I come to bury California’s parking lots, not to praise them.

The evil that abundant parking spaces do lives long after the ground is paved over.

So say the honorable officials and wise engineers of California. They tell us that parking consumes huge amounts of property that might be used more productively for business, housing, or transit infrastructure like bus or bike lanes. In L.A. County alone, parking covers 200 square miles. Most parking spaces are empty most of the time—people don’t park at home when they are at work, or park at work when they are at home.

Abundant and cheap parking encourages people to drive when they might walk or bike, which would improve their health. More driving means more accidents, and more injuries and death for car passengers and pedestrians. All that driving also creates pollution and greenhouse gases.

So, I understand why our cities are ganging up and sticking their knives into the Caesar of municipal parking requirements, the minimum number of spaces that must accompany new development. These requirements encourage sprawl, since parking requires more money and land, and property is cheaper and more plentiful far from our city centers. These rules also effectively block the construction of smaller, denser, more affordable housing, and the repurposing of old buildings for new purposes.

A number of cities are assassinating these requirements to make it easier to build new housing, without the extra costs and land necessary for parking. This year, Berkeley, following the example of a 2018 San Francisco ordinance, eliminated off-street parking requirements for new developments. Sacramento abolished its parking minimums as part of a broader zoning reform. San Diego and Oakland have eliminated parking requirements near transit, and San Jose may follow suit.

Now, higher levels of government are trying to finish off the parking lot. A bill from Assemblymember Laura Friedman of Glendale would eliminate parking requirements statewide for new buildings within half a mile of a transit corridor or major stop. President Biden’s infrastructure package includes provisions that would make it easier to eliminate parking requirements nationwide, in service of making construction more affordable.

I know such anti-parking policies are well-intentioned and honorable. And yet, I stare into the bleak future of the California parking lot, and my heart feels a strange sadness.

So, I speak now not to disprove what our honorable policymakers and editorial writers say, but here I am to speak what I have seen and known. Parking lots have been, for all their faults, good and true friends to me and our communities too.

Public lots often provide revenues to cash-starved cities. And local parking requirements also provide communities precious leverage with developers. Cities often offer exemptions from parking requirements in return for the developers providing more affordable units, or community benefits like parks, bus shuttles, or libraries to accompany their projects. Anti-eviction activists have used parking requirements to fight new developments that might displace existing residents.

But our state’s leaders say parking is a plague upon our communities. And they are wise and honorable people.

But have not parking lots provided great utility, even life-saving service, during the COVID-19 plague? Think how many more people might have died if our state didn’t have so many large parking lots—from Petco Park-adjacent lots in San Diego, to the Disneyland Resort parking garage in Anaheim, to the Cal Expo and State Fair lots in Sacramento—that could be turned into mass testing sites. Many of these same lots became centers for mass vaccination that finally allowed the state to control the coronavirus. No wonder Gov. Gavin Newsom gave his state-of-the-state speech at Dodger Stadium, surrounded by its ocean of heroic parking lots.

But the powers-that-be say parking lots prioritize cars over humans.

Sure, I did see hospitals use their lots to set up tents and house patients during COVID-19 surges. Communities turned parking lots into tent cities to shelter the homeless safely, and temporarily, with the virus spreading.

But those who would eliminate parking are right honorable public servants. Abundant parking, they remind us, robs our children of better futures. And they speak true.

Yet, with the state closing its schools and failing to provide reliable broadband, parking lots were all many young Californians had left.

Across the state, I encountered students without reliable Internet at home camped out in the parking lots of closed libraries and coffee shops so they could connect to the Wi-Fi they needed to continue their lessons. School districts routinely distributed laptops and books, and collected homework, in drive-through lines in their parking lots. And might our parking lots have saved in-person education itself, had they been allowed to become outdoor classrooms for our children?

Parking lots are bad for business, those honorable parking killers say. But weren’t parking lots also a godsend for business during the pandemic? Cities were aggressive in using their parking lots to allow restaurants and retailers to remain open and serve customers safely outside. Large parking lots became storage facilities for dormant rental cars, and for shipping containers that overflowed from ports whose workers couldn’t keep up with incoming traffic.

When our greatest gathering points closed, did not parking lots step in to provide solace and communal experience? In my hometown of Pasadena and so many other places, large parking lots became drive-in movie theaters. Churches, unable to safely use their sanctuaries, held services in parking lots; I took some comfort from a “drive-in Mass” I attended at the parking lot of Santa Rosa Catholic Church in Cambria.

You could even say parking lots saved democratic politics, as election rallies and events moved to drive-in. Might our fair state still be slurred daily by President Trump, without the dedicated service of so many parking lots to Joe Biden’s campaign?

