Hollywood Boulevard might be Los Angeles’ most famous street. The name conjures so many iconic images: stars on the Walk of Fame, celebrities on the red carpet at the Oscars, sidewalk handprints in front of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, and, if you’ve visited in the last two years, bollards and green paint in bike lanes.

In the summer of 2024, the city installed over two miles of protected bike lanes on the boulevard, starting just east of the Walk of Fame and stretching to Fountain Ave. The project was especially notable because it opened just a few months after voters passed Measure HLA, which directs the city to implement its long-neglected Mobility Plan. Adopted in 2015, the plan lays out a transformative, city-wide network of bike lanes, bus lanes, and other safety improvements. HLA says the city is legally obligated to install those improvements whenever it repaves a section of road in LA.

After a decade of no action, it seemed like Measure HLA had jump-started the city’s mobility makeover, starting with Hollywood. Fresh streets, bike and bus lanes – it was all finally happening.

This turned out to be wishful thinking. The city insisted the Hollywood bike lanes were not an HLA project, and they were not implementing the Mobility Plan. Fast forward 2½ years, and the picture has gotten even bleaker. The city has almost completely stopped repaving streets. HLA never gets triggered. The pace of bike lane installation has plummeted. The city is still occasionally installing bike and bus lanes, but almost every time they do, they strenuously claim the work is not an HLA project, just like Hollywood Blvd. Exactly one HLA-compliant project has been installed in 2½ years - 350 feet of unprotected bike lanes on Reseda Blvd. in suburban Tarzana.

Repaving is stalled. Bike lanes are stalled. Mobility projects avoid HLA. It’s a stalemate.

How do we start repaving again? How do we get the Mobility Plan implemented? I asked multiple people involved, on both the city and advocacy sides. But before I tell you what they said, I need to tell you why we can’t do one thing without doing a bunch of other things, all of which cost a lot of money.

How to make everything expensive

Bike lanes generally require repaving: In the 2010s, bike lanes were so politically toxic in LA that city councilmembers routinely vetoed them for wins in their districts. Gil Cedillo killed bike lanes on Figueroa. David Ryu killed them on 6th St. Paul Krekorian killed them on Lankershim. The ultimate insult: in 2018,1 anti-bike councilmembers passed a rule making it a lot more expensive to install bike lanes. Ostensibly to head off lawsuits, City Council required bike lanes to only be installed on fresh pavement. Bike lanes cost $250,000/mile. Repaving adds another $1 million/mile.

Repaving generally requires new curb ramps: According to the federal government, when a street is repaved, any aging adjacent curb ramps have to be rebuilt to current ADA standards.2 LA ignored this rule for decades until last year, when the feds adopted new Public Right of Way Accessibility Guidelines, or PROWAG. When the city finally admitted it had to follow the law, it also realized it couldn’t afford to. The average LA street has 14 out-of-date curb ramps per mile. That makes repaving much more expensive - a single curb ramp averages $45,000, so fixing all 14 increases the cost by over $600,000/mile.

The result of all these added costs? Last summer, the city threw up its hands and stopped repaving. That’s bad news for everybody who drives, bikes, rides the bus, or crosses the street. And it’s worse news for the Mobility Plan, since HLA is only triggered when repaving.

But the city figured out a workaround. It looks like this:

This is the now-infamous “large asphalt repair,” or LAR. It’s a long patch, usually around a block long and one or two lanes wide. The city landed on this kludge because they can claim LAR is maintenance and not resurfacing. By pretending it’s just a patch, they don’t have to update the curb ramps.

When I first wrote about LAR last December, I was outraged. But I’ve come to realize that it’s an important tool. Take the Hollywood Blvd. bike lanes. The city was required to install them on fresh asphalt. But instead of repaving the entire street, they laid down long LARs that covered the bike lanes - the darker bands along the edges of the street below.

The reason the city used large asphalt repairs to install bike lanes on Hollywood is circled at the right edge of the photo above. That curb ramp is out of date - it doesn’t have a yellow bumpy rectangle. If the street was fully repaved, the ADA would have been triggered, and the city would be on the hook for rebuilding that curb ramp and dozens more like it. That would have busted the project’s budget. Without LAR, bike lanes on Hollywood Blvd. wouldn’t have happened.3

The city needs to figure out how to restart full repaving. It’s scandalous that they’re failing to maintain our basic infrastructure. But they also deserve praise for figuring out how to install bike lanes in the meantime. Unfortunately, HLA says: not so fast.

How to make everything expensive - HLA edition

The Mobility Plan consists of several networks - bike lanes, bus lanes, goods movement routes, etc. - and streets are often part of more than one. Hollywood Blvd. is on three maps: the Bicycle Enhanced Network, the Transit Enhanced Network, and a Pedestrian Enhanced District. That’s great - the plan envisions Hollywood as a truly complete street that supports all the people who use it.

Measure HLA says that when a street is repaved, all the street’s required elements from all Mobility Plan maps must be installed. The complete street and sidewalk, all at once. And the most expensive map by far is the Pedestrian Enhanced Districts, because they require updated curb ramps. Just like the ADA.

For Hollywood Blvd., complying with HLA would mean fixing all the curb ramps when installing the bike lanes.4 But wait, didn’t the city avoid HLA by avoiding full repaving?

This is what surprised me. It turns out that HLA isn’t only tied to repaving. The text of the measure says it’s triggered by “any paving project or other modification” ⅛ mile long. A bike lane sure seems like a modification. Installing the bike lanes themselves probably should have triggered HLA on Hollywood - all of it, including the curb ramps.

To state this plainly: If the city installs bike lanes on a street in a pedestrian district, HLA says it also has to fix the curb ramps even if the street isn’t repaved.

If you’re wondering, the Mobility Plan has a ton of overlap between planned bike lanes and pedestrian districts. In Central LA, the part of the city with the highest amount of cycling, two-thirds of main streets tapped for bike lanes are also in a pedestrian district.5 Installing a bike lane there means fixing curb ramps. Here are all the bike lanes proposed by Mobility Plan in Central LA. Orange lines are also in a pedestrian district. Blue ones are not.

LA has essentially lost the ability to install bike lanes inexpensively on streets in Pedestrian Enhanced Districts. Not surprisingly, the city is trying to wiggle out of the broad interpretation of “modification.” City Council passed HLA implementation procedures stating that just installing a bike or bus lane is not a modification. But that seems to contradict the text of the ballot measure that voters approved. This question is being litigated right now, and if the court rules against the city, LA will lose even more flexibility in how it installs bike lanes.

It’s tempting to say bike lanes have become the everything bagel of LA infrastructure. Install one, and you have to install fresh asphalt thanks to the 2018 City Council, plus the complete street and sidewalk thanks to the 2024 HLA.

But a more apt metaphor for HLA is a restaurant set menu. It’s nice for a special occasion. But if every time I took my family to Olive Garden, I was forced to order an appetizer and dessert along with my entree, we’d go to Olive Garden a lot less often.

What now?

LA’s decades-long neglect of its pedestrian infrastructure has come home to roost. The story went that nobody walks in LA, so we didn’t bother to make our sidewalks accessible. What we didn’t realize is that neglect made our entire street network vulnerable to regulatory change. A couple of well-intentioned policy changes rendered the city unable to repave streets or implement the Mobility Plan.

The ADA and HLA are here to stay. One is federal law, and the other is a voter-passed initiative. We have to adapt to this new reality.

Here is what the people I talked to said we can do to get both repaving and HLA moving again.

First: We need to think much more strategically about curb ramps. They are the key that unlocks everything else. They are the biggest cost and time driver for street projects and the biggest obstacle to getting them done. The city has started budgeting for more curb ramps, yet it doesn't have the tools it needs to plan them properly. What we need:

• A complete inventory of curb ramps and their condition (we don’t even have this!)

• A long-term, public list prioritizing which curb ramps will be built next

• A strategy for planning curb ramps that considers which projects will need them

• Better coordination between the department that builds the curb ramps (StreetsLA) and the one that needs updated curb ramps to implement HLA (LADOT)

We also need to think about how to drive down curb ramp costs. Other cities do them more cheaply. Caltrans does them more cheaply. Our ramps are often over-engineered. Given how reliant we are on curb ramps to get everything else on our streets fixed, building them for less would provide a big return on investment.

Second: In November, voters have to pass the city charter reforms on the ballot. These include two transformative infrastructure-related items: creating a Capital Infrastructure Program (CIP) and establishing a new Director of Public Works. LA is just about the last American city that doesn’t have a CIP. It would serve as the master planning document for all infrastructure projects in the next five years, including mobility projects such as bike and bus lanes.

A five-year roadmap for mobility projects would help departments decide where to prioritize repaving streets and rebuilding curb ramps. The Director of Public Works would manage the CIP and have the power to direct city departments to coordinate implementation.

Third: City Council should repeal the 2018 requirement to only install bike lanes on good pavement. The requirement was passed in response to a series of lawsuits by cyclists who hit potholes. But it has also slowed down bike lane installation, so it’s hard to argue that on the whole it has made cycling safer here.

Repealing the repaving requirement would reintroduce some flexibility into the system. For example, LADOT could install smaller, gap closure-type projects quickly, without having to coordinate with StreetsLA for resurfacing or large asphalt repair. If you’re worried about the city abusing this idea to install big bike lane projects on perilously potholed streets, remember the city operates with a deep-seated fear of liability, which City Council can’t repeal. The city could reassure cyclists by prioritizing repairs of potholes reported in bike lanes. Put an “In bike lane” checkbox on the My311LA app’s pothole page.

Fourth: We sure could use more funding. The ADA and HLA have made mobility projects in the city more expensive. Streets For All tried and failed to get a dedicated funding stream for mobility written into the charter reforms. Funding is the thorniest question, and it has bedeviled every effort to improve the city since Proposition 13 was passed almost 50 years ago. But there are options, including perhaps a new ballot measure. LA voters have passed seven bond measures in the last 30 years to build and renovate LAUSD schools. Perhaps they would have the stomach for a similar measure for infrastructure in 2028.

HLA is a great idea for a well-funded city. Well-funded cities pull off complete streets projects all the time. But LA hasn’t been well-funded for decades. A broke city is constantly negotiating tradeoffs, and HLA doesn’t allow tradeoffs. But it’s here to stay, and the only way forward is to adapt to it.

I never thought I’d become an expert on Los Angeles playgrounds. But a few years ago, with two fidgety little kids, I became a walking playground Tripadvisor. Name a brunch restaurant, and I could tell you the closest park to take the kids to play after we ate. Name a playground, and I could tell you whether its floor was sand (wear sandals) or rubber (wear whatever).

I learned so much about playgrounds in other neighborhoods because mine has none. Zero public parks or playgrounds within a mile. Every time my kids wanted to play outside, we had to pile into the car and drive to a park in a different area.

A community group I’m involved with decided to try to do something about the lack of public space here. The only available land was a 25-foot-wide strip of sidewalk at the busy intersection of Pico and Hauser. We painted the outlines of flowers on the sidewalk as an invitation for kids to color with chalk. Voila, the Coloring Book:

The Coloring Book is pretty, but nobody ever uses it. It just sits there, beckoning and empty. We tried our best, but I can’t say we succeeded in bringing good public space to our neighborhood. Our family still gets in the car when the kids ask to go to a park.

So I took it a little personally when Los Angeles fell to 93rd place in the Trust for Public Land’s annual ParkScore Rankings of the 100 biggest American cities. Only 62% of Angelenos live within walking distance of a park, compared to 99% of New Yorkers and 100% of San Franciscans. LA was ranked 55th out of 100 just seven years ago, but we’ve been lapped by other cities that have been adding more parks, while LA has essentially stopped. The Coloring Book notwithstanding.

Our dismal park ranking has been on my mind this summer as SB 79 took effect, allowing apartments to be built within a half-mile radius around transit stations. LA has 145 qualifying stations, each of which could eventually welcome tens of thousands of new people to the area around it - people who will need amenities like parks.

It’s wonderful that SB 79 allows apartment buildings around our best transit. But people don’t just live in buildings. They live in neighborhoods. How can the city plan 145 neighborhoods that help their residents thrive? For parks, the path forward is revealed by SB 79 itself.

How to buy the land for parks

The biggest hurdle to creating new parks in LA is getting the land. Land is expensive here and rarely vacant. But SB 79 provides two opportunities that could make that process easier - one geographical, and one financial.

Last year, the city produced an amazing park needs assessment that prioritizes which areas should get new park space first. Almost all are in low-income neighborhoods. And remarkably, almost all have good transit and were upzoned this year by SB 79. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised that in LA, poor people get transit, and rich people get parks.

Of the 36 blue and magenta park-poor squares on the map, 30 of them overlap with yellow SB 79 station areas. That overlap creates an opportunity. The city can leverage a quirk in SB 79 to buy land for parks in those places.

The quirk: LA was able to delay SB 79 from taking effect in almost all the park-poor squares because they are also primarily low-income. Nothing has been upzoned in those neighborhoods yet. The city has until 2031 to finalize the area's zoning, and it has some flexibility in deciding how much density goes where. That means for now, landowners don’t know how much their property will be upzoned, so the value of their land hasn’t gone up as much as it will in a few years.

That creates some urgency. It would behoove the city to buy the land for parks in those yellow SB 79 areas before 2031, when prices will likely go up.

Here’s where LA could get creative. The flexibility in the final SB 79 zoning gives the city a tool to make buying the land even cheaper. If an owner agrees to sell their land for a park, the city could partially fund the purchase by letting them sell their final SB 79 zoning to another landowner in the area. If the final plan allowed six-story buildings on their property, the owner could sell three stories of zoning to another property owner, who would then have the right to build three stories taller on their land. This is known as “transfer of development rights (TDR),” and it’s already legal in downtown LA. The city would only be on the hook for the remainder of the sale price.

To supercharge TDR in the lower-income areas that need parks, the city could allow property owners to sell their development rights to an owner in a more affluent part of town, like the Westside. The rights are more valuable in places where rents are higher and developers can make a bigger profit. SB 79 allows density to be moved around somewhat between station areas in the final plan, as long as the net gain remains the same. More housing should be built in our wealthy neighborhoods anyway - to get a park in South LA, sell development rights to Cheviot Hills!

TDR probably wouldn’t generate enough money to fully fund all pre-2031 land purchases. The city would have to cobble the rest together with the scant funds it already has. LA does collect about $50 million annually in park fees on new development, but currently all of it goes toward refurbishing existing park facilities. If we redirected half of that toward buying land for new parks for the next few years, we could make a huge down payment on greening our most park-poor neighborhoods.

How to build the parks

So far, we’ve just covered a possible scenario for getting the land for parks. But building parks requires a whole lot of funding too, and we can’t keep dipping into park fees, especially with a $2.7 billion maintenance backlog for our existing parks. We need a different funding source.

The state recently created a tool that could unlock a decades-long funding stream for neighborhood upgrades like parks. When a neighborhood gets upzoned, the city knows it will collect more property taxes there: first, the upzoning will make everybody’s land worth more, and second, new buildings will be built that raise their property’s value even more. The tool allows the city to set aside the future tax revenue to build infrastructure in the area.

This tool is known as an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District (EIFD), and it’s been used most successfully in West Sacramento, a small city across the river from our state capital. West Sacramento is using an EIFD to transform its formerly industrial waterfront into a bustling mixed-use neighborhood.

EIFDs take several years to set up, and even once they are up and running, they don’t generate much revenue for the first few years. That’s why we need to use park fees or some other funding source to start buying land for the parks before 2031, when the land costs less. But once the EIFD gets going, it can provide a tremendous amount of revenue to fund the investments the city should be making in its historically neglected neighborhoods.

