February 2009 Archives
27. Gang aft agley*
By D.J. Waldie
February 20, 2009
I was talking to Karl the planner the other day. He was paging through the text of SB 375 and AB 32 (two state laws you probably never heard of) and marking passages with a yellow highlighter. He also was absently pulling at his thinning hair.
“Geez,” he says, “We’re going to be busy around here.”
“So, that’s good,” I reply with my ready optimism. “Planners don’t do much in small towns that were built out a long time ago. In the 30 years I’ve been here, only two tracts of houses were built, and the last one was just 27 units.”
“Good? Depends,” Karl says with his usual pessimism. “This city was entirely built out, except for a few dozen empty acres, by 1954. No one knows just exactly what SB 375 will do in a built-out city like this one, except that SB 375 creates planning milestones that must be met in 2010 and then on into the future. The planning angle in SB 375 is tied to goals in AB 32 for reducing greenhouse gases.”
Permalink Discuss26. Tap, tap, tapping . . .
By D.J. Waldie
February 15, 2009
Consider the many scales of public transit in L.A.: long-distance heavy rail (Metrolink), medium-distance light rail and subway (all the colored lines), express and local bus service (red buses, orange buses, DASH buses, blue buses).
All of these transit services are different. Some are operated by different regional agencies or by individual cities. They all have different equipment, fare structures, and their own rules about transfers within and without their particular system. (Think Europe before the EU)
In the future, if public transit is be a real substitute for the solo driver, how will hundreds of thousands of new riders pass from one scale of transit to another . . . from regional to local, from heavy to light, from steel wheels to tires on asphalt? And then back again at the end of the day?
Permalink Discuss (1 Comments)25. Imagine all the papers
By D.J. Waldie
February 14, 2009
The Los Angeles Times is a special case of self-destructive behavior, primordially let loose by the demons within the Chandler family. (Think Greek tragedy.) The condition of newspapers elsewhere in L.A. is better understood as a case of self-cannibalism.
The dailies that serve the ring of cities around Los Angeles are mostly MediaNews Group properties: the Daily Breeze (Torrance), Inland Valley Daily Bulletin (Ontario), Daily News (Los Angeles), Pasadena Star-News, Press-Telegram (Long Beach), San Gabriel Valley Tribune, The Sun (San Bernardino), Whittier Daily News, and several more. I know the Long Beach Press-Telegram. I grew up reading its afternoon edition.
Permalink Discuss (3 Comments)24. Paper, scissors, rock
By D.J. Waldie
February 7, 2009
I was part of a panel the other evening convened by Dr. Fernando Guerra of the Leavey Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University. His students and those in two other classes heard from Ruth Galanter (former Los Angeles City Council member), Brendan Huffman (formerly president of the Valley Industry and Commerce Association), and Ron Kaye (former editor of the Daily News). I offered some historical perspective.
Dr. Guerra led with a question about the future of Los Angeles Times, prefaced with a show of hands from a hundred or more undergraduates. A very few had read the Times that day (a Thursday). Significantly more – to the surprise of the panel – thought of themselves as Times readers, at least occasionally. The newspaper habit, it seems, had not entirely died out among these local 20-somethings. Permalink Discuss (2 Comments)23. Boom and bust and boom again and . . .
By D.J. Waldie
February 1, 2009
No surprise here. Only that the boom-to-bust cycle seems to have taken a little more than half a year. Back in the day (mid-2007), downtown Los Angeles was urbanism’s golden child – building up and moving out and hip down to the retro sneakers on its fast moving feet. Although everyone – everyone – knew this was prolongation of the glorious fakery that is at the heart of Los Angeles. The city that cynically manufactures snake oil and deliriously buys it, almost in the same wonderful moment. Cunning and optimistic, we Angeleños are. Last year, Los Angeles Magazine embraced the happy myth that downtown was the city’s center again (although the last time that was true was at the turn of the 20th century). A booming center again, the magazine actually said. Boom is not exclusively an L.A. word, but we long ago out-Barnumed P. T. Barnum in the business of booming the intangible. Of selling desire. And, besides, the square miles of empty upper floors in 1920s office buildings were wasted anyway.
Permalink DiscussMore KCET Local Blogs
404 City- Read Ophelia Chong's latest post, Investing In Yourself
Blur + Sharpen- Read Holly Willis's latest post, Soundscapes in Flux
Cakewalk- Read Erin Aubry Kaplan's latest post, No Fade Into Black
Movie Miento- Read Adolfo Guzman-Lopez's latest post, Layers
Pixeltown- Read Gary Dauphin's latest post, VOD: South Main
The Other Room- Read Kevin Ferguson's latest post, The Watermelon Patch
Think Tank LA- Read Jeremy Rosenberg's latest post, Milken's Traffic Take: California Congestion Could Cost $42 Billion
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