Los Angeles Working on Plan to Cover City in Digital Billboards
People in Los Angeles love digital billboards!! We can't get enough of them! Give us more!!! Oh, thank god, the LA City Council is ON IT. Lawsuits have tragically darkened so many of those blinky, flashy ads, but yesterday the City Council's Planning and Land Use Management Committee voted to bring them back big time. They want to *make it possible to create about two dozen sign districts spread throughout the city where ad companies could go nuts with the digital billboards, and then also make it possible for digital billboards to go up anywhere in the city through a special permitting process, "giving sign companies more options for placement," as the LA Daily News puts it. (The ordinance doesn't actually create the sign districts, as previously written; it makes their creation possible.)
Los Angeles's Most Complained-About Sidewalks: Mapped
Los Angeles knows its sidewalks are, in many places, uneven, cracked, buckling, and potentially pretty dangerous. In April, after years of back and forth, the city committed to spending $31 to $63 million a year over the next 30 years to fix its miles of sidewalks, and, as this interactive map from the LA Times shows, they've got an immense task ahead of them. Between 2010 and 2014, the city got more than 19,000 requestsfor sidewalk repairs. Some sidewalks, like the one on Hill Street from Seventh to Eighth in Downtown, have gotten several service requests in that time. (That particular one received seven requests.)
Los Angeles Wants to Legalize Hundreds of Illegal Apartments
The Los Angeles City Council is going ahead with creating an ordinance that would legalize scads of illegal apartments throughout the city (the city turns up about 600 to 700 illegal units a year). They've asked the City Attorney to draft something up that would grant "amnesty" to the landlords of illegally converted living spaces that are in multi-family apartments buildings, giving owners a more feasible way to legalize those dwellings, says City News Service. In order to get the reprieve, landlords of the unapproved units would have to keep them affordable and livable, plus meet a handful of other terms.
Los Angeles Residents Just Keep Driving Less and Less
Los Angeles has a complicated relationship with the car—the city was molded throughout the mid- and late- Twentieth Century to rely on them, but as it filled up, they started to feel more and more like little metal prisons. Over the past 20 years, LA has started to rebuild its lost public transit system (and the process has been sped up over the last decade with the help of the Measure R sales tax), and Angelenos have gradually been driving less and riding buses and trains more. Future Santa Monica City Manager and outgoing Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Rick Cole tweeted the chart above, from an LA City Planning report (just exactly which one is mysterious), showing a consistent decline since 2002 in per capita vehicle miles traveled, or how much each person drives. In 2013, the average Angeleno drove over an hour less than she did in 2002. Progress!
· @AngelenoRick [Twitter]
· Los Angeles Is Changing In The Two Most Fundamental Ways [Curbed LA]
· @AngelenoRick [Twitter]
· Los Angeles Is Changing In The Two Most Fundamental Ways [Curbed LA]
Los Angeles Passes New Rules to Just Take Some People's Stuff
The Los Angeles City Council preliminarily passed two ordinances yesterday that will make it much easier to take your stuff and penalize you for bringing it in public in the first place. Council President Herb Wesson pushed the vote through without public comment, despite a roomful of protesters "who waited three hours" to speak against the proposals, according to the LA Times. The city is still entangled in a lawsuit over a previous ordinance that allowed them to take your stuff, but is nevertheless so hungry to take your stuff that it needed new, still potentially unconstitutional rules for doing so.
Los Angeles Considering Ban on Professional Airbnb Landlords
Last month, the city of Santa Monica adopted new, very strict regulations on short-term rentals like the ones you'd get on Airbnb (they completely barred full-unit rentals, among other things), and all eyes turned to Los Angeles, which has taken few steps to try and regulate or otherwise reign in the thousands of mostly illegal short-term rentals within its boundaries. Meanwhile, the problem has proliferated and Airbnbs are pushing out regular renters and pissing off neighbors. Now two Los Angeles City Councilmembers have proposed a motion that would legalize short-term rentals, but in a way that would prevent valuable housing units from being turned into quasi-hotels,says the LA Times.
Report: LA Should Should Fix Sidewalks Near Private Property, Then Leave Upkeep to Owners
One of LA's most dangerous sidewalks
Now that Los Angeles legally has to fix its miles of busted-up sidewalks, it's finally hammering out the details of how it'll do repairs now and into the future as it embarks on a $1.4-billion plan that will, over three decades, attempt to conquer a huge backlog of fixes on the sometimes dangerous walkways. A new report out from the City Administrative Officer presents a handful of recommendations, one of whichis that commercial property owners should repair the sidewalks around their properties on their own, without city money, says the LA Times.
Every Single Part of Los Angeles is Unaffordable on $15/Hour
Today the Los Angeles City Council voted to raise the city's minimum wage from $9 an hour to $10.50, then to $12, then to $13.25, then to $14.25, and finally to $15 in the year 2020, over the loud protests of business owners who insisted that it would be difficult for them to turn a profit without exploiting their workers. (Musso & Frank's CFO offeredthe confusing explanation that "These guys are my family" as the reason he did not want to be compelled to pay his employees a living wage.) This is a good thing—higher minimum wages will bring a lot of working people out of poverty, where they never should have been in the first place, and make it easier for them to continue living in Los Angeles. But it won't make it easy. Technically, it won't even make it possible.