My vote for an EIFD: four South LA stops on the planned Vermont Bus Rapid Transit line, from Vernon to Manchester. The area is one of the most park-poor in the entire city, and there are tons of single-family homes in the area that could be demolished without displacing tenants.

You might be thinking, this is all pretty convoluted. Why not just require developers to set aside some of their land for open space? In fact, we do! The city calls them “privately owned public spaces,” and they are a poor substitute for actual public parks. The closest playground to my house is one of those spaces, a tiny, gated spot behind the Wilshire Courtyard office complex. The security guard with the key sits behind the reception desk in one of the big office buildings. Good luck getting him to walk over and unlock the playground gate on a rainy day.

The big picture

Beyond parks, EIFDs can be used to fund all kinds of upgrades to a neighborhood, such as:

• Infrastructure like water, sewage, and power

• Bus and bike lanes

• Libraries

• Childcare centers

• Mixed-use developments to bring anchor retail like grocery stores

That makes an EIFD the perfect vehicle for more holistically planning our new SB 79 neighborhoods. But not all 145. If an EIFD takes up too much of a city’s land, it risks cannibalizing the overall property tax revenues the city depends on for its budget.

So how do we actually build 145 new parks in LA? I don’t know. The more important issue is: are we even asking the question? Is the city thinking about how to holistically plan the 145 SB 79 neighborhoods?

LA has already changed some zoning in response to SB 79, creating a program called Low Rise that slightly upzones residential streets around transit stations in wealthier neighborhoods. Low Rise is overly controlling and cautious, allowing only 3-4 story buildings with all kinds of restrictions. The theory is that incremental development is less likely to lead to a backlash from neighbors. But we can’t do both incremental and holistic - they are enemies. When we prioritize appeasing neighbors’ anxiety about change, we think of change in terms of how little damage it can cause. When we prioritize holistic planning, we think of change in terms of how much good it can create.

What if instead of planning for the least harmful incremental change, we envisioned the best final product? Vibrant neighborhoods with parks, infrastructure, and amenities that make them great places to live.

The city has all kinds of plans that guide long-term planning, like the Mobility Plan and the new Capital Improvement Plan. We can start envisioning great SB 79 neighborhoods by updating our existing citywide plans to account for future growth there. It shouldn’t have been a coincidence that the park needs assessment identified SB 79 station areas as the highest need - the assessment should have been driven in part by the growth SB 79 will create.

I don’t know how to plan 145 new parks in SB 79 areas. But the city owes it to us to figure it out.

It’s a shift in mentality, from planning cautiously to envisioning holistically. From short-term thinking to generational thinking. From placating current residents to nurturing future ones. Either way, a generation from now, hundreds of thousands of new families are going to be raising their kids in SB 79 neighborhoods. Nobody will remember the old complaints from neighbors. But everybody will benefit from the investments the city boldly decided to make.

I cut my urbanist teeth 10 years ago on a project in my community called Destination: Pico, which grew out of Mayor Garcetti’s Great Streets program. In 2016, we won a grant from the Mayor’s office that promised $500,000 in city investments on Pico Blvd. in our Mid-City neighborhood. But first we had to do six months of community outreach to figure out what people wanted.

We led eight interactive neighborhood workshops, met twice with every business owner along a seven-block stretch of Pico, tabled at local events, put a survey in every customer’s check at four restaurants on the Boulevard, and sent a survey home in the backpack of every student at the two local elementary schools. All in all, we had over 1,500 points of contact with community members.

The absolute, number-one, consensus ask was a signalized crosswalk at Pico and Masselin Ave.

We delivered the final report on our outreach to the Mayor’s Office in the fall of 2017, and three years later, while we all hunkered down during the pandemic, this was installed:1

The new crosswalk had a kind of signal that was relatively new to the city in 2020 - a pedestrian hybrid beacon, also called a HAWK signal, which stands for High-intensity Activated crossWalK. (Who let the traffic engineer name this?) The signal worked beautifully. Most of the time it was idle. If you wanted to cross, you pressed the button, and the signal immediately flashed yellow, then turned red. If cars were approaching, loops embedded in the street detected them, and the signal graciously allowed them to pass before lighting up.

We were delighted. The community was delighted. Then came the end of the COVID lockdown.

LADOT “breaks” the signal

In the early days of the pandemic, when the city’s normally jammed streets were eerily deserted, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) reported that the drivers who did venture out were speeding an average of 30% faster on some streets. The California Highway Patrol reported an 87% statewide increase in tickets issued to drivers speeding over 100 mph.

In response to all the speeding, LADOT switched the city’s signals to nighttime mode, uncoordinated with the other signals down the street, so that drivers wouldn’t get a green wave of lights on main streets that allowed them to pick up too much speed.

When the Masselin crosswalk was installed later that summer, LA’s signals were still on nighttime mode, and the HAWK signal was allowed to “run free,” responding only to the pedestrians and drivers right at the intersection. Hence, the usually instant response when the button was pressed. But in the summer of 2021, as people were getting vaccinated and driving more, signal coordination was turned back on across the city, and the Masselin HAWK signal was integrated into the larger system. Instead of responding instantly to pedestrians, the signal made them wait up to 120 seconds before granting the walk signal, ensuring the HAWK was coordinated with the other signals on Pico and didn’t disrupt the free flow of car traffic.

To give you a sense of what that change felt like for pedestrians, here’s a snippet from a video I made soon after the signal timing was changed. No cars in sight, but the signal still told me to wait. (Click here for the longer and excruciatingly slower video.)

Notice a few things going on in the full video:

• I had to wait about 75 seconds to get the walk sign, even though there were long gaps with no cars coming at all.

• There’s no shade. It’s tough to wait a long time in the August sun!

• The signal is supposedly coordinated with the other lights on Pico to let car traffic flow, yet when it turned red, both lights in either direction were green, and large numbers of cars in both directions had to stop. The signal turned red literally at the moment of maximum driver annoyance.

The community was upset about the change. The most common complaints were that the signal was “broken” or had “stopped working.” Here’s a more thoughtful email, this one from one of my favorite neighbors, an elderly woman who takes long walks every day and knows everyone in the neighborhood by name:

Marilyn makes a couple of great points. Making pedestrians wait often leads them to do something less safe - cross before the light turns red. What’s the point of installing a signal if people ignore it? And when pedestrians cross before the light turns red, drivers arrive at a red light with no pedestrians in sight. Everybody, on foot and behind the wheel, thinks the signal is broken!

We did our best to convince LADOT to change the signal back to running free. We got the Mayor’s Office involved. In the end, they shortened the cycle from 120 to 60 seconds, but that’s it.

Now you may be thinking, “They cut the time in half - that’s great!” But consider this: In 60 seconds, a driver on Pico going the 35 MPH speed limit covers 3,080 feet - over half a mile. That means at the moment a pedestrian presses the button at Masselin, cars more than nine blocks away on Pico will get to cross the crosswalk before the pedestrian waiting in the blazing sun gets to walk 70 feet.2

Guide for traffic engineers

Why does a pedestrian signal have to be coordinated with the other signals down the street? For starters, the traffic engineers’ bible, the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices (MUTCD), says HAWK signals “should be coordinated” with other signals. But “should” isn’t “shall” - it’s just a recommendation. And separately, the Federal Highway Administration, which publishes the MUTCD, says:

Pedestrians’ impatience with long waits is well-documented. In one experiment, researchers varied the timing of a mid-block crosswalk on a major street in Miami Beach. They found that with a wait time of 30 seconds, only 2% of pedestrians started crossing before the walk signal. But when the wait time was increased to 60 seconds, 15% of pedestrians left early (Table 4.2) - nearly one in six.

Not surprisingly, that pattern holds for HAWKs that make pedestrians wait vs. those that don’t. In 2016, the FHWA published a study of HAWKs in Tucson and Austin. Among many other things, they looked at when pedestrians crossed after they pushed the button. Of the 20 signals they studied, only two were coordinated with the signals around them - the rest ran free. At the 18 signals that ran free (like the pandemic-era Masselin HAWK), only 0.43% of pedestrians couldn’t wait the couple seconds before the light turned red - they started crossing before they got the walk signal. At the two signals timed with other signals (post-pandemic Masselin HAWK), 4.8% crossed before they got the walk signal. In other words, pedestrians lost patience with the crosswalk signal 11 times as often when it was coordinated with other signals.

Our codependent relationship

Why is it so important to design a signal that pedestrians obey? Because human bodies have a terrible time in the fleeting moments when they share space with cars in Los Angeles. More people die in traffic collisions than are murdered in LA. Crashes are the number one killer of children here. Traffic deaths have become a matter of public health.

Yet Vision Zero, launched in 2015 to reduce traffic deaths to zero in 10 years, has been a complete failure. Instead of falling to zero, pedestrian deaths have doubled.3

Vision Zero is a failure not because we don’t have the tools to solve the problem, but because our leaders are unwilling to use them. For decades, driver convenience has dominated everything in this town, from erasing our neighborhoods to hobbling our trains. And it’s not just drivers’ convenience that we privilege - it’s their feelings. Here’s an email from an LADOT engineer defending the timing of the Masselin HAWK:

Translation: drivers will get so mad if they have to stop that they’ll run red lights and hit pedestrians. We have to design our crosswalk to avoid causing road rage.

The rage-inducing amount of time drivers have to wait when the Masselin HAWK turns red? 27 seconds.

There’s a term for neglecting your needs in order to manage someone else’s bad behavior: codependency. Like a person who keeps lending money to their deadbeat lover, the city is sacrificing its own needs (reducing traffic deaths) because it thinks the other party (drivers) can’t handle meeting those needs. The result is dysfunction - pedestrians keep getting killed, and drivers keep expecting to get from point A to point B with as little friction as possible, damn the consequences.

Codependency also has an element of magical thinking. If I lend him another $500, he’ll get his act together. If we give drivers a frictionless experience, they will drive more safely. But we’ve been trying to achieve that for decades, and look where it’s gotten us.

The only way to fix a codependent relationship is to set boundaries and start getting the other party to accept responsibility. In the city’s relationship with drivers, the boundary is “people outside of a car always come first.” Consistently send drivers that message, consistently design streets to privilege the most vulnerable people who use them, and drivers will have no choice but to change their behavior. Then we can start making some headway on Vision Zero and save some lives.

For my neighborhood’s humble crosswalk, setting that boundary means letting the signal run free.4 Giving pedestrians the walk signal immediately is the best way to protect them - they won’t cross when it’s not safe. You may notice I am concerned about taking care of pedestrians’ feelings and managing their bad behavior. That’s because they are the ones who truly have a need - to not have to play Frogger just to stay alive when crossing the street. When someone you care about has a need, meeting it is the mark of a healthy relationship. The kind of caring relationship the city should be fostering with all of us.

Until they start doing that, we will have to wait up to 60 seconds to cross Pico at Masselin. But the HAWK has always had a secret - it runs free after 7 pm. One evening this summer, my 7-year-old daughter and I walked across Pico to get pizza. She pressed the crosswalk button, and when the signal turned red immediately, her eyes widened like she had just accidentally conjured the crosswalk god. The crosswalk’s dysfunction is so etched into my kid’s brain - she’s never known it any other way - that seeing it work the way most people think it should looks to her like a magic trick.

Progress often doesn’t happen until a bunch of people decide to really care about making it happen. Recently I was lucky to join a group of committed volunteers who did just that.

The E Line is one of the most useful and popular transit lines in the city, connecting downtown to the beach and East LA. But it’s slow. Even before it opened, the LA Times’ Kerry Cavanaugh wondered if the train was “doomed to slow, mediocre service.” She noted that trains close to downtown were often forced to stop at traffic lights, which made the 15-mile ride from DTLA to Santa Monica take 46 minutes.

LADOT knew traffic lights were problematic from the start. Shortly after the line opened, an LADOT engineer admitted that “there are times when the train has to stop briefly, or not so briefly”. If you’re not an E Line rider, you can experience some of the not so briefly in this amazing Youtube video where an anonymous cyclist rides down Exposition Blvd., obeys all traffic laws, and has no trouble keeping up with a train.

Why is the E Line so slow? The main reason is that first phase of the line, between downtown and Culver City, was built on the cheap. This was before voters gave Metro billions of additional sales tax dollars through Measure R (in 2008) and Measure M (in 2016). On a tight budget, Metro built the tracks and most stations “at grade”, not elevated or underground, especially east of Western Ave. Trains have to cross intersections like all other traffic. The second phase of the line to the beach was built with Measure R funds and is almost completely grade-separated, with elevated stations. This map of Metro light rail crossings shows the stark difference east and west of Western - blue means grade separated or gated, and orange means at grade and not gated.

The slowness of the train creates tough decisions for riders. Imagine you need to get from DTLA to Exposition and Western on a weekday morning. Google Maps says driving is faster than the taking the E Line (first image). But starting from Expo/Western and going farther west to Culver City, Google Maps says the train beats driving (second image).

You’d think the stark difference east and west of Western, plus ten years of rider complaints, would have spurred some action by LADOT, which owns the signals, or Metro, which owns the tracks. In fact, transit is slow just about everywhere it has to deal with LADOT’s signals, including the A Line on Washington and the K Line through Hyde Park. Solving this problem would have broad benefits.

Even elected officials have made occasional gestures toward speeding things up over the years. In 2019, City Council passed a motion by Mike Bonin leading to signal timing tweaks that cut E Line travel times by 1-2 minutes. In 2023, Mayor Bass rode the E Line when the 10 Freeway downtown closed due to a fire and asked Metro to work with LADOT to speed it up, with no results. In April 2025, Council passed a broader motion by Nithya Raman asking LADOT for a report on options for prioritizing light rail and buses across the city that led to nothing by the beginning of 2026.

In the end, very little has changed in ten years. Remember Kerry Cavanaugh fretting that E Line from downtown to the beach would take 46 minutes? According to Metro’s schedule, ten years later it’s 47 minutes. Ten years of a stubborn status quo, immune even to interventions from LA’s highest elected officials.

That’s where our story really begins.

#proj-signal-preemption

In January, volunteer Bobby Garrity posted a question on the Streets For All Slack (which I participate in). Garrity lives downtown and works in Santa Monica, and as a daily E Line rider he was fed up with the slow train and looking to do something about it. He asked if other volunteers were interested in forming a group to push for change. After getting an enthusiastic response from people frustrated with the city’s lack of action, Garrity formed a working group, and we organized ourselves into three teams - Technical, Content and Outreach, and Political.

The group’s efforts got a shot in the arm in February when LADOT finally submitted the report requested by Nithya Raman’s 2025 motion. Disappointingly but not surprisingly, the report mostly just described the current slow state of affairs for prioritizing transit in LA. Signals can shorten a red light or lengthen a green a bit to give a train or bus priority. For light rail, signals are also automatically kept green in the train’s direction as long as no cars show up on the cross street, which helps a bit for minor intersections. At the end of the report, LADOT threw in a few vague paragraphs about exploring stronger options without committing to anything. They recommended that Council “note and file” the report, which is city-speak for “do nothing”. More stubborn status quo.

By this time, our Technical team already knew what the stronger options were, plus what software or hardware changes would be needed to implement them. They had spoken with engineers at LADOT, Metro, and private transportation engineering companies. They had submitted public records requests for Metro data on light rail speeds. Connor Webb had even written a glossary of the confusing jargon around transit signal prioritization so the rest of us volunteers understood what the heck they were talking about.

