San Vicente is, by any measure, one of Los Angeles’ great commercial streets and a hub of which any neighborhood would be proud. But attractiveness alone does not a complete community make.
In L.A., thirsting for a decent bar culture
The answer in Los Angeles is not fewer bars, but more of them; not tighter, costlier regulations, but looser ones; not suspicious neighbors, but friendlier ones.
Los Angeles’ Slow-Growthers Have Gotten What They Wanted
Los Angeles’ population is, after 100 or so years of development, just about equal with the city’s maximum allowable population.
Photos Signal Warning About a Future of Flooded Cities
“Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change,” a photo exhibition about sea-level rise and the fate of cities at the Annenberg Space for Photograph in Los Angeles, remind[s] us that the disaster has already arrived.
CEQA: The Cause of All Problems in California
Somehow, among all the laws, regulations, micro-, macro-, and global economic trends that impact on and emanate from our state, the overriding cause of California’s malaise is — wait for it — CEQA.
Sprawl Depends on More Than Just Density
Density in L.A. presents an opportunity, and a tremendous one at that. It’s an opportunity to take all the people, buildings, capital, and spirit that are crammed in here at 6,100 people to the square mile and figure out how to design our buildings, transportation network, public spaces, and civic life in a way that makes the most of what we have.
KVPR Interview: High Speed Rail: Comparing California’s Future Bullet Train To Taiwan’s
Interview with Joe Moore of KVPR’s “Valley Edition” on the future of high-speed rail in California.
Los Angeles’ Slow Burn
For some urbanists in Los Angeles’ smart growth crowd, the only thing better than the destruction of one faux-Italian megablock apartment complex would be the destruction of four faux-Italian megablock apartment complexes.
Not All NIMBYs Are Alike
The ethics of NIMBYism depend largely on the kind of environment that you’re trying to save.
Explaining the Country’s Worst Rental Market
Surely, homeowners are entitled to worry about traffic, sight lines, city services, and all the rest. What I suspect, though, is that many homeowners really want to do is what any rational, self-interested actor would want when he or show owns a valuable asset. They want to constrain supply.
Transit Branding’s Virtuous Cycle
If a beer company can fool the public into throwing away its money on the same old product, then aren’t transit agencies doing the very same thing when they promoting and rebrand themselves?
Beware the ‘Density Cult’
Joel Kotkin, Los Angeles-based urban theorist and persistent critic of downtown revitalization, would have you believe that advocates of smart growth. . . all want to turn their cities into putrid slums.
Hysteria Over California’s Decline Reaches New Heights
It’s true that liberals generally tend to oppose sprawl. But opposing sprawl doesn’t necessarily equate with constraining housing supply.
The Chemistry of Safer, Denser Cities
Reporter Kevin Drum recently revealed lead for what it was: one of the keys to the epidemic of American crime and violence that ruined our cities in the mid-20th century.
Shared Hardship and the Souls of Cities
No one moves to a place with a worst-case scenario in mind. But sometimes the worst-case scenarios are what define cities — and, paradoxically, perversely, sometimes for the better.
L.A. Tries Bringing Subway to Land of Maseratis
The city that inspired a million Tudor-style McMansions is blocking the transit authority’s plans with a demand that it reroute the subway extension to avoid running below the high school that inspired everyone’s favorite bit of 1990s high school television greatness.
Smart Growth Strategies Prompt Dumb Objections
For whatever reason, the Journal really has it cut out for California, because Kotkin’s piece—which isn’t actually an op-ed but rather a sycophantic quasi-interview by Allysia Finley—levies similar criticisms of California’s land use policies, but with some even more strained logic and offensive biases.
50 Years Later, Jacobs Still Leads a Sorority of Dissent
There must have been something in the water affecting women in the early 1960s, and it wasn’t just DDT.