Mayor Eric Garcetti was in a philosophical mood at lunch Wednesday. He quoted the poet Robert Browning, who wrote “Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp, Or what's a heaven for?”

Looking sharp in a dark blue suit and white dress shirt, he combined introspection and political salesmanship when he spoke to a packed banquet room at political consultant Emma Schafer's Los Angeles Current Affairs Forum luncheon at the Palm downtown.

Garcetti offered the good news--the Olympics on their way, two National Football League teams (both to play in Inglewood), raising the minimum wage. He dived into the bad--homelessness, the price of housing, the worst traffic, and the worst air.

Then he talked about his staff, the team that has been absorbing much heat for the failures.

He warned them, and himself, not to be trapped into "imposter's syndrome," described in Psychology Today as a term "referring to a pattern of behavior where people doubt their accomplishments...and fear being exposed as a fraud."

"We push ourselves toward the darkness," he warned.

Rather, he said, look toward what Los Angeles will become and "here in Los Angeles we have to make sure your reach exceeds your grasp."

But the realities remain. I asked about homelessness, particularly Steve Lopez' column in the Los Angeles Times that morning in which he quoted Sarah Dusseault, chair of the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, as saying that much maligned organization should be given more power. The question prompted his longest answer, not surprising since homelessness is his greatest problem.

The authority, Garcetti said, "is very imperfect." But he was skeptical over Dusseault's suggestion that the authority, which now has little power, be given the wide-ranging authority of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, run by city and county elected officials who decide where the trains and buses go.

"Homelessness (involves) everything," Garcetti said. "Transportation is one thing." Still, he said, he believes homelessness can be eradicated.

That certainly is reaching toward the heavens.

When I came to Los Angeles in 1970, I couldn't figure it out. The city and its environs were exhaustingly big and complicated. Eventually, I saw it's just a place of distinctive neighborhoods. If I learned about L.A. neighborhood by neighborhood, I'd understand the city.

That experience came back to me recently when I visited Crosstown, a non-profit news organization run out of the USC Annenberg School of Journalism, in cooperation with the Integrated Media Systems Center at the university’s Viterbi School of Engineering and mappers from SC's Spatial Sciences Institute.

It is a fascinating effort to dig into L.A., neighborhood by neighborhood, with data, computer science, mapping and journalistic curiosity.

The Crosstown staff collects statistics from the many public agencies that comprise local government in the Los Angeles basin. The stats are scattered around the county, unavailable except for those who have the time and skill to root through them. Crosstown makes available in one spot the numbers on crime, traffic, air quality, schools, mass transit and other functions of local government.

"We want to be able to connect people to their neighborhood, we want to make them feel part of their neighborhood," USC journalism professor Gabriel Kahn, publisher and editor of Crosstown, told me. As Crosstown's website explained it, "We want you to use it to hold local government accountable and to help people make choices about where to live, work or send your kids to school." The website is xtown.la.

Crosstown uses intricate information-gathering methods. Traffic data comes from 14,000 sensors embedded in 5,400 miles of Los Angeles County freeways and roads. In addition, sensors in every bus and train report their locations every 30 seconds. USC Viterbi engineers built a system to process this trove of information.

Information such as this has permitted Crosstown to reveal facts about Los Angeles traffic that could influence policy. For example, it takes an hour to travel from Santa Clarita to downtown Los Angeles, compared to 46 minutes four years ago. This is the sort of data--compared to gossip and gut feelings--that should shape debate over more transit lines, freeway and street modification, limits on driving and eventual elimination of gas-fueled vehicles, all part of the fight against air pollution and the climate change it helps cause.

Debate over climate change could also be influenced by Crosstown's almost one-year-long, hour-by-hour study of pollution in 251 neighborhoods, cities and towns in Los Angeles County.

How will these neighborhood-by-neighborhood pollution studies influence public policy?
On the local level, they could show Angelenos exactly how lousy their air and traffic is. When they or their neighborhood groups complain to city hall or their neighborhood councils, they will be armed with enough information to demolish bureaucratic excuses and frighten their elected representatives into action. From this could come grassroots movements for the fight against climate change, locally and throughout the state.

I've seen this happen before, in the pre-computer days. Activists, gathering data from documents by hand, saw beyond their own neighborhoods and joined together in powerful movements. Their work saved the Santa Monica Mountains from further development and created the coastal commission. If the Crosstown community expands and more Angelenos participate, receiving and sharing data, they could comprise the latest chapter in the story of saving the Southland.