Once the LADOT report came out, the other two teams got going. For Content and Outreach, Jonny Hale made a viral Instagram video about trains stuck at red lights.

Over on Reddit, Colin Warn (aka u/DJVeaux of “Ride the D” t-shirt fame) posted a call to action called “If You’re Tired Of Your Train Stopping At Intersections, An Opportunity To Advocate For Fixing That”. Jonny and Colin’s posts inspired people to submit over 450 written comments to City Council imploring them to speed up transit.

For the Political team, I reached out to staff of Councilwoman Heather Hutt, chair of the Transportation Committee, which would be taking up LADOT’s report. Hutt’s staff told us she too was disappointed with the report and delayed her committee’s consideration of it to figure out what could be done. We made it our mission to convince the Councilwoman to issue a strong recommendation instead of “note and file”. We also decided to focus on the E Line, the most prominent transit line in Hutt’s district.

What we learned

In response to a public records request, Metro sent us a revealing report on the E Line prepared by Turner Engineering in late 2021. Turner found that east of Western, trains wait more time at red lights (red bars in the image below) than they do at stations (orange bars). In total, trains stop at red lights for almost 5 minutes.

All those red lights make the E Line unpredictable. It averages 47 minutes from the beach to downtown but can take up to 57. Check out the long tail stretching to the right in the graph below, which shows the actual time it took various trains to get from Santa Monica to DTLA. Riders have to plan for the worst to make sure they are on time, which means they need to set aside nearly an hour to go east during morning rush.

Some intersections are simply brutal. Westbound trains have to stop at Vermont almost 90% of the time, with the station platform beckoning just past the red light. Trains in both directions stop at Washington and Flower, where the E and A Lines meet, over 80% of the time, for almost an entire minute on average.

Even more embarrassingly, trains stop pretty frequently at some very minor intersections, like Expo/Halldale - 27% of the time westbound in the afternoon, for a side street that carries a few hundred cars every day, slowing down 20,000 daily E Line riders.

The most enticing tidbit of the Turner report came in the conclusion. When transit is sped up, it also becomes cheaper to run, because you provide the same service in fewer hours. Turner calculated that if red light delays on the E Line were reduced by just two minutes, Metro would save so much money that it could add another train to the line at no additional operating cost. Another train means the E Line would come more frequently. For free.

What can be done?

A lot! Here are just some of the interventions LADOT and Metro could make to prevent transit from stopping at red lights.

Grade separation: The best way to speed up the E Line, and also the most expensive. In 2017, Metro estimated it would cost almost $1 billion. So…next?

Railroad gates: The next best option, though also not cheap. Many E Line intersections west of Western are gated, including major streets like Arlington Ave. and Westwood Blvd.

If you check out Google Streetview east of Western from 2007, before the E Line was built, you’ll see old tracks that were used for freight until the 1980’s. And - surprise! - many intersections have railroad signals:

Freight trains got higher priority decades ago than the E Line, carrying tens of thousands of daily passengers, gets today!

Changing traffic patterns: 12th St. is a little one-way street downtown where one out of every six A and E Line trains have to stop at a red light. The city has proposed closing the block of 12th just east of Flower so drivers can’t turn onto 12th across the tracks, as the white car is doing in this Google Street View image. Closing 12th will allow the train to get the green every time, except when pedestrians need to cross Flower. Closures or turn restrictions are possible at a bunch of E Line intersections (looking at you, Watt Way) - it just takes political will.

Signal preemption: Traffic lights can be programmed to automatically turn green when a train approaches. Unfortunately, LADOT told us preemption is not legal in California without gates.

Upgrading signal controllers: Probably the best bang for our buck. You know how LA became famous for inventing software to synchronize signals for the 1984 Olympics? Well, what was once cutting edge has become vintage - our traffic lights are still using that same 1984 hardware and software. Newer signal controllers like D4 are designed for smoothing the flow of transit, not just cars. They can do many tricks to prioritize transit that LA’s controllers can’t do, such as “phase reservicing” - re-ordering the sequence of green lights and turn arrows so the train gets the green next.

Installing D4 in LA would involve upgrading the signal boxes and writing code to get the D4 software to talk to ATSAC, LA’s aging controller software. Luckily, both of those things are happening as part of the ongoing G Line upgrades and should come online some time next year. The success or failure of that project will determine whether transit in the rest of the city can be significantly sped up in the next couple years.

Stronger priority: As it stands now, LA’s signals can shorten a red light or lengthen a green for transit by 10% of the total cycle length, which usually works out to 12 seconds. For the E Line, red lights can’t be shortened much more than that because the streets the train runs on - Exposition and Flower - are quite wide, and pedestrians need to be given time to make their way across the tracks and street. But at minor intersections like Halldale, pedestrians don’t cross very often. As long as the beg button isn’t pressed, the red light could be shortened a lot more for the train (yes, I’m defending beg buttons). This is something LA’s signal controllers can and should be programmed to do right now!

What we accomplished

After doing all this research and organizing, we put together a presentation deck and a more detailed policy memo for Heather Hutt’s office summarizing what we’d learned (check ‘em out - they’re awesome). When we met with Hutt’s staff, we asked them to instruct LADOT and Metro to reduce red light delays on light rail and bus rapid transit by 50% by 2028. And that’s what they did. Their amendment, plus excellent ones from Eunisses Hernandez and Nithya Raman, passed Council last week.

The work is not done. All these amendments do is ask for more reports. But it’s heartening to see an actual policy outcome - a 50% red light delay reduction by January 1, 2028 - written down and passed by City Council. I’m hopeful that in the next year, with continued advocacy and organizing, supported by data and research, we can make real progress on speeding up transit in LA.

If this blog has a main thesis, it’s that Los Angeles has the most untapped potential of any American city. Here’s my post on why LA deserves greatness, if you want the full-blown manifesto. I love this place, and I want it to be a true world capital, the kind of city that gets a clock behind every hotel reception desk. And when I say world capital, I mean culturally, economically, creatively - all of it. LA should be a dynamo.

But how on earth will we get there? Our city is currently shrinking, broke, and not even maintaining its basic infrastructure. We have so little civic capacity that we’ve barely been able to scrape together a plan for the Olympics even though we’ve known they’re coming for nine years. Los Angeles in 2026 does not look like a city poised for greatness. Greatness is going to be a long-term project. And a long-term project needs ideas.

Just about every other major American city has a policy and research think tank dedicated to pursuing ideas that could make the city better. New York has Regional Plan Association. Chicago has the Metropolitan Planning Council. The Bay Area has SPUR. Boston has A Better City. San Diego has Circulate. Los Angeles - not so much.

To be sure, plenty of local organizations focus on various slices of our public policy pie. A remarkable example is Investing In Place, Jessica Meaney’s years-long crusade to convince LA to adopt a Capital Infrastructure Program, which is finally happening. It’s kind of crazy that it took one person’s tireless research and advocacy for over a decade to make the CIP happen. What about other things our city sorely needs, like a large scale, philanthropically backed parks foundation? Do we have to wait for someone to single-handedly champion that cause for a decade?

A think tank for the future of LA

Instead of relying on dedicated individuals or interest groups to take up causes, what LA needs is an independent, highly respected institution taking a holistic approach, putting out quality policy research, and advocating for solutions that advance a better Los Angeles. And to put my personal spin on it, I think that think tank should think about how to foster and plan for a city of 10 million or more people. What does LA need to become a world capital?

Here are some areas this think tank might focus on:

• Civic culture and identity – I put this one first because I think it’s LA’s biggest weakness. Why didn’t we have an infrastructure plan like every other city? Why don’t we have a big parks foundation? Because this city’s culture has always prized the private realm over the public. Our billionaires prefer to build their own private museums instead of bolstering our public ones (David Geffen excepted!). On the Fourth of July, everyone goes to their neighborhood’s fireworks display instead of one giant show that the entire city gathers to watch. It will be easier to build a world capital here if we are inspired to build it together.

• Housing and planning – The other big one holding us back, and obviously my main passion. We can’t grow if there aren’t enough places for people to live. But where should that growth go? What should it look like? Who should get to live there? Who should own it?

• Governance – What would a government for 10 million people look like? How big would City Council be? Should the balance of power between the Mayor and Council be any different? Would City Hall have different priorities if more Angelenos were living in dense neighborhoods? Boston has an independent nonprofit, the Boston Municipal Research Bureau, that keeps an eye on the city’s budget and finances. Sounds important!

• Economy and equitable growth – How can the city attract more jobs and business investment? How can we support the businesses of all sizes that are already here? How can the benefits of growth be widely shared? How can we lift more people out of poverty?

• Infrastructure – What will the city need to build in order to support 10 million people? Which existing systems – water, sewers, power, streets, etc. – can accommodate growth, and which can’t? How many more schools, libraries, community centers, parks will we need?

• Transportation – How will people get around in the future LA? How should congestion pricing work? What new train lines will need to be built? How should we plan for the arrival of high speed rail in the city?

• Hollywood – How can the city ensure that we don’t become like Detroit, where the bosses of our signature industry remain but the production moves elsewhere? How can we make sure that young creative people can afford to move here and have enough slack to take risks?

There are so many other possible topics - sustainability, climate resilience, innovation, supporting families, immigration…let me know what I left out!

Visualizing the future

Our LA think tank should also inspire. Create a positive vision for the future of our great city. With pictures. What will it feel like for someone to walk down Hollywood Boulevard in 2075? Or to go to the beach? What do we imagine will replace the Inglewood Oil Field after it closes? Where is LA’s next great park (here’s my vote)?

In 2021, SPUR published an incredible report envisioning four possible scenarios for how the Bay Area could develop in the next 50 years. Here’s just one of the report’s many beautiful illustrations. Can I live in this future please?

An LA think tank should produce a positive vision for growth in LA that will inspire Angelenos to embrace it. This city needs to get back in the business of taking big swings. Let’s start getting people on board.

The latest chapter of LA’s SB 79 shenanigans is all about one word: control. When we last checked in on our story in March, City Council had passed a lame plan to delay the law from taking effect in the city. They unearthed an obscure, never-before-used housing program called Corridor Transition, allowed it to be used in the areas around some transit stops, and voilà - SB 79 wouldn’t take effect in the city until 2031. As a sort of fig leaf, they instructed the Planning Dept. to update the requirements of the Corridor Transition program to try to make it usable. Last month, Planning released their update. And it shows how tightly the city wants to control the look of our neighborhoods.

The program has been redubbed Low Rise, and it uses the same basic rules as Corridor Transition - 3-4 story buildings on residential streets in wealthy neighborhoods, with up to either 10 or 16 apartments depending on the location. The big difference is that Low Rise applies to some single-family neighborhoods, where Corridor Transitions didn’t apply to any. Low Rise is really LA’s first stab - forced by SB 79 - at upzoning parts of the city where apartments have been banned for decades. It could be a big deal if they get it right! (Spoiler: they didn’t.)

Our best neighborhoods

To visualize where Low Rise will apply, I made a map:

Let’s start with the good news. Apartments are being legalized for the very first time in some of the city’s best single-family neighborhoods - Cheviot Hills, Rancho Park, Eagle Rock, and Beverly Grove, just to name a few. This is a potentially historic change, if anything can actually get built.

The less good news: the blue circles are all the areas around transit stations that SB 79 would have upzoned if the city had let it take effect - about 140,000 parcels total. The red and yellow splotches are the small fraction of the SB 79 areas where Low Rise applies - just 28,000 parcels, or 20% of the total. That’s all LA had to upzone in order to delay the law until 2031. As you can see on the map, this trick exempts huge swaths of the city, which will see zero benefits from SB 79 for the next five years. Most infuriatingly, the city exempted all historic districts, which takes out almost all the bungalow-filled neighborhoods around the new D Line subway stations.

Looking again at the wider map, you’ll notice a lot of the areas where Low Rise applies are in the Valley - 55% of the total. That’s because the Valley has many single-family neighborhoods near transit. But our focus should be fostering housing in the LA Basin, which has more job centers, better transit, and a more temperate climate. If Low Rise is going to work in the areas south of the Hollywood Hills, buildings need to be feasible on the smaller lots typical to the LA Basin.

If you look at the distribution of Low Rise lot sizes south of the hills, there’s a huge spike between 6-7000 square feet:

The median lot size is right around 6,250 square feet, so when thinking about what could work in Low Rise, imagine a 50’x125’ lot.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

Let’s look at the most significant updates, from least controlling to most.

Letting go: Most significantly, Planning dialed back the amount of affordable housing required. That helps with feasibility, and if it means more buildings get built, more affordable homes will get built too. It’s also easier to qualify for a fourth story by including three-bedroom “family size” apartments. Corridor Transition buildings could only be three stories tall unless 40% of their apartments had three bedrooms. In Low Rise, that’s been reduced to 20%.

Maybe letting go: The most intriguing possible change is one Planning didn’t actually put in Low Rise…yet. Advocates led by ACT-LA asked the city to find a way to entice developers to include apartments for extremely low-income tenants. This is a laudable goal - opening up our city’s best neighborhoods to families of all income levels.

The best way to unlock extremely low-income homes is to allow more than 16 apartments. So Planning came up with a “Low-Rise Bonus,” which allows unlimited apartments as long as they fit into the same size building - four stories, 15’ front setback, etc. 8% of apartments would have to be dedicated to extremely low-income tenants, or 12% for very low.

Planning put their idea for the Low-Rise Bonus in a report but didn’t write it into their draft ordinance. City Council would have to amend the ordinance to adopt it. Let’s hope they do.

Weirdly controlling: One change Planning made is just plain strange. Corridor Transition provided a menu of common space options - courtyard, backyard, or “paseo” - from which builders were required to pick one. In Low Rise, they took the backyard off the menu and added options for a roof deck or a 15-foot front yard. But they also increased the required front setback from 10 to 15 feet. That means every building has to have a 15-foot front yard, and the other options on the menu are moot. What’s the point of having a menu if you have to pick the same dish every time? I’d rather go back to a 10-foot setback - almost nobody uses their front yard anyway, unless they put up celebrity hedges (boo). Then you’d have a usable menu.

The poison pill

Now for the most controlling part of all. Planning is requiring all parking in Low Rise projects to be either underground or behind the building. No ground-level parking allowed under the apartments. This leaves developers with two bad options if they want to provide parking for tenants. Digging an underground garage is often too expensive for small buildings. Putting a surface parking lot in the back and a driveway to get to it takes a huge bite out of the building’s footprint, which can make it too small to be financially feasible. Look at the difference between no parking and just four spaces in the back on a 50’x125’ lot:

A 42% smaller building for four measly spaces! A driveway wouldn’t be necessary if the parking could be accessed from a rear alley, but those are rare in residential neighborhoods.

I am honestly baffled by this requirement. It makes it impossible to provide parking in many cases. Of course, buildings with no parking can be great, especially when they are walking distance from near a train station. But they are still a niche product in the world of LA development, and forcing builders to build with no parking means a lot less housing will get built. The city should give builders the option to provide ground-level parking for their tenants inside Low Rise buildings. Abundant housing with some parking is better than perfect urbanism with fewer homes.

What could get built

To make sense of all these changes and figure out what could actually get built, I sat down with Jesi Harris, who is a land use consultant by day and a West Hollywood Planning Commissioner by night. She told me that since land in these wealthy neighborhoods is expensive, Low Rise projects will only work if developers can build a lot of apartments. The ten-home limit, especially coupled with no parking, is going to be challenging in the areas where it applies - that’s all the yellow in the map, over half the Low Rise parcels.

