“The ’90s,” as Zócalo Public Square publisher Gregory Rodriguez put it, “were rough” on Los Angeles. Rodriguez was moderating a Zócalo/Museum of Contemporary Art event at MOCA Grand Avenue provocatively titled, “Were the ’90s L.A.’s Golden Age?”

Tallying up the iconic Southern California disasters mentioned by the panelists over the course of the evening, the question might seem almost laughable. “But the reaction to the roughness was pretty extraordinary as well,” Rodriguez told an energetic crowd, many of whom clearly had lived through it. “There was this sense of vitality to the era.”

While the first half of the decade “was horrendous,” said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University, the second half marked a comeback that built the Los Angeles of today, and gave the city a greater sense of self. He recalled a UCLA professor telling him he was “parochial” for choosing the L.A. economy as the focus of his scholarship. But after watching the city nearly fall apart, almost every major institution of higher education formed a department dedicated to studying the city. “We rediscovered Los Angeles as academics in the 1990s,” he said, noting that today it can be hard to keep up with all the literature written about the city, a sharp departure from the early 1990s.

“For me, Los Angeles in the ’90s was all about culture,” recalled MOCA’s chief curator, Helen Molesworth. “When the needle dropped on NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, something shifted for me and a lot of my friends.” That was 1988, but for her it was when the ’90s began. “L.A. was all of a sudden a place where culture was made,” she said. MOCA’s 1992 exhibition “Helter Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990s” was a landmark event, as was watching the emergence of artists like Mike Kelley and Catherine Opie, “artists to be reckoned with,” said Molesworth. “The birth of L.A. as a culture engine is really the 1990s.”

Why, asked Rodriguez, did L.A. begin to take itself seriously in the 1990s?

Hollywood had always been the producer of mainstream culture for most of America, noted Harold Meyerson, the current executive editor of The American Prospect who served the same role at L.A. Weekly throughout the ’90s. The change came thanks to growing cultural legitimacy, but also to a political evolution that resulted from the chaotic events of the first half of the decade. It was “a story of the rise of a kind of Latino working class finally finding itself, finding an identity, and finding some power,” he said. The backlash in response to Proposition 187—a ballot initiative that banned undocumented immigrants from using state services including public education and non-emergency health care—changed Los Angeles politics. It birthed a new generation of Latino activists and brought together Latinos, the labor movement, and progressives in a coalition that changed the city and eventually the state then the country, Meyerson said.

Guerra elaborated on the changes brought about by this new coalition, including bringing Latinos into positions of political power, helping Los Angeles pass a 1997 bond measure allocating $2.4 billion to the building of new LAUSD schools, and passing propositions that led to the building of mass transit for those who couldn’t afford cars.

Turning to University of Southern California race and pop culture scholar Dr. Todd Boyd, Rodriguez asked how these changes, both political and demographic—as Anglos left the city and a Latino majority emerged—manifested themselves in depictions of Los Angeles at the time.

Boyd listed a number of movies that showed “Los Angeles as a destination but also as a unique identity”: Boyz n the Hood, Menace II Society, American Me, Boogie Nights, and Short Cuts. West Coast hip-hop emerged as a major force in music during this period as well. Today, the gang activity of the time and the way it seeped into popular discourse is “safe” and “nostalgic”; Straight Outta Compton was a blockbuster movie last summer. “But at the time, the elements that make up that film were taking place in the streets,” said Boyd. “It’s one thing to sit here now and look back on it fondly. But it’s another thing to have lived in the midst of it.”

These changes weren’t necessarily in evidence in the contemporary art world at the time, said Molesworth. In “Don’t Look Back: The 1990s at MOCA,” on view at the Geffen Contemporary at MOCA through July 11, 2016, only one work makes any mention of the 1992 riots. It was made, said Molesworth, by an African-American artist in New York who was depicting a white German critic’s obsession with these events. “This was still an extremely white institution concerned with problems of whiteness,” said Molesworth. And at the time, they would not even have been called “problems of whiteness … because they were just the problems of the culture.” She added, “When we look back on the ’90s, we look through the frame of the current moment.”

As the event drew to a close, Rodriguez asked the panelists to reflect on what is better and worse about the Los Angeles of today versus the Los Angeles of the 1990s.

“There was an edge, a sense of momentum, having been through these hells,” said Meyerson.“Recovering from all this there was a certain sense of bouncing back.” He added, somewhat ruefully (and with the caveat that he is only a visitor to the city and no longer a resident), “I don’t get a sense of a kind of momentum and edge today.”

Boyd recalled visiting downtown Los Angeles before he moved here in 1992. “I just remember how amazed I was at how barren downtown L.A. was,” he said. “It was not centralized, and there really wasn’t much going on at all.” A few years later, he decided to move downtown; people thought he was crazy. Not anymore. “This has become the hottest part of L.A. To go from it being barren and nothing to being crowded with traffic, multiple cultural options, multiple dining options, to have witnessed this and to have had it grow up around me—is one of the most interesting changes to L.A.,” he said.

Before turning the discussion over to an audience question-and-answer session that touched on the decline of Westwood as a destination and the problem of homelessness from the 1990s to the present, Rodriguez turned back to the central question of the evening: “I think we can conclude that while we had an edge and sense of momentum in the 1990s, it was not L.A.’s golden era.”

