“Lakewood is not really a suburb anymore, it’s a particular kind of urban place that looks suburban superficially but which is netted fully in an urban fabric,” says author D.J. Waldie who is most famous for writing Holy Land: A Suburban Memoir, set in 1950s Lakewood, California.

Waldie sat down with Reason Magazine Editor in Chief Matt Welch, who also grew up in Lakewood, to talk about city planning and the unique issues affecting suburbia in 2011. For 34 years, Waldie served as the Public Information Officer for the city of Lakewood and still lives in the house he grew up in.

The film rights to Holy Land were bought in late 2010 by actor James Franco for a possible movie.

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New York City mayor Mike Bloomberg, in a radio interview on Friday, warned that high unemployment could lead to widespread rioting. That’s right. He actually said that. At a time when European cities have suffered massively from hooliganism, and at a time when U.S. towns like Philadelphia and Kansas City have suffered huge human and commercial tolls from so-called flash riots.

For Bloomberg to come out with this statement is irresponsible and incendiary. But you know what? He’s got a personal agenda. This is a desperate talking point to sell Obama’s jobs plan, which Bloomberg favors as a solution to high unemployment and zero growth.

There’s a whole history here of liberals threatening riots if they don’t get their way. WABC radio host Mark Simone reminded me that back in 1994, Matilda Cuomo warned there would be race riots in New York if her husband Mario weren’t reelected governor in his race against George Pataki.

So now the liberal Mike Bloomberg is trying to go to bat for his pal Obama. And he’s doing so in a very clumsy and inappropriate way.

In fact, Bloomberg is pitching for the whole Obama jobs package — the $450 billion stimulus plan and the $470 billion tax hike. The package is totally unpopular. A recent Bloomberg poll (how ironic) showed that voters disapprove of more Obama stimulus by 51 to 40 percent, and that 56 percent of independents oppose it. Other polls show that more than 60 percent of Americans disapprove of Obama’s handling of the economy.

Memories are long. The $800 billion stimulus package nearly three years ago didn’t work. So why do it again?

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“They put incompetent adults ahead of children,” Richard Riordan says of teachers unions who stand in the way of school reform.

The former mayor of Los Angeles took office shortly after the 1992 riots and shortly before the massive 1994 Northridge earthquake. Today, notes Riordan, the City of Angels faces a slate of different crises, from failing public schools to a fiscal calamity that has put the city on the brink of bankruptcy.

In this wide-ranging extended version of an interview that aired in January (and was shot in December), Riordan sits down with Reason.tv’s Tim Cavanaugh to discuss public-sector unions, privatization, LA’s dysfunctional government, why businesses are leaving the city, and why Arnold Schwarzenegger won’t golf with him.

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