I know that, after the traumas and loss of the last year, I am weak-minded and prone to cling to the familiar. I know that our honorable policymakers are right, and that we should rejoice, not cry, at the demise of the California parking lot. But my eyes, clouded by tears, see the progressive movement to reduce parking as both comedy and tragedy, of the kind Shakespeare might have written.

The post A Funeral Oration for the California Parking Lot appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

An interesting fact about city government is that, for the most part, all city departments (about 40) operate in silos. There is very little formal interdepartmental communication and coordination, and as a result overall service provision is not maximized.

In 2008, during the worst recession since the Great Depression, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilmembers Bernard C. Parks, Jan Perry, Janice Hahn and Herb Wesson decided to work together to improve conditions in South L.A. Their effort—to create and implement a five-year economic development strategic plan for South L.A. The plan was called the South L.A. Initiatives. It was novel because it focused on a region—not a council district or a neighborhood.

I was appointed by the mayor and supported by the councilmembers as the coordinator of the South L.A. Initiatives. From 2008 to 2013, I worked closely with the mayor, councilmembers, political staffers, city department executives and staff, and community members to bring services to South L.A.

It’s common knowledge that the city produces scores of plans that are eventually shelved. But unlike so many other plans for South L.A., this one measured the performance of the plan’s goals on an ongoing basis. Every month for five years, 15 departments reported their progress. Every quarter for five years, department executives met to solve problems, report progress, and identify areas of collaboration. Additionally, a 15-member community committee regularly received progress reports.

As a result of this performance-based strategic planning, the South L.A. region experienced over $600 million of investment, as well as serious analysis and attention from 15 city departments.

At the heart of the initiatives was a $250 million investment in neighborhood infrastructure. Streets, sewers, and stormwater systems were improved. Many trees were trimmed and alleys cleaned. Municipal facilities such as an aquatic center, parks, libraries, and fire stations were constructed.

In the employment arena, 6,000 jobs were created in the region. The city’s workforce center placed 25,000 South L.A. residents in jobs. Mayor Villaraigosa’s summer youth employment program resulted in over 17,000 jobs for local residents.

The South L.A. Initiatives also focused on housing, investing $100 million to develop nearly 2,000 affordable rental units, and $6 million in home repair and security to assist close to 3,000 low-income senior residents. The program also supported the conversion of 180 vacant or foreclosed properties into more than 400 housing units. And scores of city employees worked to move forward the redevelopment of the historic Jordan Downs public housing project.

Even with the economy in free fall, the Initiatives continued to back retail and small business enterprises. Among the projects supported were the Midtown Crossing and the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw renovation and expansion, the repositioning of industrial lands for new uses, efforts to attract national and international employers, and assistance to more than 3,500 small businesses.

The Initiatives also encouraged the planning department to complete the three community plans in the South L.A. region. These plans had not been updated for more than 10 years. The new plans thoughtfully established overlay plans for transit-oriented districts along the Expo and Blue Lines, streamlined land-use entitlements along the commercial and industrial corridors, and adopted a USC master plan.

As the coordinator of the South L.A. plan, it was my job to foster ongoing communication among all participants and to manage the performance measurement mechanism. As a result of the efforts of nearly 100 city employees, who worked thoughtfully and diligently to bring projects, information, and resources to improve the lives of South L.A. residents, the South L.A. Initiatives plan won the 2012 award for Planning Excellence, Large Jurisdictions from the American Planning Association-L.A. Chapter.

Fast forward, it’s now 2016—and what should South L.A. residents do? First, encourage your elected officials to create a regional strategic service plan. Several cities actually have strategic plans, but L.A.’s size and governance structure prevents a citywide plan. So it’s best to advocate for creation of regional plans within the city.

Next, South L.A. residents need to know how to complain. Yes, call 311, but also contact the council office, the Mayor’s South L.A. district representative, and the city commissioner in the department that interests you. Get to know your local service providers—for example, the manager at your sanitation or street cleaning yard, the park supervisor, the area Department of Water & Power manager. Advocate for services and don’t give up.

As Los Angeles continues to grow, the future of each neighborhood is in the hands of its residents. I have lived in South L.A. neighborhoods all of my adult life. I have witnessed the changes, the ebbs and flows. As the neighborhoods change from predominantly African American to mostly Latino or multicultural, we must move forward as one region, connected and committed to improving the conditions of our individual lives and the lives of all South L.A. residents.

