L.A. Weighs Options for Fixing 4,400 Miles of Sidewalks
Destructive roots of ficus trees spread in downtown Los Angeles. (Photo by Downtowngal)
Perhaps no greater cliché hangs over the city of Los Angeles than that of “nobody walks in L.A.” The truth is, progressive planners have been trying to soften the city’s car-centric image for years. Neighborhoods have become more walkable, and the city’s often-ridiculed public transportation system has expanded and improved. Indeed, plenty of people walk in L.A.
Increasingly, though, many of them can’t walk — or at least find it more difficult than ever.
In a city famous for the sudden shock of moving earth, the disrepair of Los Angeles’ sidewalks is a slow-motion disaster, threatening ankles, baby strollers, disabled pedestrians and the city budget alike. Sections of pavement look more like skateboard ramps than they do sidewalks. Concrete has crumbled. Slabs have been uplifted. Some stretches look as if they have suffered their own private earthquakes.
“You just look at these sidewalks around the city and you know … there’s some failure of government that has to be addressed,” says Dennis Gleason, policy director for Los Angeles City Council Member Joe Buscaino and self-described expert on the city’s sidewalks.
The city estimates that some 4,500 of its total 10,750 sidewalk miles are in disrepair. According to a 2007 USC study, the city repaired a grand total of 64 miles of sidewalks, or 1.4 percent of damaged sidewalks, improving the city’s backlog to 72 years.
The reasons for this civic embarrassment go back even longer than 72 years. They are twofold. One is political, the other arboreal.
In 1911, the California State Legislature passed the Improvement Act, a pro-growth statute mandating that property owners maintain sidewalks adjacent to their properties. (Cities around the country commonly place this burden on property owners, but in many places, sidewalks seldom need repair.)
“Los Angeles was a pretty young city,” says Gleason. “Generally a concrete sidewalk will last for 50 to 80 years as long as there’s nothing that will cause it to crack or get uplifted.”
Generally.
From the early 1900s onward, real estate developers lured residents to southern California through many means, not the least of which was the obfuscation of the city’s semiarid climate. The region’s primary native tree species, the California live oak, grows neither quickly enough or tall enough to create an appealing urban forest. So developers turned to fast-growing non-native species. Unfortunately, one of the most popular species — especially in the 1950s and 1960s — was the Indian fig, or ficus, tree.
If you give a ficus 30 to 40 years, it will sprout to a majestic height, comfortably above the roofline of the average ranch-style house. Meanwhile, as Senior Arborist Lisa Eremita ofTreePeople, a nonprofit that advocates for a healthy urban forest in Los Angeles, explains, the ficus has a “buttress root system,” meaning that its roots flare out at the base above ground. They wreak havoc on whatever lies in their way.
“Now we are experiencing the non-planning of [decades] ago,” says Eremita.
Gleason calls the ficus “the big culprit” — and the reason why anyone today has to care about the Improvement Act.
In 1973, the city passed an ordinance essentially nullifying the Improvement Act and placing responsibility for sidewalk repair on the city, provided that damage was caused by trees. The ordinance survived an initial veto by then-Mayor Tom Bradley, but the city passed it because the federal government promised to fund some of the repairs. Gleason says that decision was shortsighted at best.
Federal funding ran out just as the city’s forest of ficuses came to maturity. For decades since then, the city has spent almost no money on sidewalk repair, essentially ignoring the problem to the point that the city now estimates that the citywide repair bill will cost upwards of $1.5 billion. Who ought to pay for it — and who will actually pay for it — is a matter of lively discussion at City Hall.
“It’s forcing the city to act and finally resolve this longstanding question of law of who is ultimately financially responsible for sidewalks,” says Gleason. “Is it the property owner, like the state law says, or is it the city when the cause of the damage is a city street tree?”
That question has to be answered soon. The city has faced a series of lawsuits filed under the Americans With Disabilities Act claiming, understandably, that the buckled sidewalks impede the movement of disabled people. The city is on the verge of reaching settlement in the major remaining case, one provision of which will be to implement a repair program to bring sidewalks into ADA compliance.