There is one kind of ten-home building that could work - condos, which tend to be more profitable to build than rental apartments. Lots of three-story, single-stair, ten-starter-home buildings near transit - sounds great! But condos are very hard to build in California for bizarre liability reasons, and until that gets fixed, they are mostly a pipe dream.

One possibility that appeals to Harris is the Low Rise Bonus - the option that would allow an unlimited number of apartments in four floors in exchange for setting aside some of them at a more deeply affordable level. She thinks builders would prefer that option to qualify for a fourth story instead of providing family-sized apartments. If City Council ends up including this alternative pathway in Low Rise, expect lots of developers to choose it, which will result in buildings with lots of small apartments as opposed to fewer bigger ones. Haven on Amherst, an almost-finished ED 1 project on the Westside, is a perfect example of what could be built - 38 affordable, one-bedroom apartments in a four-story building on a 50’x125’ lot.

What are we doing here?

Why is the Low Rise program so controlling about what can get built? Why does it seem set up to fail? Why not allow ground-level parking inside the building like every other housing program in the city? Why not allow 16 apartments everywhere? Why not let builders provide a back yard that could actually get used instead of a front yard that will just be for show? Why not, god forbid, allow five-story buildings?

Perhaps Low Rise was designed defensively, with grumpy neighbors in mind. Neighbors who might complain about having to see cars parked in a ground-level garage outside their dining room window. Who might whine about how a building crowds the street. Who might throw a fit if a building is “too tall”. Plenty of successful housing programs in the city have had to be dialed back after a NIMBY backlash, and it’s only natural that Planning would try to limit the next uproar.

But I wonder if if the issue is deeper than just defensiveness. Our city has uplifted the single-family neighborhood above all others for so long that it has become an integral part of how we visualize the city. We literally grew up seeing the image on TV.

Interrupting that image - the sun-kissed Spanish revival house, the hedges, the perfect grassy front lawn - with a boxy apartment building has to produce a subconscious response in many of us: Hang on!

The impulse to shape change, to mold it, is strong. It’s built into how planners think. But even those of us who embrace change have to face this controlling impulse. It’s natural. Nostalgia is powerful. But nostalgia doesn’t pencil.

If the city wants Low Rise to work, if the program is more than just a bunch of legal hand waving to keep SB 79 at bay for a few years, our leaders are going to have to let go a little more. Stop trying to control so tightly how the buildings in our neighborhoods look. Because that controlling instinct will lead to the same result we’ve been facing all these years - a crippling housing shortage.

Instead of trying to solve for a particular size of building or kind of parking structure, let’s solve for the kind of vibrancy we want to see in our neighborhoods. Do we want more kids? More working people? Do we want more butts in seats in schools, houses of worship, and community centers? Do we want shops and restaurants to have enough customers to thrive? More people walking and biking to the train? The kind of buildings being built should matter less than the kind of community being nurtured.

A community is not its buildings, but buildings dictate the community. LA’s longstanding controls over buildings have given us tent encampments, empty storefronts, under-enrolled schools, and an aging population. To build thriving communities, we have to learn to let go of the buildings.

In March, local and state officials gathered to celebrate the groundbreaking of a remarkable building dubbed Sky Village Hollywood - 35-stories with over 500 apartments, every one of them reserved for low- and moderate-income renters. California State Controller Malia Cohen told the crowd, “We are actually taking a pause in the craziness of the world and acknowledging how much hope building a home will bring to people.”

LA County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath had a blunter assessment: “We need more projects like this.”

Missing from the event was someone who could claim much of the credit for getting this building built - Mayor Karen Bass, whose Executive Directive 1 expedited the approvals for Sky Village Hollywood and over 450 other 100% affordable buildings.

The Mayor issued ED 1 the week she was inaugurated, and it is the housing policy she talks about the most. The order exempted affordable housing projects from public hearings, appeals, and environmental reviews, and it directed city departments to approve them within 60 days. The Mayor is right to be proud - from the start, ED 1 accomplished something truly remarkable and surprising. It supercharged a fledgling sector of LA’s housing market: privately funded affordable housing. After the Mayor issued her order, a flood of developers proposed building 100% affordable projects with no public subsidy. ED 1 made building affordable housing profitable.

In the ensuing 3½ years, however, the program has gotten mired in controversy after controversy, and for many the shine has come off the apple. Ask housing activists, and you’ll get all kinds of opinions. It’s a huge success! No, the Mayor killed it! Actually, it’ll last forever! But nothing’s getting built!

I decided to dig into the data to figure out the true legacy of ED 1. What I found surprised me, and hopefully will surprise you too.

Most ED 1 projects are likely to get built

ED 1 has been a smashing success on paper, with over 35,000 income-restricted homes approved by the Planning Department. But approved doesn’t mean built, and what works on a spreadsheet doesn’t necessarily translate to shovels in the ground. Especially with an unproven business model - privately funded affordable housing - the question with ED 1 has always been whether the buildings would actually get built.

Well, here’s some good news. As of this week, 118 ED 1 buildings with a total of 8,519 apartments have pulled permits for construction, and nine have opened.1 That means 26% of approved ED 1 projects have broken ground. Wait, is that good? Let’s look just at buildings approved in 2023, ED 1’s first year - they’ve had three years to go through the plan check process and pull permits. Fully 58% of ED 1 projects approved in 2023 have broken ground. That’s a much higher percentage than non-ED 1 apartment buildings approved in the city that year, only 42% of which have broken ground.2

If you’re disappointed that only a quarter of approved ED 1 buildings have started construction so far, you can blame LA’s notoriously slow plan check process. Remember that 60 day shot clock for approving projects? It only applies to the Planning Dept. The next step after Planning approval is review by the Dept. of Building and Safety, and the average time for ED 1 projects to complete their LADBS plan check is 642 days, or over 21 months. Projects approved by the Planning Dept. in 2024, the peak year of ED 1, have just started to break ground this year.

Unless conditions dramatically change, we’re going to start seeing a lot more buildings break ground as they finish plan check. For the graph below, think of all the buildings approved in each quarter as a “cohort”. Each bar represents the percentage of that cohort’s buildings that have broken ground. Buildings approved in 2023 - doing great! 2024 - pulling permits and getting started! 2025 - slogging through plan check. There’s no reason all these cohorts shouldn’t all eventually get to over 50%.

One more graph to convince you ED 1 construction is just getting going:

By the way, this mini-glut of ED 1 buildings comes at a time when construction is down significantly in LA overall. Last year, less than 8,000 apartments broke ground in the entire city, down by about a third from before the pandemic. And yet the numbers would have been a lot worse if not for ED 1 - a majority of the total apartments that broke ground in LA last year were in ED 1 buildings.

And just so you know, none of this data includes Sky Village Hollywood, which hasn’t actually gotten its building permit yet. When it does, 523 apartments will be added to the total.

ED 1 buildings can be beautiful

Quick story: I’ve been advocating to strengthen ED 1 almost since the beginning, including co-writing an op-ed on the subject in late 2023. After that piece was published, my co-authors and I met with the office of a certain City Councilmember. A staffer pushed back on our advocacy, telling us ED 1 buildings look like “jails” and that their constituents don’t want those ugly buildings in their neighborhoods.

The only way to build affordable housing without taxpayer help is to build cheaply, and it’s true that cheap construction is often ugly. Some of the renderings in proposed ED 1 buildings are pretty bad. But plenty are lovely! Check out these ED 1 projects, all under construction, all privately funded:

ED 1 projects are being built all over the city

This one’s a bit inside-baseball but important for me to address. In 2024, some at City Hall started raising concerns that too many ED 1 projects were being proposed in lower-income neighborhoods. ATC Research, a service that provides land use data in LA, reported that 49% of approved ED 1 projects were located in South LA. This is an equity issue - it would be kind of gross if we mostly put new homes for lower-income folks next to other lower-income folks. There was talk of capping the number of projects that could be approved in each city council district until every district reached the cap.

In the end, the concerns turned out to be overblown. Many of the proposed South LA projects weren’t actually financially feasible and didn’t get built. I’ve mapped the 118 ED 1 buildings that have broken ground, and as you can see, they are pretty well-distributed throughout the city (the Valley has plenty of projects too - they are on the full map). Completed buildings are in green.

Still, a third of projects that have broken ground are in South LA,3 which is too many for my taste - I’d like to see more affordable housing built in affluent neighborhoods that have historically been off limits to lower-income Angelenos. The simplest way to do that would be to allow ED 1 to be used in single family neighborhoods, which tend to be in wealthier parts of town. And that brings me to…

The Mayor didn’t kill ED 1

In the first few months after ED 1 was issued, a handful of projects were proposed on large lots in the Valley that happened to be zoned for one single-family home. After the requisite neighborhood freakouts, Mayor Bass revised her order to explicitly ban its use in single-family neighborhoods, saying the program was never intended to apply there. Housing activists proceeded to freak out, and banning single-family from ED 1 is still often the first sin they bring up when complaining about the mayor.

The part many folks don’t get is that ED 1 couldn’t be used on the vast majority of single-family properties even before the mayor issued her revision. To use ED 1, projects have to qualify for the state density bonus, which requires a property to be zoned for at least five homes. The projects in question were unicorns - they were located on lots so big (over 25,000 sq. ft.) that the city allows five homes there under its obscure definition of single-family zoning, which actually allows one home per 5,000 sq. ft. of land.

All the Mayor’s revision did was ban ED 1 from being used on the tiny fraction of single-family lots bigger than 25,000 sq. ft. Did this change kill the program? Absolutely not:

ED 1 applications did begin a major decline after the Mayor’s second round of revisions, in June 2024, that introduced new design standards and other restrictions to appease NIMBYs and assert more control over how the buildings look. This controlling strategy has been used over and over again in LA, and somehow the city never learns that it always kills project feasibility. In the first half of 2024, ED 1 was absolutely crushing it, with builders filing an average of 27 projects per month. Almost every day brought a new ED 1 application. But the decline was swift after the Mayor tightened the program.

According to an Abundant Housing report on ED 1 written soon after the Mayor’s revisions were published, the most impactful new rules were ones that made buildings smaller. 69% of projects proposed before July 2024 couldn’t comply with the revisions’ requirements for bigger setbacks, and 54% couldn’t provide as much open space as required by the revisions. Once the Mayor’s changes went into effect, it’s possible that builders had trouble making smaller buildings work and stopped proposing them.

But I don’t think those revisions killed the program either, and here’s why. ED 1 grew up last year, evolving into the Affordable Housing Incentive Program, which is just about the only part of CHIP that is generating any proposals for new homes. (Technically ED 1 lives on as a separate program from AHIP, but it’s rarely used on its own any more.) The interesting part is that AHIP undid most of the restrictions the Mayor added in July 2024. If those restrictions had been killing feasbility, AHIP would have unlocked a bunch of new building proposals. Are the applications pouring in? Not really:

It’s too early to know what’s going on here. Perhaps developers are still figuring out AHIP, and applications will start coming in a faster clip soon. Perhaps external factors are to blame, like the federal government’s 2025 reduction in the value of Section 8 vouchers in lower income neighborhoods, which many ED 1 developers count on getting. Perhaps ED 1 was a bit of a bubble, and we are headed toward a more natural equilibrium. No matter what, I’m not going to blame Karen Bass for it.

The way forward

Remember Proposition HHH? That’s the ballot measure we passed in 2016 to use our tax dollars to build 8,000 affordable homes to the tune of $1.2 billion. ED 1 has already gotten almost as many affordable homes built at zero taxpayer cost.4 It is an absolute godsend to the City of LA, and we should be finding ways to strengthen its successor AHIP as much as possible.

Start with allowing AHIP in single-family neighborhoods. A recent motion from Councilmember Ysabel Jurado would instruct the Planning Dept. to figure out how to add AHIP to the recently enacted Low Rise ordinance that upzones single-family areas around SB 79 areas. That’s a good start, but let’s go farther and allow AHIP in single-family neighborhoods near all transit, including bus routes that don’t qualify for SB 79.

We also need to speed up the plan check process. It shouldn’t take almost two years to get permission to start building. The added time and uncertainty of the permitting process adds risk for developers, making it harder for them to get funding for their projects.

LA should be proud of ED 1. We sort of accidentally spawned a whole new industry of for-profit affordable housing builders, and we should nurture it. We can be the national model for how to build affordable housing at scale through the private sector. And we can build a city where even regular people can afford to live.

Single-family zoning is the final boss of LA housing battles. It is undefeated in every major housing debate in recent years. 2023: should we include single-family neighborhoods in Executive Directive 1, Mayor Bass’ signature housing policy? Game over! 2024: include them in CHIP, the citywide housing plan? Game over! The result is that the bungalow pictured above is still the only thing allowed on this lot on Glendon Ave. in Rancho Park, despite the fact that it’s in a great neighborhood with excellent schools, located two blocks from an E Line station. (Except of course you could build a bigger house.) And when a 1,000 square foot single-family home is worth $1.4 million, it means only rich people can move into the neighborhood.

But yesterday, with an SB 79-shaped gun to their heads, LA City Council took what could be a historic first step toward ending single-family zoning in the city. It wasn’t a courageous step, and it wasn’t a bold step, but with some help it might just be enough to defeat the final boss.

A challenger emerges

When Governor Newsom signed SB 79 last October, everyone thought that new law would be the challenger to defeat single-family zoning. SB 79 requires cities to allow apartment buildings around train stations and some bus stops, overriding whatever single-family zoning is currently in place. Suddenly our little bungalow on Glendon Ave. could give way to a building with 28 apartments, eight of which are set aside for low-income families. That’s dozens more people from all walks of life who could get the chance to live in this great neighborhood, walking distance from the train.

Except SB 79 gives cities a wide berth in how they implement the law before it takes effect on July 1st, and the devil is always in the details. Cities get three options:

1. Just let the law take effect - this is what Long Beach is doing. The city already allows apartments near its train stations, so SB 79 will have little impact there.

2. Pass a “local alternative plan” to shift the law’s upzoning around different areas, as long as the total number of new homes allowed remains the same. Our lot on Glendon Ave. could be limited to 14 apartments instead of 28, or it could be further upzoned to 56 apartments. Beverly Hills is doing this, moving tons of density to a handful of parcels near the D Line Wilshire/La Cienega station so they can cut in half the number of apartments allowed in single-family neighborhoods.

3. Totally exempt certain areas until 2030 - eligible areas include historic neighborhoods, fire zones, low-income neighborhoods, and places that already allow apartments. Glendale is doing this for the Tropico neighborhood, which got upzoned a few years ago.

What would LA do?

Last fall, when I first wrote about SB 79 implementation, it looked like Los Angeles was going to choose some version of the third option, deferring parts of the city until 2030, and then take that time to write a local alternative plan that would take effect when the deferral ended. The vast majority of the areas around transit stops qualify for deferral - pretty much everything that’s not in a wealthy single-family neighborhood, like the bungalow on Glendon Ave. The question, as I wrote at the time, was how many of these areas City Council would choose to defer.

But the smartypants staffers in LA’s Planning Dept. came up with a fourth option for City Council to choose - beating SB 79 to the punch and challenging the boss themselves. Council could defer everything they’re legally allowed to and also make those wealthy single-family neighborhoods eligible for deferral by preemptively upzoning them before the law takes effect - remember that areas that already allow apartments can be deferred until 2030. That trick would allow the entire city to be deferred from SB 79 for the next four years.

