Los Angeles is laying the groundwork for a better urban future

More than any other American city, LA is trying to address its problems by transforming its built environment

In LaLaLand, it’s perfectly normal to jump for joy in standstill freeway traffic (Credit: Lionsgate)

As I seek out stories for my book that offer a positive vision of the future of American cities, my gaze keeps returning to Los Angeles.

Yes, the very same Los Angeles where tens of thousands sleep outside every night; where biblical-scale natural disasters seem as common as light rain; where the freeway traffic is so slow you might as well get out of your car and dance.

Los Angeles has its problems, no doubt about it. But unlike most cities in America, LA has big plans to address them by transforming its built environment. The city has come to recognize that so many of its pathologies are connected to urban planning and urban infrastructure. If it wants a better future, Los Angeles will need better urbanism.

LA’s big plans for housing, transit, and streets will never be enough, on their own, to end homelessness, seriously reduce inequality, heal the environment and keep people healthy and safe. Even the most utopian urban planning interventions can’t fully address every social, economic, environmental and political problem. There’s so much more LA can do, and plenty it can do better.

But what LA is already doing will help a lot. Angelenos ten or twenty years hence will benefit enormously from the urban policies the city is pursuing today. Every other American city would do well to watch, learn and copy.  

Transit

LA’s transit plans are by far the most ambitious of any city in the U.S. I wrote a CityLab article and an accompanying Substack post about the good, the bad, and the weird projects in the pipeline, so I’ll skip all of the details here.

The future of transit in LA, explained

The most exciting parts of LA’s transit building-spree are the handful of lines that will do what transit does best: connect dense neighborhoods strung along busy corridors at much-faster-than-driving speeds. The under-construction D Line between UCLA and downtown; the planned Sepulveda Pass transit line; and the planned K Line extension from LAX to Mid-City and West Hollywood are all transit corridors that ordinary people would intuitively pick out on a map.

In virtually every other American city, these kinds of subway projects across daunting geographic barriers and dense, built-out neighborhoods are too expensive and complex to even contemplate. But LA Metro’s voter-approved, long-term funding sources make this kind of visionary infrastructure possible.

A not-so-fantastical map of LA’s transit network in 2050 via Adam Paul Susaneck’s excellent visualization of LA Metro’s expansion plans.

Rail

LA is also brimming with potential when it comes to regional and inter-city rail, though the path forward remains hazy. The Las Vegas Brightline train is coming, and even though it won’t reach LA proper, it could be a powerful accelerant for other rail projects including California High-Speed Rail and improvements to Metrolink regional rail. The Metrolink system has big modernization plans that could be a lot bigger thanks to the under-construction project to add through-running tracks at Union Station. With the right investments, this vast system, with lots of publicly owned track, could become a real competitor to Southern California’s legendary freeways for longer regional trips.

Is this a new era for high-speed rail in America?

As for CAHSR, its journey to LA goes through Washington, DC. If Democrats remain in power, the next infrastructure bill very well could include serious money for high-speed rail. (That push is beginning with Congressman Seth Moulton’s recently proposed $205 billion American High-Speed Rail Act.) Connecting CAHSR’s initial segment in the Central Valley to LA and Las Vegas — thus creating the beginnings of a southwest high-speed rail network — would be high on the list of priorities for any future high-speed rail bill.

Housing

As with transit, LA voters have put their money where their mouth is and consistently voted in favor of affordable housing, including the Measure HHH bond issue in 2016 and the “mansion tax” passed last year. The mansion tax is a testament to the strength of LA’s tenants rights groups, which put forward the measure and led the campaign. These origins left their imprint on the final law, which will include significant funding for rental assistance and eviction defense in addition to money for new construction.

But LA leaders are increasingly recognizing that they need to do more. Funding affordable housing and protecting tenants are necessary, but not sufficient, to address the city’s housing woes.  

Has LA cracked the code for building affordable housing?

The other side of the equation is simply making it easier to build. The city took a major step forward on this front with Mayor Karen Bass’ first action in office, an executive order that exempts affordable housing projects from most zoning and building codes. The policy, known as ED1, has been successful beyond anyone’s expectations. In just over a year, developers have proposed 16,000 new units of affordable housing under the program, roughly double the figure from prior years, with no additional public subsidy. The opportunity to get through the approval process quickly and skirt around arcane rules like street tree requirements is so valuable to for-profit developers that they’re willing to rent their properties at below-market-rates. ED1 shows that when you treat housing like an emergency, and wipe away all of the obstacles to construction, the market can do a lot of the heavy lifting.

Streets

For anyone not inside of a car, the current state of LA’s streets is atrocious. Last year, the city saw more traffic fatalities than homicides. But things could be starting to change. Last week, nearly two thirds of LA voters passed Measure HLA, which will require the city to speed up implementation of the streets plan it approved back in 2015, but has largely ignored since. It’s a very ambitious plan, including hundreds of miles of protected bike lanes, dedicated bus lanes, and pedestrian improvements. It could quickly have a transformative impact on LA’s streetscape, as I wrote in CityLab last week.

The voters of LA delivered a mandate on safe, walkable, bikable streets, just as they did for affordable housing and transit. With Measure HLA, advocates found a way around the block-by-block NIMBYism that tends to accompany any significant change to city streets by letting voters weigh in on the overarching vision. Clearly, that vision is something Angelenos overwhelmingly support. The campaign tapped into people’s desire — one could say, their right — to feel safe on the streets outside their homes, schools, and places of work, in a city where being outdoors should be an eminently pleasant experience.

A thought experiment

Imagine if these policies were in force in your city. Let’s take New York as an example.

If New York City had tens of billions of dollars in long-term funding for transit capital projects, as LA does, its transit-building ambitions could go well beyond a short extension of the Second Avenue Subway and the conversion of some old freight tracks in Brooklyn into a light rail line.

Fantasy transit maps from advocacy groups like RPA and Effective Transit Alliance would turn into real plans. Think: Subway extensions deep into dense neighborhoods in Brooklyn and Queens; subway service along Manhattan’s far east and west sides; through-running regional trains connecting Westchester County, Long Island, and New Jersey to each other, as well as to Manhattan.

The RPA's long term plan for New York City's subways, and the Effective Transit Alliance's plan for through-running regional rail service in the NYC region

If New York City had something like ED1, affordable housing proposals, like one recently proposed in Morris Park, the Bronx, or another in the West Village, would no longer be political footballs. They would simply be built. Instead of groveling to community boards and downsizing their projects, affordable housing developers would build bigger and denser than ever, in neighborhoods where they could never build before. Perhaps for-profit developers would convert their projects from market-rate to affordable to take advantage of fast-tracked permitting and zoning holidays, as they have done in LA.

If New York had a policy like Measure HLA, a recalcitrant mayor and department of transportation would not be able to slow-walk countless street improvements, like bus lanes on Fordham Road, or a bike lane on Bedford Ave. (Mayor Eric Adams pledged to build 150 miles of bus lanes in four years. In his first two years his administration built 22 miles.) No more haggling over details: If it has been approved, it gets built.

This approach wouldn’t be novel for New York. It would look more like the Janette Sadik-Khan era, when the city’s Department of Transportation rapidly installed protected bike lanes, traffic calming interventions, and vast new pedestrian spaces like the plaza at Times Square. When Sadik-Khan was in power, New York became the world’s tactical urbanism laboratory, a place where new design ideas were incubated and exported around the country and the world. It’s fair to say New York has since lost that status. Perhaps LA will pick up the mantle.