On March 8, Los Angeles residents go to the polls for the first round of voting in their city's mayoral election. The incumbent, Democrat Jim Hahn, is dull, bland, a shameless servant of labor, and under investigation for widespread corruption at the highest levels of his administration. In short, he is a mediocrity, one who is closely linked with a period of nationwide urban political malaise that has come on the heels of a bold era of mid-to-late-1990s civic reform. And yet, despite his shortcomings, and despite the fact that in early polls he has garnered the support of barely one in five voters, Hahn still has a chance to win. He has the largest war chest among the candidates by about a million dollars; and if he can squeak through the first round as one of the top two candidates, he might, depending on who becomes his opponent in the May runoff, have a shot at another term. Whether he triumphs will tell us a lot about the direction Los Angeles is headed; it may also tell us whether the momentum of the '90s urban reform movements has really been lost forever.

The reformist regimes of the '90s--Ed Rendell in Philadelphia, Rudy Giuliani in New York, Bob Lanier in Houston, and Richard Riordan in Los Angeles--arose in response to disastrous downsizing of city economies, rising crime, and a pervasive sense of urban decline. In each city, voters sought to salvage their towns by challenging the long-standing domination of public employee unions, city contractors, and racial politics. And in many ways, it worked. New York, which had been sliding towards disaster, saw its economy revive, its neighborhoods resurge, its crime drop, and, for the first time in decades, its population rebound. Philadelphia, once perched on the brink of bankruptcy, restored life to its city center and at least slowed its demographic decline. Houston, under Lanier, rebounded from its oil-bust disaster and once again emerged as a fast-growth sunbelt paragon.

Today those reforming regimes are gone, having been replaced--except in Houston, where the newly elected Bill White shows promise as a reformer--by politicians far more willing to get along than fight. In New York, Michael Bloomberg has retreated from Giuliani's hard-driving style. The city debt is growing again, and the power of the public employees once more goes largely unchecked. Against all logic, the mayor seems determined to expend all his capital on a sports stadium the city neither needs nor wants. In Philadelphia, the moderately successful Rendell has been supplanted by the disastrous John Street, whose administration has been riddled with charges of corruption. "Philadelphia can't adjust to a high mobility world where people can simply go somewhere else," says Wharton Professor Joe Gyourko, who has studied the city's long-term historical decline. "To business and to the middle class, it seems very hard to reform. It's simply easier to exit." This reversal of fortune isn't limited to Philadelphia or New York. As urban historian Fred Siegel puts it: "The era of widespread urban reform has ended. Cities aren't back to what they were in the early 1990s, but many are stalled, many are backsliding, and some have gone into reverse."

Los Angeles is no exception to this trajectory. The city's renaissance took place under arguably even worse circumstances than New York's or Philadelphia's. After the 1992 riots, Peter Jennings compared the city to Bosnia and one European consultant ranked it 46th out of 50 American cities, behind the likes of Detroit. The Arizona Republic wrote a chilling epitaph for what it called "America's First Third World City." Yet under Riordan, the city literally rose from the ashes, and by the mid-'90s L.A. was experiencing a resurgence in business confidence and job creation. Meanwhile, a downtown residential surge (which continues today) began. Hahn, Riordan's successor, does not qualify as a total disaster. His appointment of Giuliani's old police commissioner, William Bratton, has been a resounding success in further lowering crime rates. But that's the extent of it. Hahn has failed to restart the city's economy; and the bad old municipal habits have come back. Even the normally lock-step liberal Los Angeles Times has expressed its disapproval.

The looming corruption scandals are obviously a stain on Hahn's record, but there are deeper problems with his administration. Even during the recession, Hahn allowed public employee salaries and pensions to balloon to among the highest in the country. L.A. city cops, meanwhile, enjoy three-day workweeks; and even the most incompetent city workers are basically assured of never losing their job. Civic improvements are hard to find. The city's coffers are $450 million higher than when Hahn took office, but little has gone to pay for more police, put streetlights in the back streets, or fill the multitudinous potholes. Instead roughly three-quarters of all new revenues have been squandered on pay raises for city workers. The city's multiple inefficiencies have accelerated the flight of jobs out of the region or to surrounding, more business-friendly, cities such as Burbank or Glendale. From an economic point of view, Los Angeles is an island of weakness surrounded by stronger communities to its east, north, and south.