Preemptive upzoning may sound good, but there’s another twist: the city only has to allow buildings half the size of what SB 79 requires on a property in order to defer it. So if the city allows a minimum of 14 apartments on the Glendon bungalow’s lot, as opposed to the 28 apartments that SB 79 allows, that’s all the upzoning we get for now. Half the homes, in a much smaller area. Until 2030.

(If you want to dive deeper, check out this great tool Planning developed to explain SB 79 and the options for City Council.)

Planning presented their minimal upzoning and maximal delaying plan to City Council along with two others that upzoned more aggressively. Five councilmembers supported a more aggressive plan, but in the end, Council voted for the most minimal plan.

You could look at this two ways. Cup half-empty: LA discovered a workaround that allows it to exempt the whole city from SB 79 for several years, and all it had to do was allow small apartment buildings in a few neighborhoods. Cup half-full: LA just allowed apartment buildings in some single-family neighborhoods for the first time in generations, a truly historic milestone.

My take: we’re using the wrong cup.

The catch

There’s a big problem with the city’s upzoning plan. Remember how our little bungalow needs to be upzoned to allow 14 apartments for the plan to work? To achieve that, the city is using a CHIP program called Corridor Transitions that allows 4-story buildings with up to 16 apartments - what some call "missing middle" buildings. The problem is that Corridor Transitions has existed for over a year, and not one application for a building has been submitted using it. Here’s the chart of applications through CHIP’s various programs from my writeup of its first year:

In the lead-up to the vote, I called out the city’s preemptive upzoning plan because I thought it wouldn’t lead to anything getting built. The single-family status quo would be perpetuated while exempting the whole city from SB 79.

In the run-up to yesterday’s hearing, multiple organizations wrote in to City Council highlighting Corridor Transitions’ shortcomings. The advocacy had an impact - both Nithya Raman and Katy Yaroslavsky introduced amendments asking the Planning Dept. to look at beefing up Corridor Transitions so it would actually generate housing. Raman’s amendment, the one that passed, asks Planning to look at “greater density, floor area, and/or height paired with levels of deeper affordability to allow for realistic development capacity”. The “deeper affordability” is a reference to concerns raised by ACT-LA, which wants extremely low-income units in the mix for Corridor Transition buildings.

In her remarks at the hearing, Yaroslavsky explicitly took on “the elephant in the room we need to address directly”:

It’s encouraging to hear our Councilmembers talk about finding ways to actually get housing built. About revisiting their previous actions that didn’t work. Whether this rhetoric actually leads to real change remains to be seen. If Corridor Transitions gets revised into something that really does generate a lot of middle middle housing in neighborhoods like Rancho Park, yesterday’s vote will go down as a truly historic defeat of single-family zoning. If when rubber meets road, Yaroslavsky and her colleagues vote to keep Corridor Transitions a paper-only program, yesterday’s vote will have been just another delay tactic.

More rhetoric or reality?

City Council made another move yesterday that the jury will be out on for a while. Remember those local alternative plans that cities can draft by 2030 to somewhat shift SB 79 density around? Instead of waiting until 2030 to draft the city’s local alternative plan, Council voted to instruct the Planning Dept. to start working on it immediately.

This is a genuinely confusing move. Council had the chance to instruct Planning to develop a local alternative plan back in December and didn’t take it - they voted to ask for the deferral and preemptive zoning plan instead. Why the change of heart? The optimist would say Councilmembers have had more time to understand the impacts of the law and are genuinely feeling the urgency of putting a permanent plan in place. The cynic would say Councilmembers are feeling the heat from prohousing advocates and, having picked the least aggressive preemptive upzoning plan, are trying to show they really are taking things seriously.

Again, the proof will be in the pudding. Will Planning actually develop a local alternative plan quickly or get bogged down in multiple rounds of community outreach? Will Council take it up promptly or let it languish in committee for years? It will probably be many months before we’re able to know whether this move was motivated by urgency or delay.

Where is this hopefully not fake upzoning happening anyway?

If you’ve read this far, you deserve a map! The plan upzones single-family and low-density neighborhoods around 55 Metro stations in wealthy neighborhoods, carving out historic districts and high fire zones:

These are some really great parts of town where more people deserve to live - especially the Westside, where apartments could now be built in previously exclusionary neighborhoods like Cheviot Hills and Westchester, not to mention our little bungalow’s Rancho Park. Kudos to the Planning Dept. and to City Council for focusing their rezoning energy on LA’s best neighborhoods. We should be putting more housing there. More kids deserve to grow up there. If we want to see homes actually built there, advocates will have to work hard to hold the city to its promises.

2/23/26: Updated post to reflect corrected data sent by the Planning Dept. that makes the results even worse.

Happy first birthday to CHIP, the sprawling Citywide Housing Incentive Program adopted last February by City Council to jumpstart homebuilding and meet LA’s state-mandated housing target: 450,000 new homes in eight years, roughly triple the city’s recent homebuilding pace. To reach that ambitious goal, LA came up with an alphabet soup of different programs like AHIP, MIIP, and TOIA. Each letter jumble is a different flavor of carrot for developers - they can build a bigger apartment building if they set aside some of the homes for low-income folks. The city had implemented successful incentive programs before, like Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) in 2017, but CHIP was supposed to be bigger and better - enough to super-charge homebuilding in LA.

City Council passed CHIP unanimously but rather quietly. News reports featured few quotes from elected officials about the effort. But when SB 79, the state transit-oriented upzoning law, was being debated last summer, suddenly CHIP became city leaders’ pride and joy. Many Councilmembers defended their opposition to SB 79 by arguing they had already upzoned in a more locally-driven, sensitive way. Councilmember John Lee had a typical quote: “SB 79 is a blunt tool that does not take into account the years of painstaking work all of us have put into crafting and adopting our housing element and Citywide Housing Implementation Plan.”

Even Karen Bass, in her letter to Gavin Newsom asking him to veto SB 79, took credit for CHIP as she argued state intervention was unnecessary: “I have cut red tape and spearheaded local initiatives, such as the Citywide Housing Incentive Program, to accelerate housing development…The City of Los Angeles has already made substantial efforts to align with state housing goals and increase housing development citywide.”

CHIP CHIP, Hooray! We don’t need no stinkin’ SB 79. LA’s got this.

Our leaders’ enthusiasm seemingly got a boost last fall, when the Planning Dept. released a gushing report on the first six months of CHIP, trumpeting over 16,000 homes already proposed. Tremendous! But a closer reading of the report revealed some puzzling choices. First, the report counted pre-applications, which are just a formality developers submit stating their intent to file an application later. Many pre-applications are just vaporware - they never get farther than that initial form. The number of actual applications was buried in a table on page 5 of the report - only 3,000 filed.

The six-month report also counted projects submitted under the State Density Bonus program. As you might imagine by its name, the density bonus comes from state law, not a city program. But CHIP tweaked some aspects of how the city implements the law, so Planning decided to count density bonus projects in its report, comprising about half of the total applications. The problem is that the vast majority of those applications would have been submitted with or without CHIP.

CHIP at one year

To clear things up, I obtained a list of all actual applications submitted under CHIP, not including state density bonus projects, in the first full year of the program’s existence.1 Here are the numbers:

Total projects submitted: 99
Total homes proposed: 8,835

Each of the first four columns represents a different CHIP program. One wrinkle to keep in mind is that not all of the CHIP programs are new policies. Of the four, two are updated versions of city programs that existed before, and two are brand new.

Rebranded programs:

TOIA (2,286 homes proposed) - Transit-Oriented Incentive Areas is an updated version of the successful TOC program. It allows developers to build bigger buildings near transit stops. To compare, in the first year of TOC, developers proposed 9,909 homes - TOIA generated less than 1/4 of that. So…not great.

AHIP (6,077 homes proposed) - the Affordable Housing Incentive Program is an updated version of Mayor Bass’ wildly successful Executive Directive 1 (ED 1), which allows 100% affordable housing to be built just about anywhere apartments are allowed. To compare, in the first year of ED 1, developers proposed 10,306 homes (data courtesy of housing policy savant Joseph Cohen May) - AHIP generated about 60% of that. So…not terrible.

New programs:

Now let’s look at the parts of CHIP that are truly new policies, allowing apartments to be built in places that weren’t possible before:

OC (472 homes proposed) - Opportunity Corridors allows bigger apartment buildings all along major boulevards in wealthier parts of the city. The idea is to fill in the areas between the transit stops on those boulevards. Unfortunately, developers aren’t biting yet. So far, only six projects have been proposed citywide.

OC-T (zero homes proposed) - Opportunity Corridor Transition Areas allow 4-16 unit “missing middle”-type buildings on residential side streets within a block or two of opporunity corridors. The catch with OC-T is that, like all CHIP programs, it can’t be used on single-family lots, which means it is limited to side streets zoned for duplexes and fourplexes - i.e. the places that already have missing middle housing. This limitation makes OC-T pretty useless, and nobody’s used it yet.

Oof

To recap: CHIP, which city leaders are touting as the vehicle for tripling housing production in LA and meeting our very ambitious housing targets, generated less than 9,000 applications for new homes in its first year. Just one-sixth of what the state says we need. Even more embarrassingly, 95% of those homes were proposed through programs that are basically rebrands of successful city housing programs that existed for years before CHIP. And those rebrands, especially TOIA, included tweaks that were intended to make them even more likely to generate new housing. But in comparison with the programs they replaced, the rebranded programs are delivering fewer homes than their predecessors did - certainly not triple the homes. And don’t get me started on the actually new policies in CHIP - so far it’s hard to call them anything but duds.

Why is this happening? One possibility is the effects of ULA, the “mansion tax” that actually taxes new apartment buildings too. ULA has driven down homebuilding overall in the city and creates a huge headwind for any new housing policy, no matter how well-designed. There are also macroeconomic factors like higher interest rates and tariffs, except other cities have managed to keep building despite these challenges. It’s also possible the incentive structures in the CHIP programs could benefit from some rejiggering - perhaps in order to make the math work, developers need bigger rewards for setting aside apartments for low-income families. Finally, there’s the elephant in the room - single-family neighborhoods. After a big fight, City Council opted to exempt them from all of CHIP, leaving a huge swath of developable land on the table.

Enter SB 79

All of this is suddenly extremely relevant, as on Tuesday City Council is starting to consider how to implement SB 79 in LA. As you recall, most Councilmembers specifically cited CHIP’s potential to boost housing production in the city as a reason to oppose SB 79. Well, with SB 79 now law, and CHIP not delivering, how will that impact how Council sees the law now?

Interestingly, the Planning Dept’s report on SB 79 implementation options actually recommends expanding CHIP as a way to get out of implementing SB 79 for now. The state law allows cities to delay it going into effect until 2030 if their transit stations are in low-income areas or already have good enough zoning (this is a gross oversimplification, but work with me here). Shockingly, at least to me, 88% of LA qualifies for deferral - most of the areas around the transit stations in wealthy parts of LA have pretty decent zoning, but a few on the Westside and in the Valley have mostly just single-family homes.

In a bit of four-dimensional zoning chess, the Planning Dept. is telling City Council that they can fully delay SB 79 for four years by partially addressing the single-family elephant. Planning recommends pre-emptively increasing the zoning in some single-family zones so that every part of the city qualifies for deferral. They are actually proposing to upzone using programs from CHIP - either TOIA (up to 7-story buildings) or OC-T (up to 3-story buildings). As we’ve seen, both of these programs are disappointments - especially OC-T, which hasn’t seen a single project application in its first year. Would TOIA or OC-T work better in single-family neighborhoods, where the land is cheaper and there are no existing apartments to contend with? Hard to know.

The more important question is: does City Council feel any urgency? The housing crisis isn’t getting any better, and the city’s vaunted solution is a flop so far. City Council could take this opportunity to delay SB 79 for four years, or they could use this moment as a kind of do-over on CHIP. If the city pre-emptively upzones with a too-weak program that doesn’t generate enough homes, we’ll get four more years of the same failed policies. If instead the city takes this opportunity to actually do a real upzoning (TOIA in single-family zones might be great), they could put CHIP on a path to outshine SB 79 and actually get us out from under this crushing housing shortage.

Yesterday the Metro board made two awful, cowardly decisions that cast serious doubts on their ability to lead an agency undertaking the largest public transportation expansion in the country. First, they voted to ask for LA County to be exempt from SB 79, the transit-oriented upzoning law that would allow more homes to be built near Metro’s own train stations and bus stops. Then, over Metro staff’s objections, they voted to change the route of the planned South Bay extension of the K Line train, choosing the more expensive, less feasible route and throwing the entire future of the project in doubt. As we’ll see, the common thread in these votes was simple: caving to NIMBYs.

No SB79 in my backyard

Why would Metro want to kill the law that will let more people live near the transit Metro builds? Wouldn’t they want more people to, you know, use their product? The problem, as Metro sees it, is that the law makes their job harder. SB 79 allows upzoning around future transit lines if they’d already reached a certain stage of planning when the law passed. For example, SB 79 applies to the areas around the stations on the future subway through the Sepulveda pass even though it’s years away from construction.

You can see where this is going. NIMBYs around future Metro stations will fight to keep the line from being built so that their neighborhoods don’t get upzoned. This is already happening in Glendale with the under construction North Hollywood to Pasadena bus rapid transit project. Glendale officials, including Mayor Ara Najarian, are vowing to stop the project in their city so they don’t have to face a NIMBY backlash when the areas around the bus stops get upzoned.

Metro’s reaction to this? Waaaaah! Metro staff’s report cranks up the whining to 10:

Sure, the resistance has “intensified”. But it’s not like Metro’s projects were just sailing through before unscathed. Just look at the NoHo-Pasadena BRT project. NIMBYs showed up in droves to oppose it at the initial community meetings. An LA City Councilmember stalled it. The project was saved only when a group of community activists proposed their own plan, which Metro largely adopted.

Metro always faces intense pushback, including lawsuits, from grumps who oppose their projects. And yes, SB 79 gives NIMBYs another thing to be afraid of. Ara Najarian supported the BRT before the law passed - that’s certainly a headache for Metro. But getting rid of SB 79 would not stop local resistance. NIMBYs will always, always find reasons to oppose projects.

If Metro is having trouble because the Najarians of the world are stalling construction, they should get state legislators to pass permitting reform so local elected officials don’t have the power to block regional transportation projects from getting built. But the problem is that the Metro board is made up almost entirely of local elected officials from across LA County - mayors, city councilmembers, county supervisors. Serving on the Metro board is just their other part-time gig. Karen Bass is on the Metro board. Notorious NIMBY city councilmember Imelda Padilla is on the Metro board. Ara Najarian is on the Metro board! These folks would never ask the state to take away the power they have in their day jobs to stall projects their constituents don’t like.

And of course, local electeds hate SB 79 itself because it takes away their control over zoning in their city. Most of the Metro boardmembers are on the record opposing SB 79. Naturally they seized this opportunity to beg for an opt-out for LA County.

What is lacking in this story is the kind of vision or leadership we should expect from the Metro board. SB 79 will eventually lead to millions more people living near the transit Metro builds. This short-sighted attempt to get around the law, while possibly making it a little easier to build projects, would only harm Metro and LA in the long term. The anonymous Mar Vista Voice put it best:

SB 79 is a generational opportunity to fix LA’s outdated zoning and build a city that works for everyone, not just rich homeowners. It also will lead to huge ridership gains for Metro. In a sane world, Metro would embrace the law and work with the state to improve it. In a sane world, the Metro board would push back against staff’s whining about NIMBYs and remind them what a boon the law is for the agency. Instead, all the mayors and councilmembers on the board can think about is the small ball of appeasing their constituents, even if it means throwing the baby out with the bathwater at the expense of every Angeleno and Metro itself.

