Will Sacramento Be a Sucker For the Kings?

It Makes No Economic Sense For a Strapped City To Bribe Billionaire Team Owners. But, Let’s Face It, We’re Ripe For Extortion.

Walk into any room in Baltimore this month, be it barroom or living room, and you won’t need to know a trap block from a trapdoor to strike a spark of fellow-feeling and shared accomplishment. Just say, “How ’bout those Ravens?”

There is no community glue more universal than love of the home team. Winning isn’t even required. In Chicago a century of futility has bound Cubs fans as tightly as the stitches on a baseball. And in my hometown, we have never breathed together more as one place with one …

Urban Planner and Designer Melani Smith

Why Yes, I Am Busy Doing “Research”

Melani Smith is director of planning and urban design at downtown L.A.-based design firm Meléndrez; she’s currently working on the Figueroa Corridor Streetscape Project, which will link South L.A. and …

Downtown L.A. Has Arrived, Believe It or Not

A Panel In Grand Park Discusses the Future of One of the City’s Trickiest Neighborhoods

Will downtown L.A. ever work? It’s already working, said a four-person panel of architects, planners, and designers who’ve been closely involved with downtown over the past decade. At an event …

Is Downtown Finally Looking Up?

What Would It Take For Los Angeles To Have a Downtown That’s Considered World-Class?

 

Los Angeles, a place of constant reinvention, is always reinventing its downtown. For decades, those reinventions, and various big dreams for the city center, have been dashed. But the past …

Downtown Reborn?

Yes, We’ve Been Burned Before, But I Have Grand Hopes For Our New Park

In 2008, after years of living in different parts of Los Angeles, I moved downtown. I work as an attorney for the public defender in the downtown courthouse and had …

The Man With A Take-Some-Prisoners Approach

Assessing the Legacy of James Q. Wilson

Rarely does a public intellectual generate as much admiring disagreement as political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died this year at age 80. At a Zócalo event co-presented by UCLA …