The most recent issue of The Economist has a short article entitled "Tackling the Hydra" about Los Angeles and urban design. It highlights the debate that is all too familiar to those of us in the coalition for affordable housing and sensible transportation design that takes more cars off the streets and puts more eyes and feet on the sidewalks.
Los Angeles has long epitomised car-oriented sprawl. As early as 1946 the historian Carey McWilliams judged it “a collection of suburbs in search of a city”. So rare are neighbourhoods where basic needs can be met without hopping into a car or bus that estate agents tout the few where they can as “walkable”. Urban planners elsewhere routinely invoke the city as an example of what to avoid.
Yeah, we know.... Do you have to rub it in?
The article goes on to talk about the competing views of how Los Angeles should change. More density or less? More density around transit, reasoning that "If the subway cannot reach the people, the thinking goes, the people must be brought to the subway," some say. Others will fight to block any and all development that includes higher density.
The article also notes that City Council just blocked a massive 5,600 home development in Santa Clarita, some 35 miles from the city. The freeways just can't take any more commuters. But until the housing in Los Angeles is more affordable, people will continue to locate outside the city and drive in.
People, like those in North Hollywood referenced in this article, claim that new live-work developments in their neighborhoods will create a nightmare of traffic worse that what exists already. What they refuse to acknowledge is that the chief cause of traffic in the city is people driving in from the suburbs because they can't afford housing in the city. Building affordable live-work developments in higher density in the city is actually part of the solution to traffic and pollution in Los Angeles.
It was fun to read a British magazine talking about Los Angeles and recognize the exact developments they are referring to.
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