South Bay rail likely killed

The request to exempt LA County from SB 79 wasn’t even the worst decision the Metro board made yesterday. For over a decade, Metro has been in the process of planning an extension of its suburban South Bay light rail line from Redondo Beach to Torrance. Like all Metro projects, this one generated NIMBY pushback from the start. But in 2024, over homeowner objections, the Metro board approved the best route, in blue and orange below. Known as the “hybrid alternative”, the route uses an existing right-of-way that Metro already owns and that already has tracks used by freight trains (the tracks would be moved over to make space for the new light rail tracks).

The hybrid alternative has two big advantages over the other route down Hawthorne Blvd., in green. One is cost - the hybrid route, shown below as LPA for “locally preferred alternative”, costs $737 million less than the Hawthorne route, and it crucially requires zero federal funding (unavailable until Democrats regain power). The other advantage is feasibility - the Hawthorne route runs parallel to the 405 freeway for a stretch, crossing over off-ramps and running next to a sound wall. This “encroachment” would trigger added layers of complexity for the project, including several years of federal environmental review and uncertain approvals from Caltrans, which would lose the ability to widen the 405 next to the train.

After the Metro board picked the hybrid route in 2024, staff compiled their final environmental report, which the board was supposed to certify yesterday. Instead, County Supervisor Holly Mitchell, who serves on the Metro board and whose district the project runs through, filed a surprise last-minute motion to switch the route to Hawthorne. At yesterday’s meeting, the board voted unanimously for the Hawthorne route.

I talked to Nick Andert, who has become semi-famous among LA urbanists for his incredibly in-depth videos about Metro’s future transit lines. Andert told me this decision likely sets the project back 5-10 years and could possibly kill it altogether. Besides requiring years more of environmental studies, Hawthorne’s biggest problem is that $737 million difference - it will need more funding. But it’s a low ridership, suburban project that is unlikely to win federal or state grants, especially when Metro has more important projects that will be competing for the same funds. It may never get fully funded.

It’s also quite possible that Caltrans will simply veto the project. Caltrans already killed Metro’s plans to extend the E Line along the 60 freeway, and there’s no reason to think they’ll be any more amenable to a train running next to the 405, especially when they can argue that there’s a perfectly good alternative route that avoids the freeway.

The problem with endangering this four-mile extension is that it endangers Metro’s entire long-term vision for transit in the South Bay, which is to eventually extend the train all the way to San Pedro or Long Beach for a one-seat ride to LAX and points north. Andert points out the echoes of former congressman Henry Waxman, who blocked the subway under Wilshire in the 1980’s, a mistake finally being rectified this year:

Why did this happen? NIMBYs. The hybrid route follows freight train tracks close to the homes of some residents of Lawndale and Redondo Beach who used the language of environmental justice to argue that Metro was taking away their “greenbelt”. Never mind that freight trains already run on the existing tracks. Never mind that Metro was planning to spruce up the green space, adding more trees and building a proper walk and bike path. These homeowners just didn’t want the transit. Their sustained campaign won over Holly Mitchell, who in her day job as County Supervisor counts these homeowners as her constituents. The rest of the board went along with Mitchell out of deference since it’s her “home” project.

Again, what we are lacking here is the vision and leadership we should expect from the Metro board. Holly Mitchell has potentially killed light rail for most of the South Bay because of the objections of a few homeowners who might not have voted for her if they were mad at her. The board made a short-sighted, political decision that will harm Metro and the South Bay in the long term.

Bat signal to Sacramento

The Metro board needs reform. It needs fewer politicians who care mostly about their constituents and more experts who care mostly about transit. Fewer people who are as out of touch as Karen Bass, who marveled at yesterday’s meeting that Angelenos would actually advocate for transit:

Let’s get people on the Metro board who actually use transit. Who like transit. Who love cities and want them to work. Look at who’s on the board of WMATA, the Metro of Washington, DC:

• Senior urban development specialist with the World Bank

• Maryland’s Assistant Transportation Secretary for Planning and Project Development

• Fairfax County, Virginia supervisor

• Fellow at Brookings Metro, studying commercial real estate, infrastructure, racial justice, and governance

• Associate Director of Maryland Government Affairs for Johns Hopkins University

• Group Vice President of Maritime Policy and Government Affairs at MSC Group

These look like serious people. They are appointed by elected officials. They are mostly not elected officials themselves.

As it happens, the state legislature decides how Metro’s board is structured, and Sacramento will need to make changes before 2030. That’s because of Measure G, an LA County ballot measure we passed in 2024 that expands the number of LA County Supervisors from five to nine in 2030. Currently, all five county supervisors sit on the 13-member Metro Board, but Sacramento gets to decide what happens when the supervisors expand to nine.

LA is blessed with a Metro that, thanks to several voter-passed sales tax hikes, is well-funded and has big plans for our future. The fully built-out network is a functional, usable, and dare I say transformational public transit system.

This is a huge, decades-long, $100 billion undertaking. For Metro to succeed, it needs better governance. Better leadership. Yesterday.

Los Angeles is not exactly famous for its pristine asphalt. 7,500 miles of streets are a lot to maintain, and StreetsLA, the department in charge of doing the maintenance, has been understaffed for years. As a result, only 60% of our streets are in a state of good repair (see p. 510 here), and the city pays millions of dollars a year to compensate drivers whose cars are damaged by potholes.

It’s such a cliche that LA’s streets are in bad shape that a couple years ago, Arnold Schwarznegger thought he could score some publicity by playing Good Samaritan and filling in a pothole in his neighborhood himself - except it turned out to be a trench cut by SoCalGas as part of an active project.

Well, we might all need to become better versions of Arnold, because the city has quietly stopped repaving our streets altogether. Here’s LA’s StreetStat Dashboard:

StreetsLA has resurfaced exactly zero miles since July 1st. And they stopped pretty abruptly - their list of resurfacing work completed has lots of projects leading right up to June 30th, and then nothing. Notice the list is updated as of last week.

And this is not some kind of temporary delay. In their budget proposal for next fiscal year, starting July 2026, StreetsLA is proposing to practically zero out resurfacing next year as well. In a bit of hiding the football, the budget calls for 560 lane miles of “resurfacing and slurry seal” (p. 156), and then later mentions that 500 miles of that are slurry seal (p. 501). Slurry seal is a temporary coating applied to streets in already pretty good condition to extend their lifetime a few years before they need repaving. That leaves funding for a whole 60 lane miles of actual resurfacing (out of 7,500!) if these numbers are accurate.

Last year, the city resurfaced 312 lane miles and slurry sealed 761 lane miles. What are they going to do next year with all the money they save from doing way less? StreetsLA is proposing instead to do 1,000 “large asphalt repairs.” StreetsLA defines large asphalt repair as “a pavement maintenance activity that addresses localized but significant damage to asphalt streets, typically larger than a standard pothole repair, but smaller than full resurfacing or reconstruction.” Basically, it involves repaving only part of a street, not the entire width. Here is an example of a large asphalt repair the city did on Spring St. in September:

The thing about large asphalt repair is that it’s…not a real thing. It appears to be a term made up by the city some time in the last year. Googling “large asphalt repair” pretty much only returns results from LA city government. Googling “slurry seal”, on the other hand, leads to explanatory pages on all kinds of cities’ websites.

Why did the city suddenly stop repaving streets and shift instead to repaving only parts of them? Why is it using a made up phrase to describe its work?

PROWAG the dog

In 1994, the federal government made a rule that when a street is repaved, the curb ramps on the sidewalk next to the street must be brought up to the latest ADA standards. LA’s own Bureau of Engineering published a memo in 2020 spelling out how to comply with the requirement. But nobody in LA actually complied. Until this past July, the city routinely ignored ADA requirements when repaving its streets, and the curb ramps didn’t get updated.

Updating a curb ramp takes a big chunk of time and money. Each ramp costs about $50,000 - that’s $200,000 per intersection. At an average of 10 blocks per mile, updating all the curb ramps adds around $2 million/mile to the cost of repaving the street, whereas the asphalt costs only around $1 million/mile (at $3.79/square foot, according to the City Administrative Officer). And StreetsLA says curb ramps “typically take 9-12 months from design to construction” (see p. 413 here). The feds require the ramps be done by the time the road is repaved, so the city has to find the time and funding for the ramps before they can put down new asphalt. The city saw all this added complexity and decided to simply ignore the issue for decades.

What changed this year? In January, the feds adopted updated guidelines for the public right of way called PROWAG. The new guidelines basically repeat the same old requirement about updating curb ramps when repaving the street. Regardless, a city staffer told me PROWAG’s release is what finally made LA decide it had to start following the law.

It’s great news that the city has finally acknowledged its obligation to follow ADA law after all these years. The result, in a not upside-down world, would be a surge in installation of much needed curb ramps, making it easier to walk in LA for disabled folks, parents pushing strollers, and all kinds of other Angelenos. Or…

Large asphalt repair - the legal workaround

This is where someone in the city decided to get cute with the legal stuff. The feds say curb ramps have to be updated when a street is “altered” - repaving is considered an alteration - but not when doing maintenance, like filling potholes, patching pavement, or filling cracks. The city looked at these definitions and decided that from now on it would call all the repaving it did maintenance. Thus was born the city’s savior: “large asphalt repair”.

Here’s a large asphalt repair the city did on Century Blvd. in October:

Fixing 1½ lanes’ width of one block is basically patching. I’m not opposed in principle to StreetsLA devoting more resources to patching. I could see how they could use it strategically to fix bad pavement on more streets around the city than they could with full resurfacing. The problem is that the city isn’t doing large asphalt repairs because it discovered an innovative way to fix a larger number of streets. It’s doing them because it discovered an innovative way to wriggle out of its ADA obligations.

If you don’t believe this is about the ADA, behold the one repaving-adjacent activity that StreetsLA continues to do without interruption: slurry sealing. 240 lane miles since July. Slurry sealing can look like repaving but really just covers the asphalt with a layer of bitumen to put off repaving for a few years. The city continues to do it because the federal government has explicitly said that slurry sealing is maintenance, which means - ding ding! - it doesn’t trigger ADA compliance.

I’m not a lawyer, but I can’t imagine these shenanigans are going to hold up in court. As North Westwood Neighborhood Council boardmember Connor Webb pointed out on Bluesky, the Dept. of Justice already threw down the gauntlet in 2015:

A history of failure

The sad truth is that none of our curb ramps would have to be updated during repaving if the city had already been keeping up with its overall ADA obligations over the years. LA has about 80,000 curb ramps, many of them outdated, plus over 12,000 corners with no ramp at all, but we budget for building only 200 ramps a year. At that rate, it would take 60 years just to cut curb ramps on the corners that don’t have them, and then another four centuries to update all the existing ramps. Instead, we have tens of thousands of curb ramps that are decades old. The irony is too bitter to be funny - the city’s historic failure to maintain one part of its basic infrastructure (curb ramps) has now forced it to stop maintaining another part of its basic infrastructure (streets).

LA simply doesn’t spend enough on its streets and sidewalks - $267 per capita according to Streets For All. That’s “almost half of what NYC and San Diego spend, and a third of what is spent in Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco”. Worse, the city has never comprehensively planned how it installs or maintains its infrastructure, which is why organizations like Investing In Place spent years advocating for the city to transition to a five-year Capital Infrastructure Plan. Mayor Bass signed an executive order in late 2024 putting in motion the process of drafting a CIP. But that process is still in its infancy, and no one knows whether it will lead to more resources allocated toward maintenance of curb ramps, streets, or anything else.

What does this mean for HLA?

Remember Measure HLA, which we passed last year by an almost 2:1 margin, voting to force the city to implement its own Mobility Plan that passed in 2015 but had stalled for years? The plan says that when a street is repaved, the city has to install any elements (bike lanes, bus lanes, etc.) planned for that street in the Mobility Plan. What happens when the city stops repaving its streets?

This question has been covered extensively by Streetsblog L.A.’s Joe Linton, who has not only been reporting on the city’s terrible implementation of HLA so far, but also, in a personal capacity, filed a series of HLA appeals to the Board of Public Works. One of those appeals revealed the city’s thinking on large asphalt repairs and HLA. When the city repaved Hollywood Blvd. and installed protected bike lanes last year - a wonderful project! - Linton noticed they didn’t put in all the elements required by the Mobility Plan.

He filed an appeal, and amazingly, the city claimed the project didn’t trigger HLA at all, because they didn’t actually resurface the street. It was a large asphalt repair.

The appeal was denied.

Once again, the city has made a legally dubious decision, all hinging on the idea that large asphalt repair is only maintenance. The HLA implementation ordinance says HLA is not triggered by “routine pothole repairs; utility cuts; or emergency repairs“. Is large asphalt repair just a repair? It’ll probably be up to the courts to decide.

If all the city will do to maintain its streets going forward is large asphalt repair and slurry sealing, HLA implementation is basically not going to happen until someone forces LA’s hand. The city’s invention of large asphalt repair has allowed it to wriggle out of two basic commitments - making our sidewalks safe to walk on, and making our streets safe to ride on. Maybe ADA and safe streets advocates can come together to fight this large asphalt abomination together, because the safety of just about every Angeleno outside of a car depends on it.

Now that SB 79 is the law of the land (thanks, LA City Council!), cities across California are scrambling to figure out how to implement it. The law is a sprawling beast - it was amended 15 times as it wound its way through the state legislature. If you need a refresher, Aaron Eckhouse and Nolan Gray of California YIMBY wrote a great breakdown of what’s in the law, and Streets For All made the best map of where in LA it will likely apply.

Some of the most complex amendments address Imelda Padilla’s number one job - local control. Cities get five years to craft their own tailored transit-oriented zoning plans that would supersede SB 79’s blunt instrument. In the meantime, they can choose to exempt some parts of their city from the law. Here are the places cities can exempt for the next five years:

• Fire zones

• Sea level rise zones

• Historic buildings

• Low-income neighborhoods

There are also a couple provisions that give cities credit for transit-oriented zoning they’ve already done (like CHIP here in LA). For the next five years, cities can exempt:

• Individual parcels that are already zoned for apartment buildings at least half the size that SB 79 allows.

• The entire area around transit stations that are already zoned for 75% of the building capacity that SB 79 allows (40% if the area is mostly low-income).

All these five-year deferrals are optional - cities can use them or not. But they have to decide by July 1st of next year, when the law takes effect. And the deadline is more like March, because the state housing department has to approve cities’ deferral choices, which can take up to 120 days. That means LA has about four months to decide where SB 79 will apply for the next five years.

In LA, these potential deferrals are a big deal. Streets For All calculated that about 2/3 of the SB 79 parcels in LA are eligible for deferral - that’s over a million potential new homes at stake. The biggest chunk is low-income neighborhoods, which covers around half of parcels - the A, B, and E Lines, and the under-construction East Valley light rail line all pass through a bunch of low-income parts of the city.

So what will City Council decide? Which parts of LA will SB 79 take effect in next July, and which parts will have to wait until 2031?

The low-hanging fruit

The reason deferral of historic buildings is a slam dunk? A quirk in how the law was written. In the alternative plans that cities get five years to craft, they are allowed to exempt historic buildings, but only up to 10% of the parcels around each station. That means the city will be forced to pick favorites, choosing which historic buildings are exempted in the final plan and which aren’t - a highly charged effort that surely nobody is excited about. The obvious choice for now is to defer everything for the next five years while some poor souls in the Planning Dept. lead an extensive outreach program to pit homeowners against each other in a battle to see whose 1923 Spanish Revival bungalows survive and whose get sacrificed on the YIMBY altar.