Hahn's approach has been bad for the city's entrepreneurs and taxpayers, but it has also earned him the loyalty of organized labor. County Federation of Labor head Miguel Contreras is now the closest thing L.A. has to an East Coast-style political boss. He controls most members of the city council and the bulk of the state legislative delegation. Several in both city hall and the legislature, including Democratic Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez, hail directly from the ranks of Contreras's unions. Nothing important in the city of Los Angeles--whether a boondoggle for downtown developers or an expansion of the airport--gets passed without Contreras's blessing. If Hahn makes it to the next round, he will owe a lot to Contreras's support.

But do any of Hahn's opponents appear poised to pick up the mantle of urban reform? And which of them have a realistic chance of winning? Councilman Antonio Villaraigosa, a former Assembly Speaker and charismatic union organizer, is wildly popular with the labor rank and file. He is also beloved by the city's predominately left-wing media, including the influential LA Weekly, which sees him as ushering in a new "progressive" epoch based on the marriage of left-labor politics and advocacy for the city's Latino residents. Villaraigosa, however, appears to have lost some support with voters in his eastside district, in large part because he reneged on a pledge not to run citywide this time. If they face Villaraigosa (who currently leads in the polls) in the run-off, Hahn's savvy advisors can be expected to use his long-time associations with the ACLU, Latino nationalist groups, and the radical fringe of the Democratic Party to paint him as a devotee of the far left.

The mayor also faces a challenge from Councilmember Bernard Parks, the former police chief whom Hahn cashiered. In 2001 Hahn got into the primary largely due to the loyalty of African-American voters, who venerated his late father, County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. Parks, arguably the most conservative of the major candidates, plays on black resentment against his firing while managing also to appeal to some right-wingers disgusted with Hahn's coddling of labor. Parks has little chance of winning; his greatest impact will probably be to siphon black votes from Hahn.

Arguably the biggest threat to Hahn--and the best hope for urban reform--comes from former Assembly Speaker Robert Hertzberg. A former Sacramento roommate of Villaraigosa's, Hertzberg has tried to appeal to the center-right base that elected Richard Riordan in 1993 and 1997. Hertzberg is also a Jew married to a Latina, not a bad combination for a city where those two groups amount to almost half of voters. Riordan has already endorsed Hertzberg, as has Assemblyman Keith Richman, the most important elected Republican from Los Angeles in the state legislature. If Hertzberg wins the roughly 20 percent share represented by the Republican vote in the first round, he may have close to enough votes to get into the run-off. Hertzberg's big ace in the hole may be his home base, the San Fernando Valley, a middle-class suburban enclave that normally delivers more than two out of every five votes in the first round of voting. Hertzberg, who is running on a platform of government efficiency and breaking up the dysfunctional school district, appeals directly to these voters.

If Hahn loses because of San Fernando voters, it will be ironic for two reasons. First, when Valley residents tried to secede from L.A. in 2002, it was Hahn and his public sector allies who kept the area in the city by mounting a slick and expensive campaign--led by strategist Kam Kawata--that successfully overcame the sometime bumbling, chronically underfunded secessionists. Bitterness remains from that campaign; and former Valley secessionists are now arguably the strongest, most cohesive, anti-Hahn voting bloc. What's more, the orgy of fundraising used to defeat secession could ultimately prove Hahn's undoing. A pattern of alleged "pay to play" in the Hahn administration--basically, give us money to stop secession if you want to do business with the city--is being investigated at the city and county level. Perhaps as a result, only half of L.A. voters, according to a recent Times poll, now think Hahn is "honest" enough to be the city's mayor.

So it will be an uphill climb for Hahn, but he's not through yet, mainly because today in L.A., as in other big cities, apathy serves the status quo. Even business, which generally sees Hahn as ineffective and too beholden to public employee unions, seems largely unwilling to confront a sitting mayor who might want to get even later on. And so it remains possible that Hahn's managers, with their superior resources, could keep their man alive through March 8 and into the next round. If he faces Villaraigosa, he could win. But if Hertzberg makes it through against either Hahn or Villaraigosa, the Democrat from the Valley might well be the next mayor of Los Angeles. That would signal a second wind for '90s-style urban reform in the country's second-largest city. And maybe in the nation as a whole.