The post What Did It Take to Clean Up South L.A.? $600 Million and Cooperation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

On the list of path-breaking private houses is everything from Irving Gill’s Dodge House of 1916 to Tadao Ando’s Malibu residence, still under construction. Yet the list of path-breaking public structures is pitifully short, especially for a city that has been a mecca for architectural talent. Once you’ve named the Bradbury Building, City Hall, Bullock’s Wilshire, the Department of Water and Power headquarters, the American Cement Building, Disney Hall, and the occasional gem like the Coca-Cola bottling plant on South Central Avenue, the roster quickly turns kitsch or plebeian.

The LADWP Headquarters in Downtown Los Angeles—an exception to the city’s rule of mediocre architecture.

Los Angeles has not one thrilling subway station portal and not one inspiring modern skyscraper. And all the billions of dollars spent by the Los Angeles Unified School District in the past decade on innumerable new campuses have produced nothing of any architectural value except a singular spiral folly that ascends from nowhere to nowhere, atop the main auditorium of the Ramon C. Cortines School Of Visual And Performing Arts.

Given this dismal record of public structures, can we even say architecture has mattered to Los Angeles? For all its talents and blessings of natural splendor, L.A. is a model dystopia. Wide swaths of the city are dull, sometimes even bleak. You can go for blocks and blocks without encountering a single, consistent architectural motif, and much of the landscape is encrusted with buildings that are little more than studio props decorated with a thin commercial patina of advertising—buildings as billboards.

All true. But this would be a misreading of Los Angeles and the nature of its architecture.

For starters, Los Angeles is perhaps the world’s first modern and almost purely “infrastructural city.” With no central force driving the city’s design—no Daniel Burnham, no Robert Moses—with an official sanction and scepter to wield, every effort to adopt a citywide plan floundered, leaving Los Angeles to the whims, and tightwad budgets, of developers. So the greatest public monuments in Los Angeles are not buildings at all. They are the enormous public works projects wrought by engineers: William Mulholland’s 1913 aqueduct, a siphon that, without a single pump, drew water from the Owens Valley to the San Fernando Valley; the freeways that crisscross the basin, designed by the state’s highway department; the more than a dozen bridges spanning the Los Angeles River, built between 1909 and 1944, the majority constructed by city engineer Merrill Butler; and the river itself, cemented and rip-rapped by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.

Without the foreign supply of water, without the easy means to cross the river, without the freeways (creating and abetting sprawl), and without the channelized river (liberating the plains south of downtown from the vicissitudes of a sometimes drunken, mad river), the free-form city would never have emerged. These engineering marvels are at once the framework of the city and among its most beautiful creations.

All this infrastructure—and countless smaller bits and pieces of engineering magic—allowed the city to spill out of the center, willy-nilly, and with alarming briskness, causing the center to decline in importance as rapidly as it emerged. Even by the 1920s, when downtown Los Angeles was booming (and when many of the buildings we are anxiously converting to lofts today were built), the civic center was loosening its grip on the city at large. The expansive fury spawned by all that poured-in-place concrete permitted architecture to become a mutt. There was no slow movement of time that allowed a progression of building types that might have been native reflections of the landscape.

The Day of the Locust author Nathanael West, an Eastern snob with a phony pedigree and an excoriating pen, described the result: “Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples, Swiss chalets, Tudor cottages, and every possible combination of these styles,” which, he peevishly suggested, ought to be dynamited. Mostly, we’ve just remodeled them—or left them to a slow decline.

Within this permissive chaos, a vernacular architecture has emerged. The design has less to do with the original appearance of the buildings than with how they have since been occupied and bent to new purposes. Cruise the boulevards and you’ll see a noisy clash of storefronts vying ceaselessly for attention—in a multiplicity of languages, scripts, fonts, colors, and materials. You’ll see entire buildings decorated in florid hand-painted murals or flooded in the fluorescent whiteness of illuminated plastic signs.

Typically, the facades have all but disappeared. What was once an undulating Zig-zag Moderne market, or a vaguely Rococo Spanish Colonial Revival restaurant, or an ordinary concrete block auto repair, has now metamorphosed into a Laundromat or a pawn shop or a storefront church.

This is architecture as it was once understood in the early New England village and in the original Spanish land grant. It is not a time capsule or shrine. It is an evolving collection of places in which citizens engage one another within a world of their shared making. This kind of architecture is about settling in, adapting, and accommodating a shift from one set of aims and hopes and desires to another.

And this is the architecture that matters in Los Angeles. It comes from the bottom up, not the top down. It springs from a multiplicity of influences, rather than just one. Outwardly, it appears messy, even ugly, especially to outsiders. It is also what gives our city its life and vitality. Without this percolating, mutable, and, yes, frustrating form, Los Angeles would be a city with less visual clutter—and a far duller place.

The post L.A. Only <em>Looks</em> Ugly appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.