Low-income neighborhoods

Housing justice groups like ACT-LA advocated for cities’ ability to defer low-income neighborhoods for five years while they craft their local plans. ACT-LA argues in a letter that the extra time will give low-income folks a chance “to learn about the law and engage in a deliberate, community-driven planning process ahead of SB 79 taking effect.” Their biggest concern is protecting existing tenants in those areas from being displaced by new development.

Others argue for letting SB 79 take effect in at least some parts of low-income neighborhoods. Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, who represents many of these neighborhoods, is known to covet more market-rate development for his district and may want to see apartments built on its commercial corridors. Abundant Housing LA, who wrote their own letter, advocate for going further by also applying SB 79 immediately to single-family areas in low-income neighborhoods.

The political pressure to defer low-income neighborhoods will be enormous, especially for single-family areas. In some parts of South LA, like this neighborhood near the Expo/Western E Line station, about half of houses are renter-occupied. Homeowners and tenants fighting for the same thing? Good luck going up against that. As for low-income commercial corridors, it ultimately depends what individual councilmembers think about CHIP.

CHIP away?

Commercial corridors across LA already got upzoned by CHIP, the big set of incentive programs adopted in February to try to meet our state-mandated housing targets. The program that upzones near transit stations is called Transit-Oriented Incentive Areas, or TOIA. In most cases, TOIA allows bigger buildings and requires a higher percentage of affordable apartments than SB 79 does. ACT-LA is advocating for all TOIA-eligible sites across the city to be deferred, arguing that letting developers use SB 79 instead would create “a lose-lose result where SB 79 encourages slightly smaller projects with less affordable housing.” Greg Bonett of Public Counsel, who helped draft the ACT-LA letter, told me this is “not a super close call” - TOIA requires roughly double the affordable housing set-aside than SB 79, so letting developers use SB 79 would cost the city a bunch of affordable homes, unless way more projects are built using the looser SB 79 rules.

Scott Epstein of Abundant Housing takes a different view. “More tools are good,” he told me. Until this year, the two upzoning tools used most by developers in LA were the city’s Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) program and the state density bonus law. Epstein noted some projects worked better with one program, some with the other. “You focus on abundance in as many tools as possible - that’s the way to get as many affordable units as possible.”

The problem with this debate is that it’s all theoretical. TOIA is a brand new program - we don’t know if developers can afford those stricter affordability requirements in this economic environment. The Planning Dept. announced in July that they had received pre-applications for 14,800 total homes through CHIP in four months - a lot! - but they’ve provided few details, including how many were proposed through TOIA. How can we compare it to SB 79, also a brand new program?

Greg Bonett argues that because both programs are unknowns, we should stick with CHIP, since it’s easier to change than SB 79, which requires going back to the legislature. If developers don’t end up proposing enough new apartment buildings through TOIA, Bonett says, City Council can tweak it until it starts producing.

The factor neither advocacy group mentions is pride. Many City Councilmembers stuck their necks out to vote for CHIP. Only a few did the same for SB 79. Katy Yaroslvasky specifically said she opposed SB 79 because we have CHIP, calling SB 79 “a blanket approach that overrides the targeted, context-sensitive local planning system tools we have just implemented here in Los Angeles.” CHIP is City Council’s baby. Most Councilmembers aren’t yet ready to give that baby a new little sibling.

Entire stations

Now for the juiciest part. The provision letting cities defer entire station areas if they’re already upzoned gives opportunistic City Councilmembers a chance to game the system. Take Wilshire/Fairfax, the one near all the historic districts.

Those diagonal streets at upper-right are Park La Brea, home to a bunch of 13-story apartment buildings that, along with the generous zoning along the Miracle Mile on Wilshire, could very well add up to 75% of the density allowed by SB 79. That existing capacity could give Katy Yaroslavsky the opportunity to defer the entire station area, including the upper-left part of the station, Beverly Grove, which is a neighborhood full of wealthy single-family homeowners, including that of one of LA’s most famous NIMBYs, Paul Koretz.

For SB 79 supporters, this is the nightmare scenario - City Councilmembers delay the law from taking effect in a bunch of the city’s wealthy single-family neighborhoods that happen to be located near bigger buildings. You can bet that homeowners in these neighborhoods are already running the numbers and lobbying their councilmembers to get their neighborhoods deferred. As Scott Epstein told me, “Rich people always find a way of getting around [stuff].” Both Abundant Housing and ACT-LA are gearing up for a fight on this front - both of their letters insist that SB 79 should take effect in wealthy areas right away.

Annoyingly, that fight will have to wait a few months while we await guidance from the state housing department. The problem is that it’s tricky to figure out what the zoned capacity is in an area. Consider this: nobody’s going to redevelop Park La Brea or the office towers on Wilshire. Should the 75% capacity calculation include those buildings - what’s already been built around a station - or only what could realistically be built in the future? Experts I’ve talked to are divided on what the law says. I’m hearing the housing department won’t even look at this issue until after the new year. Until then, all we can do is speculate.

What’s the point?

Why does SB 79 allow these five-year deferrals at all? Ostensibly it’s about giving cities time to write their own alternative plans. In those plans, cities will be allowed to shift the density around a bit, as long as every parcel allows an apartment building between half to double the SB 79 size, and the area around every station is upzoned at least the same total amount as SB 79 does. No matter what, almost all the deferred areas will end up getting upzoned in 2031.

So how will this work in practice? The city defers some of the more “sensitive” parts of town while writing its plan, and for the first five years all the development happens in the richer, less sensitive parts of town. Except, as we’ve seen, plenty of rich neighborhoods could get deferred too.

If you’re thinking this wasn’t super well thought out, you’re on to something. The deferrals weren’t added for policy reasons. They were added to get legislators’ votes. Unfortunately, the deferrals create a perverse incentive - they give constituents in deferred areas five years to lobby the state legislature to amend the law and exempt them permanently. People getting around [stuff]. If that happens, we could lose over a million new homes never built near our best transit. SB 79 supporters should go into this fight clear-eyed - the conversation might be about temporary deferrals, but the players might really be playing for keeps. What gets deferred now may never come back.

It came as no surprise when LA City Council voted last month to symbolically oppose SB 79, the state bill that would require cities to legalize apartment buildings around train stations. LA politicians, like those in plenty of other cities, have a long tradition of opposing bills they perceive would take away their control over real estate decisions. Over the years, City Council has passed resolutions against SB 827, SB 50, SB 9, and plenty of other proposals to override local zoning. Most of the resolutions passed unanimously.

Of course, this is mostly theater. The SB 79 resolution, like all its predecessors, is non-binding - the votes that matter take place in Sacramento. And as part of the theater, all the players gave their reactions to the media after the vote. Scott Wiener, the bill’s author, said Council was offering “no real solutions to address our housing shortage”. California YIMBY, one of the bill’s sponsors, released an angry statement denouncing Council’s “cowardice”. Neighborhood associations expressed their gratitude to Council.

But one crucial part of the script was different this time. The Council vote was closely divided, 8-5 with two abstentions, meaning the resolution passed with zero votes to spare. And it turns out that while supporters in Sacramento were publicly expressing outrage, privately they celebrated the five “no” votes and went into action. In an interview with bill co-sponsor Streets For All after SB 79 passed, Scott Wiener told the story (starting at 52:06):

What a disaster for City Council. They tried to send a strong message to Sacramento, one they hoped would sway some legislators to vote against the bill. A message was received, just not the one written in the resolution. LA has been so vehemently, unanimously opposed to state legislation for so long that when cracks in the consensus developed, the cracks are what got Sacramento’s attention. And as Wiener tells it, the divided vote actually persuaded more state legislators to support SB 79.

Mapping the vote

But perhaps you don’t believe Scott Wiener. You think he’s just engaging in some victory-lap rewriting of history. Surely this overlapping business couldn’t be true. Well, have I got some maps for you.

First, some background: the state legislators who represent LA in Sacramento have always lagged behind their Bay Area colleagues on housing. Whether NIMBYism is stronger here, or the housing crisis got bad later here, LA legislators historically have been much more likely to vote against housing bills than their Bay Area counterparts. The pattern held with the SB 79 vote:

It gets worse if you look specifically at the state legistators who represent the City of LA. Only three out of our 11 assemblymembers and one out of our seven state senators voted for SB 79. Brutal. But check out which ones voted yes, and you can see what Wiener is talking about.

Here are the districts of the five city councilmembers who voted against the city resolution because they supported SB 79:

Here are the districts of the three assemblymembers (Jessica Caloza, Mark Gonzalez, Sade Elhawary) from LA who voted for SB 79, overlaid onto the City Council votes. Assembly “yes” votes are in pink:

And here is the district of the only state senator (Maria Elena Durazo) from LA who voted for SB 79, in red:

The yes votes at the state level line up almost exactly with the yes votes at the city level. No state representative supported the bill without an overlapping city councilmember doing the same. You can see Wiener’s story playing out - maybe Assemblymember Jessica Caloza gained confidence from Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martinez’s vote, or maybe Assemblymember Sade Elhawary was inspired by the vote of Councilmember Marqueece Harris-Dawson.

The past: a legacy of segregation

The one councilmember whose vote doesn’t overlap with their corresponding state legislators is Nithya Raman, whose district is covered at the state level by several white representatives who all opposed the bill. Why do I mention their race? Because not a single white elected official at the city or state level who represents the City of LA voted to support SB 79. Not one. Which is particularly shameful considering white people literally invented zoning in order to keep people of color out of their neighborhoods. Zoning in LA is so strict/successful that despite being one of the most racially diverse metropolitan areas in the country, it is the sixth-most segregated. White officials who opposed SB 79 continued the long tradition of people like them voting to perpetuate the segregated status quo. Let’s put them up on the board:

The future: mapping LA’s prohousing core

What’s going on in Central LA, South LA, and the Eastside that would lead almost all their legislators at the city and state level to support a controversial upzoning bill? Are these politicians just taking cues from each other, or is something deeper going on? One clue can be found in a UCLA report from last month called “A Large Majority of Angelenos Want More Apartments — Even on Single-Family Streets”. UCLA polled 1,500 Angelenos on their housing views and then mapped the results by city council district. Check out where people said they support allowing apartment buildings in their own neighborhood (left) and on “streets that primarily have single-family houses” (right):

Central LA, South LA, and the Eastside are where voters have the most prohousing views. This is the city’s YIMBY core. Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising, since those areas are also where apartments are already legal to build, which means they have the most renters. The politicians that represent these voters are simply serving them by supporting prohousing policies that benefit renters. (And the politicians that represent parts of town dominated by homeowners - the Westside, the Valley, and San Pedro - are supporting policies that they perceive benefit homeowners.)

Seeing politicians in the YIMBY core of the city responding to their voters - you know, doing democracy - gives me hope that the prohousing movement in LA can become a truly popular movement with electoral power. Many elites are opposed to or skeptical of prohousing policies (see white faces above), but a bunch of renters have turned their representatives into YIMBYs - or elected prohousing candidates in the first place. In a city where most people are renters, maybe the way forward for the prohousing movement will be through the ballot box.

Imagine a video game in which you got to build America from scratch. Like Sim City on a national scale. You got to pick where all the cities went, where the farms were and what they grew, the national parks, roads, everything. And imagine you had to pick one location to become a megacity of 10 million people, the nation’s world class metropolis. You would pick the place where the most people would want to live and have the best chance to thrive - the place with the best combination of natural setting, weather, and opportunities for trade with other countries.

You would pick Los Angeles.

It’s the best location in the country, hands down. Let’s play the video game and run through your thought process. You would pick LA even if you were sitting in your mom’s basement looking only at a physical map and a climate map:

• Your megacity should be on a coast so it can have a port.

• On the coasts, you need a good, temperate climate so people will want to settle in your megacity. The West Coast has better weather than the East Coast (terrible winters) or Gulf Coast (terrible summers).

• On the West Coast, you need enough room for all the people in your megacity. The Los Angeles Basin is the largest coastal plain on the West Coast - it’s the only land wide and flat enough to support 10 million people.

Ok, so you picked LA by process of elimination without knowing anything about it. Did you pick a nice place? Oh hell yes you did:

Now let’s set the video game scenario aside and talk about the strengths of the real Los Angeles as it exists today, starting with its layout. Unlike other Sunbelt cities, much of LA was originally designed not for cars but for what was once the largest streetcar network in the world. This means the city already has many dense, walkable neighborhoods that provide a good starting point for growth.

Also, LA’s temperate climate allows homes to use relatively little heat and air conditioning, which means each Angeleno has one of the lowest carbon footprints of any city dweller in the country, even though we drive more than in some other cities.

But even given this long list of physical advantages, LA’s greatest asset is really its people:

• Incredible cultural diversity. LA is home to Little Ethiopia, Little Bangladesh, Little Armenia, Little Tokyo and Little Osaka…It is the city with the most Salvadorans outside of El Salvador, the most Koreans outside Korea, the most Iranians outside Iran, the most Filipinos outside the Philippines…

• Culture of openness and tolerance. LA has always been a place people move to in order to start anew, from a sunshine-seeking Midwesterner in the 1920s, to a Mexican immigrant in the 1980s, to an aspiring actor last Tuesday. A city of people reinventing themselves is a city open to new ideas, tolerant of differences, and buzzing with the potential for greatness.

• Creativity and innovation. At no point in world history has a greater collection of creatively talented people ever assembled in one place than right now in LA. From movies to music to art to architecture to tech - this is the place to be if you dream of making a living off your dreams.

Let’s up the stakes: Los Angeles has the best bones of any city in the world. I challenge you to name a city on Earth with a better combination of natural setting, climate, geographical location, and culture. Rio is less culturally diverse. Sydney is more isolated. Singapore has worse weather. Marseille doesn’t have the natural setting.

Where is everybody?

There is no reason why LA shouldn’t be a much bigger city. More people deserve to live in such a wonderful place. In fact, more people want to live here. They just can’t - there’s nowhere to put them.

In the second half of the 20th century, through a series of zoning changes, Angelenos made it impossible for the city to grow. LA’s zoning laws used to plan for growth - the laws allowed enough homes to eventually be built to accommodate around 10 million people. But starting in the 1960s, downzoning after downzoning reduced that capacity to barely above the actual population. And the city wasn’t subtle about it. In 1972, the the Planning Dept. issued a 75-page report calling for a population ceiling of 4.1 million. Once the ceiling was implemented (see plummeting black line below), it became illegal to build enough housing to let the city grow.

The population ceiling worked. LA basically stopped growing around 2000. In the 21st century, the city has added a paltry 175,000 people, an 0.2% annual growth rate. For comparison, in the same time period, Phoenix and Houston grew 2.0% annually, Vegas and Orlando 2.4%, and Austin 3.0%.

Let’s say LA lifted the ceiling and began growing like Phoenix and Houston. Starting with a 2025 population of 3.8 million and adding 2% compounded every year gets us to…10 million Angelenos by 2075. We can get there if LA grows for next 50 years at the same pace that the next two biggest Sunbelt cities have grown for the past 25 years.

Getting to 10 million

To achieve 2% annual growth for 50 years, LA will have to change how it has thought about change for the previous 50 years. Put simply, we have prioritized preserving what is here now (but not who is here now) and have feared the changes that new development brings. Almost every time a chance to grow presents itself, we get anxious about the potential harms of change - the neighborhood will look different! the low-income neighbors will move away! there won’t be any parking! - and claw it back.

