Putting L.A.’s People Back Up on Their Feet

In medical jargon our city is a walking heart case without nitroglycerin pills. Arteriosclerosis describes the near-terminal congestion of our auto-ways. Infarction (formerly living tissue, now dead for lack of blood supply) describes the deadly results of impending citywide gridlock. This is neither news nor debatable. The news is that a cure is close at hand--always has been. The debates raging are among proponents of every medicine but the obvious one.

The patient wants to live; life is not perfect but it’s more satisfying than life in many other cities. All the experts blame the arteriosclerosis on Angelenos’ love affair with their autos. But it’s not that simple. The love affair blossomed when driving was primarily for pleasure; it went on the rocks when driving became more and more a matter of absolute necessity--and recently, a near impossibility.

What went wrong? Distance. Why, for most of us, is it so far from home to office, from home to market, to school, to friends’ houses, to theaters and restaurants? Why, simply, do we have to drive almost everywhere? Small towns aren’t that way, nor are some parts of older cities. Residents rarely need take their cars out of garages. They can walk. Why can’t Los Angeles be rearranged for walking?

Most proposed cures treat symptoms: street widening, ride-sharing, more public transit, even increased parking requirements. Temporary reliefs, yes, but they only make it possible--even encourage--more people to make more trips. And the no-growth people, always slamming the door, don’t help when they try to move increased congestion somewhere “over there.” In truth, we’re all no-growth people trying to be comfortable in a city that’s not going to stop growing. So what about this cure that’s so close at hand?

In 1972, Toronto, in a unique burst of planning reform, elected a new administration committed to rearranging the city for walking and for living in humane communities. Despite a splendid new subway and an imported Los Angeles traffic engineer busily carving the city with L.A.-style freeways, they saw gridlock and social dislocation up ahead. Toronto promptly stopped the freeway under construction and enacted a limited building moratorium to gain time, to devise a livable solution.

Gridlock, alone, wasn’t what threatened Toronto. More important, the redevelopment of old neighborhoods was destroying human communities. Blockbusting redevelopment was forcing people out of their human networks of friends, families and familiar surroundings, scattering them broadside like displaced persons into what was rapidly becoming another faceless city. And psychologists were already warning that the results, alienation and increased crime, were growing at cancerous speeds.

Toronto took the proper medicine, revising obsolete planning and building ordinances to permit maximum density in new commercial developments only if those projects included a certain percentage of residences. Blockbusting is prohibited. Tax inducements encourage rehabilitation of rundown housing in old neighborhoods. Large old houses are subdivided into apartments and small “infill” apartment buildings are built in the open spaces of old yards. Densities are greatly increased in some cases but auto traffic is diminished because the mix of residential and commercial properties in each community are carefully proportioned to induce pedestrian traffic. Low-rise walk-ups, for example, frequently include shops and services--sometimes even schools at street level. High-rise office buildings are judiciously apportioned in each community, as part of a well-balanced diet for community health.

But Los Angeles, by contrast, still suffers from a blight born of zoning, with squeaky-clean, homogenous suburban residential neighborhoods where mixed-use communities are prohibited. These zoning laws need rewriting. Toronto has come a long way and other urban centers, among them Minneapolis-St. Paul and Baltimore, are making rapid progress. Even downtown we have only a few thousand places for upper yuppie-life and patches of low-income apartments built magnanimously with Community Redevelopment Agengy funds.

Los Angeles is not Toronto but we have a disease similar to the one they are recovering from. It can be cured by grass-roots pressure on city and county governments, either in their chambers or by citizens’ initiative at the polling places. Neighborhood activist groups must be brought into the governmental system and defined (they are known as Neighborhood Planning Offices in Toronto). Their community goals, as formulated, must be treated as legal mandates to city planning officials. Most important, lacking technical expertise, they must be empowered, like a grand jury, to call upon society’s best professional advisers, private and governmental, for interdisciplinary symposiums to help them clarify goals and agree upon the most viable methods for implementation. These sessions must include planners, architects, sociologists, bankers, demographers, urban geographers, psychologists, criminologists and political scientists. If this seems like an urban overdose, consider the weakened condition of the city today, having been treated almost solely by the planning profession and the profit motive.

Fortunately, there is a spreading awareness of the urgent need for life-enhancing urban effort. But with citizen groups, government planning groups and private planning groups each urging a favorite remedy, the result resembles a cluster of medieval physicians hovering over a dying king. The absence of unanimity is itself a symptom of professionals’ most common and virulent disease, tunnel vision. The experts need forced-feedings of interdisciplinary confrontation.

These prescriptions will arouse powerful opposition from those who consider themselves realists, warning about losses of tax base and the impossibilities of financing such “schemes,” perhaps even mislabeling them as examples of a pernicious no-growth psychosis. But these same realists sit in their autos side-by-side with us in freeway gridlocks and, by shared pain, can be persuaded to hear well-conceived proposals from communities or neighborhoods.

Imagine a greater metropolitan Los Angeles, including an imposing central city where face-to-face business transactions must take place (computer seers to the contrary), completely surrounded by reasonably self-sufficient communities (small towns) where people can live, work, study, shop and play on two legs. Picture great freeways and great public transportation systems, great in the sense of linking life in the metropolis.

The impersonal forces operating in the developers’ world have proved destructive to the deepest values of community life, a fact obscured by the brilliance of the skylines surrounding us. These forces can be redirected in truly constructive directions by the same people who, by neglect, permitted others to commit the damage in the first place. The same people are us, the residents.