The post In the 1990s, Los Angeles Was Both Heaven and Hell appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

That is the good government proposal of choice in Los Angeles, the recommendation that candidates, elected officials, and blue-ribbon commissions make over and over. The theory behind the recommendation is that, without thoughtful and up-to-date community plans, the city lacks clear direction to guide decision-making about land use in our communities. And such guidance is vital at a time when many Angelenos want to create more livable neighborhoods.

The city of Los Angeles has 35 community plans—also called the “land use element” of the city’s legally required General Plan. (Cities have general plans to provide a comprehensive and long-range statement of priorities to guide public decision-making across various policy areas.) The city council adopted the current community plans in the 1980s and 1990s—meaning that they are decades out of date. L.A. was a younger and faster-growing city 30 years ago than it is today, and many of our neighborhoods have been changed by development and demography.

Our current obsession with updating the plans dates to a decade ago, when Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Director of Planning Gail Goldberg made updating the community plans a cornerstone of their broader approach to city planning. As conceived then, 35 separate updates, called “new community plans,” would be prepared and adopted over an eight-year period until all 35 community plans were in the hopper.

But, as of this writing, the City Council has adopted only three updated community plans—for Hollywood, Sylmar, and Granada Hills. The Hollywood plan envisioned taller buildings along major east-west boulevards and a denser core around Hollywood and Highland. But its methodology and content were so slipshod that in 2013 Superior Court Judge Alan Goodman rejected the update, as well as its voluminous “up-zoning” ordinances (which increased building densities and heights in Hollywood), its general plan amendments, and its companion environmental impact report.

To comply with Judge Goodman’s court order, the City Council reinstated the previous Hollywood community plan (1988), restored the zoning laws it had rescinded, and agreed to pay nearly $2 million in legal bills to the community groups and law firms that successfully challenged the updated plan.

Since that experience, the City Council has been reluctant to adopt additional updates, and understandably so. Why approve another round of flawed plans that could just meet the same judicial fate?

Of course, the delays haven’t stopped people from calling for updated plans. Last year, the City Council’s little noticed LA 2020 Commission’s Time For Action report criticized the delays and recommended that the Department of City Planning update all 35 community plans. Like most of the commission’s recommendations, this proposal received little traction at city hall. Instead, Planning has focused on revamping L.A.’s zoning code citywide through re:code LA in order to achieve the same goal as the community plan updates: up-zoning much of Los Angeles to permit greater density, uses, and heights.

This approach is shortsighted because community plans have great potential to change the city. They are the only parts of the General Plan that can readily amend local zoning and planning ordinances—and they are best way to enact detailed zoning and planning amendments that change local uses, densities, and heights in community plan areas.

While up-zoning is only one feature of the community plans, it happens to be the focus of most calls for updates. So city planners should not take calls for updates lightly.

But they are not a panacea. Community plans do have limits—they are not the way to make changes to emergency services, infrastructure, parks, streets, bike lanes, libraries, or schools. To update the plans that govern Los Angeles, we need to do much more. Why are there so few people demanding updates to the air quality, public safety, and conservation elements of the General Plan? Why not also update the other outdated discretionary general plan elements, such as the well-regarded framework element (a strategy for the city’s long-term growth that was last updated in 2001) or the totally forgotten 47-year-old infrastructure element (last updated in 1968)? Why not link the recently adopted mobility (transportation) element to the community plan updates, since mobility is now a high priority at city hall?

Here’s my answer to all these questions: Since the focus on updating the community plans right away hasn’t produced new community plans, why not try another approach—and update the other citywide plans first?

After all, the community plans are supposed to apply the citywide General Plan (and its various required and optional elements) to local communities. So, before you put in place community plans and apply them locally, it’d be best if the city would update that General Plan and its elements (housing, transportation, mobility, and the framework) first. It’s the logical approach.

But, big surprise, the general plan elements are also wildly out-of-date too. Why?

The official reason is lack of staff. But there also does not appear to be much interest in timely, comprehensive city planning among L.A.’s elected and appointed officials. Since real estate speculators need to move in and out of projects quickly, they prefer a deregulated environment that accommodates their abrupt investment decisions—without environmental reviews. The institutional culture of local government in Los Angeles has fully absorbed their outlook; the city planning units dealing with general plan updates are perpetually under-resourced.

The entire city General Plan is also barely monitored. Since municipal plans are only as good as their monitoring programs, any general plan element that is not regularly and comprehensively monitored can quickly become irrelevant. In contrast, well-prepared, closely tracked general plans are invaluable tools that can smooth out the bumps of business and budget cycles through zoning and environmental regulations that meet long-term goals, rather than immediate political pressures.

Perhaps the City Council’s recent adoption of the new mobility element is an opportunity to start updating the other elements—most of which are out-of-date—before tackling the community plans. These updates should be based on current census data, not fanciful extrapolations that give the false impression that Los Angeles is on the verge of another population boom.

In addition, the city should also prepare two other optional citywide general plan elements—climate change and economic development—instead of leaving these to strictly short-term, ad hoc actions by the mayor or the City Council.

With these in place, the City Planning Department could then prepare those spectacular local plans we keep hearing about but have not yet prepared or enacted.

The post How to Get L.A. to Update Its Community Plans—Finally appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.