The problem is that the harm is happening regardless. LA has the most unhoused people in the country. Those who stay housed are moving away in droves to find cheaper housing.

It doesn’t have to be this way. If we Angelenos can ditch our scarcity mentality and embrace our megacity destiny, we can start growing again.

First, we can start by planning for more growth. Add much more zoning capacity around the biggest job centers and best transit. Stop excluding entire neighborhoods from the process just because they only contain houses today.

Then we can prioritize growth. Make it more attractive for builders to develop housing in the city. Overhaul our broken approval and permitting processes so apartments take less than an average of 1,748 days to build. Cut “impact” fees. Treat newly built townhomes and apartments as valuable in themselves, not something to extract value from (looking at you, ULA tax). Roll out the red carpet for anyone who builds affordable housing. Build social housing.

We also have to make sure that when we add millions more Angelenos, we don’t add millions more cars. That means building more trains, bus lanes, bike paths, and sidewalks so people can get around the city in safer, healthier, and less stressful ways.

While we’re dreaming, let’s also repeal Proposition 13 so our city isn’t perpetually broke and can fund the services we need. Building a bunch of new buildings and adding a bunch of new residents will help increase the city’s revenues as it grows, but getting rid of Prop 13 would do the job much faster.

What does 10 million look like?

Are we talking about the “Manhattanization” of Los Angeles here? Not at all. 10 million people living in LA’s 469 square miles equals a density of about 21,000 people per square mile. Just how dense is that?

• Less dense than New York City (28,000 people per square mile across all five boroughs). About the same density as Queens (22,000).

• A bit more dense than San Francisco (19,000).

• About the same density as Palms (21,000), Playa Vista (21,000), and Hollywood (23,000). Of those three neighborhoods, only Hollywood has any buildings over 7 stories tall.

We don’t need to build a bunch of skyscrapers all over the city to get to 10 million. San Francisco has neighborhoods with skyscrapers and neighborhoods that look like this:

There is so much valuable, underused land in LA that could be put to much better use. Take the intersection of Beverly and La Brea Boulevards, a location in an excellent neighborhood, close to several job centers, walkable to all kinds of shops and restaurants, and served by two high-frequency bus lines. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is one of the best places in the world to live. If you asked a mother in a less prosperous part of the world to point to a place she would dream of raising her kids, this would be one of the best spots for her to put her finger down.

At this world-class location, you will find two Chevron gas stations, a car rental agency, and a small strip mall.

Just a total waste of this valuable place. More people should live at Beverly and La Brea, and at countless other underdeveloped places in the city. We can get to 10 million without radically altering LA’s feel, unless you count gas stations as historically significant and worthy of preservation (as some do!).

Why?

You may be wondering what the point of this exercise is. Just because some random blogger thinks LA has room to grow, why should it? Because I think it’s a tragedy that more people don’t get to live in this magnificent city. That LA is hemorrhaging families instead of welcoming them. I have personally lost friend after friend to other cities - Phoenix, Albuquerque, Portland, Redlands, the list goes on and on. None of them wanted to leave. But housing costs forced them out.

When my friends left town, they moved to places less prosperous than LA. They were downwardly mobile. It’s bad for the country when people are forced to move to less economically productive places. It’s bad for LA to lose young families who would have contributed so much to this city. And of course, it’s terrible for my friends not to be able to live where they want.

We are so lucky to live in a place where so many people want to be. That’s the best kind of city - where people are happy to be there! I want LA to be generous and capacious enough to welcome all who want to live here.

An LA of 10 million people will be a stronger city. More economically dynamic. More politically powerful. Able to take bigger swings. At this moment, LA is practically paralyzed by a generational budget crisis, an anemic response to the Palisades Fire, and sluggish preparations for the Olympics. Wouldn’t it be nice to live in a city with more capacity to tackle big problems? Let’s ditch our scarcity mentality and start growing.

One heartbreaking part of this story is how systemic racism pushed Black residents into the path of the fire. Although it started east of town, the fire burned more of Altadena west of Lake Ave. - the heart of the Black community. It’s no coincidence that more Black folks lived west of Lake – in the mid-20^th century, the racist practice of redlining and the enduring racism of real estate agents made West Altadena (yellow on map) their only option. Then last month, the brutal whims of nature targeted them once again.

Another injustice came on the night of the fire. In what one can only hope is a cruel coincidence, residents living east of Lake got an alert to evacuate within half an hour of the fire breaking out on their side of town, while West Altadena did not receive an evacuation alert until nearly five hours after the flames first crossed Lake. All 17 people who died in Altadena were west of Lake.

What do we owe Black Altadena? While there are plenty of questions about whether neighborhoods in risky areas should be rebuilt at all, it seems to me that if there is a community that deserves to be rebuilt, Altadena is it. How can it be done in a way that preserves the Black community instead of upending it? One of the politicians with the most power over how these questions get answered – County Supervisor Kathryn Barger – has made it clear where she stands. In an op-ed, she made “a commitment to ensure that everyone who calls Altadena home can remain a part of its future.” She continued:

Powerful stuff! But Supervisor Barger’s track record on housing is mixed at best – last year, she blocked affordable housing due to NIMBY opposition – and it’s hard to trust that she’ll do the right thing for Altadena. As we’ll see, her instinct to block housing was activated again by the Eaton fire.

In late January, tucked in a wide-ranging motion covering countywide wildfire recovery efforts from debris removal to inspection of farm crops exposed to smoke, Barger laid out how she plans to save Altadena’s Black community: build back just the way it was. She explained that her motion would “help rebuild Altadena in the image of what it was before this deadly fire.” The part of the “image” that Barger can try to control is the buildings. She’s betting that if we rebuild the same buildings, the same people will come back. But what if rebuilding the buildings means the people leave?

I’m interested in how this motion would affect Altadena’s people, not its buildings. Let’s look at how this motion would affect three groups – homeowners, small businesses, and renters.

Homeowners

Altadena was a community of middle-class homeowners – 74% of Black residents owned their homes. They understandably have plenty of anxiety about whether they can afford to rebuild. Most of them are seniors on a fixed income, and many of those had paid off their mortgages and dropped their homeowners insurance. Those that do have insurance may not get a big enough payout to rebuild. Fire hazard maps may be redrawn, requiring newly built homes to include costly fire-hardening measures that cash-poor homeowners can’t afford. Speculators are already calling with exploitative offers to buy folks out. If you know anything about this country’s history of real estate (or emergency alerts, or Covid, or maternal health, or…), you know that Black folks have very little reason to trust that people will be looking out for them in this process.

What does Barger’s motion do to help cash-poor Black homeowners rebuild? Not much. It prioritizes building back what was there before. Homeowners who apply to build the same size house as before get to cut to the front of the line in the approvals process. “Like-for-like” rebuilds even get their own special permit review team. While this sounds sensible, it ignores the many homeowners who can’t afford to build like-for-like. Aid efforts are being put in place to help cash-poor homeowners, but they aren’t likely to be enough – the collective homeowner shortfall could run to the hundreds of millions. Instead, if Barger were serious about helping Black homeowners rebuild, there are several policies she could leverage:

• SB 9, the duplex law, provides homeowners with several ways to unlock the wealth tied up in their land. They can split their lot and sell half of it, or build a duplex and sell half of it, or even split the lot and build two duplexes.

• A new state law allows several townhouses or condos to be built on any vacant lot. Homeowners could sell to a developer on the condition that they get one of the new homes for free.

• Another new state law allows homeowners to sell an ADU built on their property – but their city has to pass an implementation law first. The County could work on legalizing the sale of ADU’s. Instead, Barger’s motion asks the state to let them take longer to approve them. Bodek also said she wants ADU’s banned in fire zones countywide, which would make them illegal in Altadena if fire maps are redrawn to include it.

For Black homeowners who lost their homes, their wealth is literally in the ground – they still own their land. Until recently, the only way for folks to access that wealth was to sell their property and be displaced from the neighborhood – which is a big reason why the Black share of Altadena’s population fell from 43% in 1980 to only 18% today. Now homeowners have tools to unlock the wealth in their land and stay. But instead of prioritizing these tools, the County is sending homeowners who use them to the back of the line while their wealthier neighbors sail through the approval process. Given that the County will potentially have to process permits for more than 6,000 houses, that could mean years of delay for folks using creative ways to stay in their community.

Why make it hard for homeowners to leverage their land wealth? Because what all these tools have in common is that they add density, and they require homeowners to partner with developers. This scenario triggers the County’s worst NIMBY instincts. At the hearing to consider Barger’s motion, Planning Director Amy Bodek used some impressively fuzzy math to tell us what she thinks will happen to all those households if they partner with developers:

If you only think developers = unscrupulous = displacement, you can’t imagine developers = partners = remaining in the community.

The result of this blindness to the usefulness of developers will likely be that many Black homeowners will be forced to sell and move away. This displacement will happen because of not building. Barger talks a good game about preventing displacement, but that’s exactly what she is encouraging.

At the hearing, Barger said, “Altadena’s future must be shaped by those who call it home.” But she’s not letting them shape it. Instead, Altadena’s future is being shaped by Kathryn Barger.

Small Businesses

This is where things get weird, with a twist at the end. Barger’s motion proposes that the Board of Supervisors ask Governor Newsom to suspend for five years a bunch of state laws that make it easier to build apartment buildings. The list includes just about every major housing law passed in the last few years to address California’s housing shortage – SB 330, SB 35, SB 6, AB 2011, AB 2097, Density Bonus Law, and more. To rebuild Altadena, Kathryn Barger wants to make it harder to build.

Why suspend all these laws that make it easier to build apartment buildings? Here’s Amy Bodek:

Translation: To bring back the 800 businesses that burned down, we want to force the property owners on Altadena’s main streets to rebuild the same one-story commercial strips instead of selling to a developer who might build an apartment building. If we make it impossible to build apartment buildings, the property owners will have no choice but to rebuild.

That’s unlikely to happen. Let’s say you’re the owner of the cute brick building in Mariposa Junction (pictured above) where Altadena Hardware and a few small businesses were located. You like the idea of rebuilding, but who’s to say your tenants will come back? How long will it take until enough people live in Altadena to support the kinds of small businesses – a hat store, a bike shop – that paid rent so you could pay your mortgage? (Six years after Paradise burned in the Camp fire, with an intense rebuilding effort, the population is one-third its pre-fire size.) You might conclude it’s too risky to build another small commercial strip. Or maybe your insurance payout just isn’t enough to cover rebuilding. Maybe you’ll just wait out the five-year pause and then sell to a developer who can build an apartment building. That is, if you can afford to pay your mortgage in the meantime – if not, you’ll lose your property to the bank, which can afford to sit on it until the building pause is lifted.

Businesses can’t survive in a city without people. Until Altadena’s population rebounds, few property owners are going to take the risk of rebuilding what was there before. This motion isn’t a recipe for building back Altadena’s commercial corridors the way they were. It’s a recipe for vacant lots.

There is another way. If the County can’t convince the Governor to suspend all those state laws, apartment buildings could be built on Altadena’s main streets, bringing more people to live in the community. Enough people to support the small businesses Kathryn Barger says she wants to save. Instead of suspending laws that enable apartment buildings to be built, why not improve them – for example, require developers to build ground floor commercial spaces and give displaced businesses the first right of return at their old rent?

Now here’s the twist: just one month before the fire, the County legalized the very apartment buildings they are trying to ban on Altadena’s main streets! Bodek:

Wait a minute. Before the fire, they believed upzoning created the potential for massive displacement of small businesses, which they say is terrible, but they went ahead with it anyway? And now that 800 businesses have actually been displaced by fire, they want backsies? Something is broken here. Zoning should reflect a holistic, long-term vision for a community. Did this vision include the displacement of Altadena’s treasured small businesses? Or is something else going on?

I don’t think they believe this talk about displacing businesses. They didn’t when they upzoned, and they don’t now. They don’t believe small businesses are actually going to sit tight for several years while their old building is rebuilt and then move back in.

So what’s Barger up to with suspending all these laws? I think she wants a do-over on the upzoning. Here’s what she said in December when she reluctantly voted to approve it:

Barger likes to assert control over housing. As I mentioned, she blocked a senior affordable housing project in San Dimas after community pressure. In Altadena, she demanded the developer of a another senior housing project make the building shorter (thankfully, that project got built and survived the fire). For Barger, legalizing apartments in Altadena in response to state mandates seems to have represented an intolerable loss of control. Perhaps the fire presented her with an opportunity to take it back.

Renters

One group that has gotten overlooked in this conversation is Altadena’s renters. The fire burned 122 apartment buildings in Altadena, most of them smaller and older. These naturally affordable homes keep affluent neighborhoods from becoming only playgrounds for the rich. In a town where the median house is worth $1.1 million, renters could afford to live in Altadena’s older apartment buildings and keep the neighborhood at least somewhat economically diverse. Amy Bodek:

But they’re not. The thing about affordable housing is that it’s almost impossible to build naturally without the government chipping in to subsidize it. One place that has made it work is the City of LA, whose ED 1 program has been a smashing success, with developers submitting plans for tens of thousands of affordable homes with no government funding. But ED 1 works because developers can take advantage of state laws that lower developers’ costs by letting them build bigger, denser buildings with no parking and enabling them to charge low rents. Guess which state laws Barger wants suspended?

Another way to get affordable housing is to give developers incentive to set aside a few apartments for low income tenants when they build a new apartment building. If the developer sets aside the units, they get to build bigger or faster. This is the basis of the state density bonus law, which Barger wants to suspend. If she gets her way, developers of new apartment buildings will have no incentive to include affordable units. When the owner of an old, naturally affordable four-unit building has no choice but to rebuild like-for-like, “in the image of what it was before”, the rents in the rebuilt apartments will be much higher than they were in the ones that burned down. Same building, different people. What does this mean for renters? Unless Altadena gets a massive influx of government funding to build affordable housing (unlikely!), new apartments built in Altadena will be market-rate, and the old renters won’t come back. Again, displacement in the name of preserving the community.

Bottom line

Barger’s motion is a disaster for Altadena’s Black community. Here’s the nightmare scenario: only wealthy homeowners will be able to rebuild, lower-income renters will be displaced, and the smaller population that remains won’t be able to sustain the businesses that want to reopen. Altadena will become a whiter, wealthier bedroom community.

Many of the buildings will come back. But the community will be gone.

And to be clear, massive displacement of Black folks from Altadena had already been happening for decades before the fire due to the housing crisis. Listen to the people who live there, like Akeem Mair, who lives with his 94-year-old grandmother:

None of this is inevitable. It is driven by policy, and policy can be improved. Here are just a few ideas for helping Altadena’s Black community – its people – survive this tragedy:

1. Give cash-poor homeowners options. Expedite duplexes, lot splits, and small lot developments for homeowners who commit to moving back in to one of the new homes.

2. Create a clearinghouse of pre-approved designs for ADUs. Legalize selling ADUs.

3. Require ground-floor commercial in new apartment buildings. Require developers to offer them to displaced businesses at their old rent.

4. Let developers use independent reviewers to approve their plans if the County can’t do it within a reasonable timeframe.

What makes a community? Our cultural obsession with “neighborhood character” means the focus for decades has been on how the community looks – mostly its buildings. This is the approach Kathryn Barger is taking. But if we focus on rebuilding the buildings, we’ll get the Disney version of Altadena. It will look the same, but the people – homeowners and small business owners – won’t live there anymore. A neighborhood needs its characters. Put the people before the buildings, and Altadena’s Black community will get a fighting chance.