A few years ago, Laura Friedman toured an affordable housing project in Glendale, the city of 200,000 she represents in the California State Assembly. What caught her eye was the garage: a cavernous, subterranean space, virtually empty. To comply with local parking requirements
two spaces for every studio or one-bedroom apartment, and rising from there the builders had been forced to pour millions of dollars of concrete and reduce their number of new apartments, all to build a garage their low-income tenants would never fill. “These requirements are definitely stopping housing,” she concluded.
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It’s a familiar situation: Nearly all California cities require that enormous amounts of parking accompany every piece of new construction. In Cupertino, for example, where Apple has its headquarters, a new single-family home must come with four parking spaces. Such requirements effectively block most small-scale, affordable, and infill housing; they distort the size and
On April 1, officials from the Los Angeles County Metro Transportation Authority (L.A. Metro) presented to the public controversial plans for a new Bus Rapid Transit line in Northeast L.A. connecting the San Fernando Valley to Pasadena. Then, for the next four hours, they fielded around 50 questions from more than 200 attendees, many of whom were irate at plans to convert car lanes to bus-only lanes on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock, a hip suburb in the middle of the intended route.
The dispute is another example of the gridlock behind the gridlock all across Los Angeles. When city officials try to convert auto transit to greener, faster and more equitable mass transit, they face organized, hostile opposition. Meanwhile, even ambitious vehicle electrification goals adding 70 million electric cars by 2030 and banning gas vehicle sales by 2035 are not enough to meet 1.5 degree Celsius warming targets, according to the Rocky Mountain Institute, a nonprofit studying climate change
Facebook’s Housing Echo Chamber Details
PERSPECTIVE-In 2019, I reported in 48 hills that the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative was using mega-grants to shape California housing law and policy.
CZI gave Enterprise Community Partners $500,000 to draft and then lobby for Assemblymember David Chiu’s AB 1487, the law that authorized the Metropolitan Transportation Commission to become a one-stop regional planning agency overseeing transportation and housing and to levy taxes on the nine-county Bay Area; CZI formally endorsed that bill.
CZI also gave the Terner Center for Housing Innovation at UC Berkeley nearly a million dollars: $440,000 for unspecified uses and $500,000 to start a Housing Lab essentially, a development incubator under the aegis of the celebrated public university.
Traffic on the I-405 Freeway. Photo by Bart Everett/Shutterstock.
Remember a year ago, when Los Angeles freeways and streets were nearly empty? Now it feels like a distant memory. According to Seleta Reynolds, general manager at the LA Department of Transportation (LA DOT), traffic levels in the region have returned to about 90% of what they were pre-pandemic.
There are a few explanations, says Reynolds. First off, a lot of Angelenos never stopped going to work. Secondly, those working from home have found other excuses to get in their cars.
“They can run an errand in the middle of the day, they can take their kids to the park, they have more flexibility in their schedule. And it actually ends up that people are moving around more.”
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