“Mark it, Dude.”

The years 2025 to 2028 may prove to be the most consequential in recent California history, if not all of the state’s history. From budget crises to new taxes and fees on hard working residents to ongoing crises in quality of life, homelessness, crime, and the overall economy, Californians have not been this restive – and increasingly resentful – in decades. The state’s political class is starting to feel the heat, and it’s only April. Los Angeles is at the tip of this flaming spear.

As Los Angeles and San Francisco start the annual process of setting their municipal budgets, both cities face more than $1 billion in budgetary shortfalls. While L.A. Mayor Karen Bass and S.F. Mayor Daniel Lurie are in decidedly different places politically – Bass is fighting to regain her standing and credibility after a disastrous series of failures during the January firestorms, while Lurie is enjoying his early first term honeymoon – both will soon have to make decisions that will anger and perhaps alienate key constituencies. Lurie may find his honeymoon cut short, while Bass could emerge politically mortally wounded.

La La Land and Frisco aren’t alone. San Diego has a $250 million shortfall, Oakland’s deficit is $129 million, and Sacramento and San Jose are both $45 million in the red. While Governor Gavin Newsom’s proposed 2025-26 budget includes a $17 billion surplus, it also includes cuts to affordable housing programs and the Cal State University system to get there. Moreover, the state budget is heavily reliant on federal funds, which account for roughly a third of the total. Given President Donald Trump’s rather mercurial attitude toward the Golden State, those funds are by no means guaranteed.

These budgetary woes – which, it must be pointed out, are entirely self-inflicted – are just one area in which the state’s political class is hurtling toward a reckoning. I was in downtown L.A. last week to meet a friend for lunch*. I arrived early, and decided to take the opportunity to do a little urban exploring. I made it two blocks before I turned around and went back to my car to kill time by making some phone calls. 

The streets of downtown L.A., particularly below Los Angeles Street, are an absolute horror show. I passed inert bodies, tranced-out addicts, and individuals with whom I dared not make eye contact. I passed smears of excrement, and was hit by odors the likes of which I’ve only previously experienced in Third World slums. As if to emphasize the decline, a Metro bus pulled up to a stop and the driver opened the front door – revealing that he was seated behind a protective transparent barricade. Over the last few months the transit agency has spent millions not on increasing service or enhancing the transit experience, but on installing such barricades on all its buses. That’s how dangerous riding the bus in L.A. has become.

Forget homelessness – the degree of abject human suffering on display was beyond belief. I thought I was accustomed to the depths to which my city has sunk over the last decade. What I saw last week was next level.

I realized that it’s not just homelessness that will be on display when L.A. hosts the Super Bowl in 2026, the World Cup in 2027, and the Olympics in 2028. It will be urban decay at an almost unimaginable scale, in places amounting to complete societal collapse. There are no laws in Skid Row. There’s no social order. Tens and probably hundreds of thousands of human beings are living a survivalist existence, lives in which merely making it through the day and finding a few calories to put in their stomachs are almost overwhelming tasks. Forget employment, much less economic advancement.

There is no way the 88 cities that comprise Los Angeles County can possibly clean up or cover up mile after mile after mile after mile, much less bring a modicum of relief to the people living these nightmares every day, in time for those worldwide events. It is a physical impossibility, compounded by the city’s looming budget crisis and the incompetence and corruption that with depressingly few exceptions pervade our political class.

Make no mistake: Those three global events will augur their own reckonings for the Southland, and by extension California. The world will see what has become of us, and recoil in horror.

I confess: I hope the Olympics are a disaster of epic proportions. Not because I wish any ill on the athletes who will compete, people who in many cases have trained their entire lives for those few hours, minutes, or even seconds of transcendence. I hope the Games themselves are extraordinary, with records shattered, triumphs attained, and expectations exceeded.

That said, I hope everything surrounding the actual competition is nothing short of a s***show. I hope the traffic is horrendous, the mass transit disastrous, and the experience of the average attendee desultory. I wish for these things not because I harbor animosity for the millions of people who will visit L.A. in August of 2028, but because a complete calamity may be the last and only thing that can save the city I love with all my heart. I hope the L.A. Olympics are something of a California Chernobyl, the horrific event that exposed a broken system to the world once and for all and set the stage for its collapse and rebirth (granted, I hope post collapse L.A. takes a far different trajectory than post-USSR Russia, but I digress).

Because something, anything, finally, has to give. California cannot continue on its current path. There’s too much pain, too much human suffering, too much failure, too much everything. I am not alone in feeling these things, far from it. This morning, the UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs released their annual L.A. quality of life survey. The results equalled last year for the lowest in the survey’s history.

I want only the best for my beloved state and city. Alas, the last two decades have at this point made it painfully clear that things will have to get worse, maybe much worse, before they get better.

Bring on the reckoning.