-national urbanized complex, stretching from the northern Los Angeles suburbs down through San Diego to the Tijuana metropolitan area.

Divided We Fail: Segregated and Unequal Schools in the Southland

Southern California schools show profound segregation by race, poverty and language status, all of which are visibly related to disparities in educational opportunity and outcomes. This analysis provides the first comprehensive, region-wide study of enrollment and segregation patterns in the six-county Southern California region. It then addresses the question of why these trends matter: evaluating how segregation is related to graduation rates and college attendance, as well as the distribution of learning opportunities in Southern California.

Fragmented Economy, Stratified Society, and the Shattered Dream

This is the second in a series of reports called The Lasanti Project, named after the region encompassing Los Angeles, San Diego and Tijuana. As recovery from the Great Recession remains subdued, and as the depth of the economic plunge becomes increasingly clear, this report examines the growing disparities in the labor market yielding widespread increases in economic inequality throughout the region of Southern California and the state as a whole. In particular, this study looks at underemployment as a more comprehensive indicator of the health of the job market and overall economy since it counts three groups of workers: the total number of unemployed people, involuntary part-time workers who want full-time work but have had to settle for part-time hours, and “marginally attached” workers who are available and want to work but have given up actively looking.

Unrealized
 Promises:

 Unequal Access, Affordability, and 
Excellence 
at
 Community
 Colleges 
in
 Southern 
California

California 
community 
colleges 
are, 
by 
design,
 the
 only
 entry 
point 
to
 four‐year
 institutions 
for 
the 
majority 
of
 students 
in
 the
 state. 
Yet,
 many
 of
 these 
institutions
 perpetuate 
racial 
and
 class 
segregation, 
thus
 disrupting 
the
 California 
Master 
Plan
 for
 Higher 
Education’s 
promise
 of
 access, 
equity,
 and
 excellence 
in
 higher 
education.
This
 report 
is 
an 
exploratory 
and
 descriptive 
examination 
of
 the 
pipelines 
to
 and 
from
 Southern
 California’s
 51
 community 
colleges.

Vast Changes and an Uneasy Future: Racial and Regional Inequality in Southern California

International immigration, changes in birth rates and internal migration patterns interact in increasingly complex ways to create massive demographic transformation and deep divisions in the Lasanti Region.