[Note: Since this article was published, Hertzberg has conceded, meaning that a Hahn-Villaraigosa runoff--which is described in the piece as "likely"--is now assured.]

Last night Assembly Speaker Antonio Villaraigosa finished in first place in the initial round of voting in the Los Angeles mayor's election. With some ballots still to be counted, incumbent James Hahn appears likely to finish second, meaning that Villaraigosa and Hahn will probably face each other in a May runoff. If these results hold, more revealing than who made it to the second round of balloting will be who didn't: former Assembly Speaker Bob Hertzberg. (Right now, Hertzberg trails Hahn by several thousand votes, with 99 percent of precincts reporting.) Hertzberg ran as the candidate of the city's middle class, tailoring his appeal largely to the San Fernando Valley, the city's most suburbanized area. He focused on issues like traffic, taxes, police protection, business growth, and dysfunctional schools--topics that are the chief concerns of middle-class homeowners. Yesterday Hertzberg won the bulk of these voters. The problem? Middle-class residents here may no longer have large enough ranks to elect one of their own to citywide office. This may have turned the famously energetic Hertzberg into the little engine that could not climb the demographic hill. Whatever the merits of the candidates in this particular election, one thing is clear: The underlying demographic factors that doomed Hertzberg's campaign spell bad news for Los Angeles, and for the American city in general.

Across the country, major cities are continuing to lose middle-class residents as they flock either to the surrounding suburbs or to less congested, more affordable, and more business-friendly smaller cities, particularly in places like Nevada, Arizona, Texas, and Florida. The group that is leaving--upwardly mobile people in their thirties and forties--represents a particularly important part of the urban mix. Historically, when this strata has abandoned cities, urban society has shifted toward a more bifurcated makeup: the wealthy few residing among a growing underclass. This occurred in late imperial Rome, in seventeenth-century Venice, in eighteenth-century Amsterdam--and has become a common prelude to urban disaster in American cities during the past half-century.

Several forces have driven this change recently: the shift of jobs overseas and to the periphery of cities; the collapse of almost all urban school districts; and, in the last few years, inflation in home values, particularly in crowded coastal cities. Like other urban regions, Los Angeles has experienced all three phenomena, later than some East Coast cities but at an accelerated rate. This became increasingly evident in the early 1990s, after the 1992 riots and the collapse of the local aerospace industry, which had long been a primary employer of middle-class workers. By the mid-'90s, a veritable flood of people were leaving the Los Angeles area annually--300,000 more left than came in 1995.

This out-migration slowed significantly by the end of the decade, as crime dropped and the economy improved markedly under the administration of Richard Riordan. But while Riordan had successes, he could not, in the end, "turn Los Angeles around" as he had promised to do. The demographic trends were already too firmly established, with continued out-migration of middle-class families to the suburbs and other states.

As Brookings Institution demographer Bill Frey has shown, while the Los Angeles area has tended to attract some younger, educated residents, it also tends to lose residents once they reach the child-bearing and property-buying years of their thirties. Frey has shown a similar pattern among New York's well-educated residents. Both cities are losing out to their suburbs and to less expensive, growing cities, mostly in the Sunbelt, a pattern that holds for both upwardly mobile whites and upwardly mobile minorities. To be sure, in Los Angeles and New York these losses have been somewhat offset by the continued immigration of newcomers, mostly from developing countries; in contrast, many other cities that had gained population in the '90s--Chicago, Minneapolis, Boston, San Francisco--have not attracted enough immigrants to temper the ongoing loss of their middle class.

The political ramifications of these changes could prove profound for the future of urban politics in America. If middle-class homeowners and families are fleeing the cities, who is left behind? In most places, it appears to be three main demographic groups: minorities, the young, and wealthy elites. Among the first group are a number of new immigrants who need city services such as public hospitals and transit lines and also require the intimacy of their language communities. The second group is most visible in places like San Francisco, Portland, Boston, Seattle, and, increasingly, Manhattan, where even in periods of weak economic growth, housing has become very expensive; yet because of their arts scenes and other cultural amenities, these cities remain attractive to young single people in their twenties. They also remain alluring to the third group who, by dint of wealth and privilege, can afford to live a middle-class lifestyle where the median housing price is well above $500,000. Not surprisingly the last two groups (the young and wealthy elites) have high percentages of households without children.

Why is this a troubling trend? Because cities that are stratified between the very wealthy and the very poor cannot fully exercise their role as centers of American economic, social, and cultural life. For one thing, such cities offer little room to the upstarts who historically reshape urban centers--a highly bifurcated city is less likely to produce great entrepreneurs or innovators. The wealthy generally bypass public institutions--parks, libraries, public schools--because they can create their own; those institutions, used only by the poor, inevitably deteriorate, and a vicious cycle is born. This is particularly important with regard to the public schools, which were once the primary means of social uplift in cities (and should, at least in theory, provide the glue that holds a city together across ethnic and economic lines). Think of New York in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly during the LaGuardia era and its aftermath: The city had a workable school system, safe parks, and excellent transit; generations born into the working class were able to lift themselves into the middle class and above. Today it is so much rarer for someone going to New York public schools or City College to benefit from the social mobility that produced the likes of Andy Grove, Henry Kissinger, or Colin Powell (all graduates of CCNY).

The declining demographic power of the urban middle class will make it increasingly difficult for reformers such as Hertzberg to win elections. An aroused middle class has generally been the primary force behind city reform movements--from the late nineteenth-century progressives to the clean-government activists that remained powerful through the 1950s. And it was predominantly middle class voters--notably white homeowners in places like Queens--who drove the demand for urban reform that brought Rudy Giuliani to office in 1993. Today, notes Fred Siegel, professor of urban history at Cooper Union and author of an upcoming biography of former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, the political base in the city has shifted further left as middle-class families have lost political power relative to minorities and the young. Add these groups to the other demographic that isn't leaving--white, affluent liberals--and Siegel argues it would be difficult for someone like Giuliani to be elected mayor of New York today; this may explain why his successor, Michael Bloomberg, faces a tough race for reelection, despite having displayed a more conciliatory style than Giuliani during his first term.

The same demographic realities may have done-in Hertzberg, who tried to resurrect the Los Angeles coalition of Republicans, moderate Democrats, and Valley homeowners that propelled Riordan into office back in 1993. The problem was, the electorate Hertzberg faced was not the same as the one Riordan faced when he first campaigned for office. (To be sure, Hertzberg was also hurt by apparent voter apathy in the Valley.) Whoever wins in May, these underlying demographics will remain the same--which means that the prospects for a renewal of reform here may slowly fade away. Villaraigosa would govern more firmly from the left than Hahn, but both will likely favor expensive downtown boondoggles, which will win support from the media, powerful developers, patrons like Eli Broad, and unions. The middle class, which rarely visits downtown and can't afford seats at the sparkling Disney Hall, won't get much out of the deal. Valley residents should expect City Hall's indifference to their issues to continue, despite the inevitable promises that will be made to them over the next few months by Hahn and Villaraigosa.

The middle class will continue to survive in Los Angeles, as it has in pockets in most major cities. Defeated on the political level, it will likely will turn inward, away from politics, and toward community, neighborhoods, family, and religious institutions. But the key institutions that hold an entire city together will continue to fray, as more and more middle-class residents scrape together the funds to send their children to religious or secular private schools. Their numbers may well shrink; and as Hertzberg's poor performance yesterday shows, the prospects for urban reform will shrink with them. Left behind will be stratified towns dominated by the very wealthy, the very poor, and public employees. If history is any guide, that's hardly the recipe for a renaissance.