LA Doesn't Have to Cut Back on Any More Water (For Now)
The state of California is only requiring Los Angeles to reduce water usage by 16 percent, a lot less than initially prescribed in the package of statewide cutbacks. Because the area served by the LADWP has already done so much to conserve, officials were able to negotiate down, says the Daily News, and because of existing moves to limit water use, Los Angeles is already ready to meet that 16 percent requirement by 2016—meaning there will be no additional restrictions on what Angelenos can and can't do with water. That is, if the city doesn't blow it this summer.
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Thanks to Expensive Housing, 27 Percent of LA Lives in Poverty
When you factor in the high cost of housing, California has the highest percentage of people living in poverty in the nation and Los Angeles has the highest percentage of people living in poverty in California, according to a new report from the California Housing Partnership Corporation (via the LA Times). Since 2000, rents statewide haveincreased 21 percent, while renters' incomes have decreased by eight percent (LA has the worst rent/wage discrepancy in the country). One in four children lives in poverty in the state, which the CHPC takes care to note is the "nation's largest and richest." And while poverty is "moderately high" in Los Angeles in particular (at 18.2 percent), the housing crisis pushes that rate to 26.9 percent: "In other words, nearly 3 in 10 households in California's most populous county are in poverty with high housing costs being a primary cause."
Mapping Johnny Carson's Swank '70s and '80s Los Angeles
In Maps to the Stars, Curbed LA maps the lives of the most notable figures in Los Angeles history through the places that were important to them.
[Carson via Getty]
[Carson via Getty]
New York City may be the center of the late-night television universe today, but for 20 solid years, that distinction was held by beautifully boring Burbank, thanks to one guy: Johnny Carson. Carson hosted The Tonight Show from Studio 1 on NBC's Burbank lot from May 1, 1972, to May 22, 1992. Over the course of those two decades, he elevated the late-night talk show to an art form with his easygoing charm and nonthreatening humor. Carson made millions, made careers, and won a Peabody, and had a great time doing it—or looked like he did, anyway. Meanwhile, he left his stamp all over Los Angeles.
Drought Could Finally Open Door For LA Landlords to Pass Water Bills Onto Renters
[Image via Stephen Falk / Curbed LA flickr pool]
After a decade of pushing, landlords hoping to change the law so they can pass water bills on to tenants have gotten a lucky break lately from the drought. Now that there are mandatory water restrictions for the whole state, everyone seems a lot more interested in the plan, and in fact "[Mayor] Garcetti is open to the idea and says he is exploring ways of doing this without drawing too much ire from tenants' rights groups," reports the LA Business Journal. Los Angeles's rent control law says landlords of buildings built before 1979 can't pass on water costs to their tenants, which obviously they hate and have been trying to change forever; but now "there's more urgency from landlords because of the expectation that water rates will increase sharply as drought-related water limits take hold in coming months." They're also worried they'll be stuck with fines for their tenants' over-use.
Mass Rent-Control Evictions Doubled in Los Angeles Last Year
[The Villa Carlotta, where residents were given eviction notices citing the Ellis Act last December, via Michael Locke]
Mass evictions of rent-controlled buildings are the hot new thing in Los Angeles—in 2014, there were more than double the number in 2013, which was in turn a 40 percent increase over 2012 (the trend began in 2009). Using California's Ellis Act, landlords can evict all of their tenants, so long as the landlord then sells the building, turns the apartments into condos, or allows the building to be vacant for at least five years. According to the latest numbers from the Los Angeles Housing and Community Investment Department, via KPCC, in 2013, landlords evicted people from 308 rent-controlled apartments using the Ellis Act; in 2014, that number rose to 725 apartments. "Every rent-controlled tenant should be worried, and it's going to get worse," says Larry Gross of the Coalition for Economic Survival.
There's a Plan For a Los Angeles World's Fair Starting in 2022
Los Angeles may have lost out on the Olympics (to Boston!), but this is a city of opportunity. Today comes its next chance to welcome all the world: a World's Fair. An Indiegogo campaign was launched just last week by the appropriately-titled Los Angeles World's Fair, seeking $100,000 to build the first of several transit-accessible pavilions all across the city; so far they've raised a pretty impressive $41,000. If things go according to plan, the fair would run for two full years, from2022 to 2024.
The Magic Johnson Map Guide to Los Angeles
In Maps to the Stars, Curbed LA maps the lives of the most notable figures in Los Angeles history through the places that were important to them.
[Image via Getty Images]
[Image via Getty Images]
The worst season in Lakers history comes to a merciful end tomorrow night. It's been a long, demoralizing slog, but with any luck, it won't get any worse—Jordan Clarkson is good, Julius Randle will be back, and Los Angeles should have a top five draft pick. Good times are on the horizon (as long as the Lakers keep that draft pick), so what better way to celebrate than by looking back at arguably the greatest, inarguably the most beloved Laker of all time? No, not Swaggy P—Magic Johnson.
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