CommentsDEEGAN ON LA-That Los Angeles is gradually turning away from the personally owned automobile as the primary means of transportation has become more than rhetoric:
it’s now visible on the streets as fact. Spend ten minutes on the corner of any major street and witness the parade before you: personal cars, ride-sharing cars, busses, bicycles, electric scooters on streets, and skateboards and people walking on sidewalks. Yet more evidence that our city is turning into an alternative mobility paradise, with choices to fit every lifestyle.
It's hard to imagine, and for some hard to accept, that in just a couple of generations we went from being a car-centric city to one that has replaced “suburbanite” with “urbanite” as the preferred lifestyle for more and more people who want to live higher up and closer to where they work, shop and play. The endless sprawl of tract housing may always remain in the central San Fernando Valley, and hillside dwelling will continue to be a special refuge, but the great basin on the south side of the Santa Monica Mountains separating the valley from the rest of LA is where development and future lifestyle preferences are defining the new Los Angeles.
Tracing the history of development and the automobile, the city grew “outward” toward the suburbs, not “upward” in the city core. That’s changing, something newcomers seem to expect, while longtime residents seem to reject -- setting up a generational divide. The slow war of attrition, which may take another decade, favors the newcomers. Visitors to the 2028 Olympics will see a different city than we have today.
Conceptually, increasing density is easier said than done, despite the skyscape of cranes across the city. In the war for the hearts and minds of some residents, the City has failed to make the case for why they are approving so much density. It seems more of a “build it and they will come” than addressing the real shortage of affordable housing, particularly in those places where rent-controlled housing is being taken out of inventory and being replaced with transit-adjacent “market rate” housing that may be unaffordable to displaced tenants. There is still lots of resistance to growth through density, no matter how compelling it looks on paper. Budging ensconced special interests away from their positions is tough.
Talk around the failed Measure S in the 2017 election posited that there is a “pay to play” culture at City Hall with developers lubricating electoral races for City Council, then currying votes of support for their projects as well as Mayoral approvals. A heavily financed and well-organized opposition killed the measure at the polls.
Even if it had passed and provided “a two-year moratorium on development projects seeking variances from some aspects of the city's zoning code,” it wouldn't have delayed the boom in young newcomers joining the land use and development conversation who are vocal about what they want. This has set up a generational shift causing slow erosion of the familiar, transitioning into their version of the city -- something tall and transit adjacent, instead of low slung and spread out. Gradually, the combination of youth and a density boom is eating away at familiar Los Angeles and creating a new iteration of what this great city may look like in the future.
Anchoring this growth with transportation is a very smart political justification for density. Missing from this, though, is taking into account the unfortunate infrastructure impacts that will be caused if not actively dealt with before the flashy new buildings arise.
Infrastructure is contained in what the city calls “community plans,” which is planning at the community level. LA’s old community plans were oriented around freeways. The new community plans, now under review, will be different, making a stronger connection to public transit, as explained by City Planning Director Vince Bertoni in a recent interview.
According to Bertoni, who compared past planning to now, “The general plan at that time (circa 1970) was called Concept Los Angeles and it looked at having Los Angeles become a place that focused growth in centers that were going to be connected by mass transit and a freeway system. Now that mass transit system never developed in the way it was laid out. And Concept LA was assuming a great expansion of the freeway system. Neither of those things really came about. We’re at a different place in how we get around the city and how we envision ourselves getting around the city in the future. So, these new plans are going to be focused in a way that acknowledges that change in the city and really looks forward into the future to see how that change is going to keep going into the future.”
A good test case of the Bertoni edict is the Purple Line Extension Neighborhood Transit Plan, in collaboration with LA Metro, that will “enhance the urban built environment, and focus new growth and housing in proximity of transit and along corridors while protecting the character of single-family neighborhoods.” It is being severely challenged by well-organized neighborhood groups, with one objection being the lack of attention to infrastructure.
Despite the debates over these issues, no matter what form of mobility you use, all this leads to the intractable concepts of density and new urbanism – a lifestyle in which you live, work, shop and play within a bubble that is easily traversed by foot, skateboard, electric scooter, or bicycle. Save your car (or use a ride sharing service) for the trips to the stores (although home delivery is accelerating rapidly) or those times when you want to get out of your bubble.
Los Angeles is slowly becoming a city of the future, for residents of the future, and the new urbanists may be the ones leading us to that destination.
(Tim Deegan is a civic activist whose DEEGAN ON LA weekly column about city planning, new urbanism, the environment, and the homeless appear in CityWatch. Tim can be reached at [email protected].) Edited for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
