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FIGURE 6. Value of commodities imported into the United States, by country, 1996–2010. Author analysis of data from the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. International Trade Commission, tariff and trade data 1996–2010.

      China’s incredible rise as a center of production, when combined with U.S. consumption capacity, created new opportunities for Southern California’s ports to establish themselves as vital transpacific gateways. Private investors and regional boosters championed the idea that Chinese imports provided a solution to the region’s sagging job base, especially among blue-collar workers. A report commissioned by the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) argued that logistics was the “only route that the region has available to helping those workers achieve growing standards of living while simultaneously correcting the recent deep slide in Southern California’s relative prosperity vis-à-vis other major parts of the country.”³⁵ The SCAG economists and planners believed that the region’s declining manufacturing sector could be replaced by global logistics. Their rationale seemed to make sense. If regions in the United States were losing manufacturing jobs as a result of economic restructuring, some could gain them back on the other end of the commodity chain by building extensive distribution networks that connected imported products with the insatiable appetite of the American heartland.

      Of course capital did not completely abandon cities in the United States after the late 1970s. Cities like Los Angeles capitalized on macroeconomic shifts by transforming themselves into transpacific trade gateways. Such a transition was possible because although U.S. production of commodity goods declined after the 1980s, American consumption did not. On the contrary, U.S. consumer demand—combined with the shorter product cycles and readily available credit discussed above—drove imported commodity shipments to record heights at the same time that U.S. production declined. Values of imported commodities jumped from $790 billion in 1996 to $2.1 trillion in 2008.

      Los Angeles and Long Beach adopted the global logistics development strategy and pushed ahead of other ports by implementing regional policies that expanded their capacity to absorb a larger portion of Asian imports. Local policy makers, led by the port authorities of Long Beach and Los Angeles, leveraged tremendous amounts of public resources to invest in infrastructure that allowed them to expand their throughput capacity. Billions of dollars were spent on infrastructure to modernize the ports for the global distribution market.³⁶ For example, net investment in both ports topped $493,732,400 in 2006.³⁷ Port authorities budgeted more than $2.5 billion in capital investments for the 2010 fiscal year. This did not include private and public spending on rail and transportation infrastructure both near and away from the ports.

      Local officials had reason to be happy with the results. Global economic restructuring and local infrastructure spending enabled the region’s share of imported goods to reach record levels. Export and import container volume grew from 9.5 million twenty-foot equivalent units (TEUs) in 1999 to 13.1 million by 2004,³⁸ an increase of 38.2 percent.³⁹ Imported container volume reached its peak at 8.1 million TEUs in 2006 and 2007 (see figure 7). While many pointed to 2008 as a year of major port decline, container volume remained relatively high. Port activity grew at such record rates during the 2000s that even a decline of 9 percent between 2007 and 2008 did not wipe out historically high volumes. By 2010 imports were on their way back up and reached 7.1 million TEUs.