At the same time, the sidewalks are impeding the city’s other policy goals surrounding smart growth and promotion of transit.
“We preach that we want this whole first-mile, last-mile connection to our transportation system, and we’ve got to make that happen,” says Deborah Murphy, executive director ofLos Angeles Walks, a pedestrian advocacy group.
In downtown’s South Park neighborhood, as many as 20 high-rises, mostly apartment buildings, are slated for development, making it the heart of the city’s move toward density. Cracked sidewalks are poor complements to gleaming new towers.
“A good portion of the sidewalks are going to be redone as part of development projects, but there are going to be huge gaps,” says Jessica Lall, executive director of the South Park Business Improvement District. “You can’t create a sustainable neighborhood if block to block, things aren’t cohesive and walkable.”
The city is considering a dazzling array of funding schemes.
• The council has proposed that property buyers be assessed for sidewalk repair at the point of sale, or that landlords be required to fix sidewalks when they do other major improvements.
• Some proposals would force property owners to pay for repairs but would split the costs, 50-50, with the city.
• Councilman Buscaino recently advanced the concept of “beautification assessment districts,” in which property owners would agree to tax themselves in exchange for the repair of sidewalks throughout the district.
Gleason predicts that, with the lawsuit expected to settle in a few weeks, the City Council will propose a repair and funding plan by summer.
As much as property owners might like to avoid assessments, the value of walkable streets may compel them to pay their share.
“If people cannot get around easily from block to block … it hurts our businesses,” says Lall. She explained that BID members may be predisposed to contribute because they “understand and have accepted that they’re not going to get all the services that they should be receiving from the city.”
As for the ficus? Its reign of terror is over. The city has published an approved list of street trees, including species that are appropriate for the climate and that might enable the city’s second generation of sidewalks to last longer than the first did.
The Works is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Josh Stephens is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles and contributing editor to the California Planning & Development Report.
In Chicago, Creative Matchmaking Helps Arts Groups, Churches and Parks Thrive
Caption: Actors from Theatre Y rehearse in St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square in Chicago a space match facilitated by Partners for Sacred Places’ iSPi tool.
Arts groups know better than most that urban space comes at a price. Rising rents in gentrifying communities forces these organizations to think outside of the box when looking for offices, studios and performance venues.
Since the early 2000s, the non-profit technology company Fractured Atlas has been providing an evolving online directory and marketplace, SpaceFinder, to assist artists to find places to work and perform. In the past year, Fractured Atlas has created two new partnerships that are helping arts groups find overlooked or underutilized spaces in the city’s parks and places of worship.
“What we’ve found looking across the dozens of cities where we’ve done this is that a lot of time, the business practices around finding space are really very old fashioned — pen and paper, Paleolithic stuff,” says Fractured Atlas executive director Adam Huttler. “It’s not an instantaneous thing. There’s a lot of outreach that needs to happen.”
To that end, Partners for Sacred Places has recently launched iSPi, a gateway for artists to find spaces in houses of worship, which is powered by SpaceFinder software. Built with custom functionality, the web portal supplements the organization’s Arts in Sacred Places program.
The Chicago houses of worship that iSPi helps to breathe new life into were once much more central to the community life of their neighborhoods.
“How do you convert something that was built for one purpose and change to something else, but do it in a way that is sensitive to the historic fabric?” asks Partners for Sacred Places President, Bob Jaeger.
While their congregations might be have condensed, renting out the ornate and uplifting interiors of church buildings is a natural fit for arts groups. “The Binding,” a religious play that adapts “The Testament of Abraham” was presented by Theatre Y this fall in St. Luke’s Lutheran Church of Logan Square, a space match facilitated by Arts in Sacred Spaces.
“By having a critical mass of information — not just on the physical space needs and availability, but on the values and mission of the arts groups and congregations — it allows us to really ramp up our space matching,” says Jaeger.
“In the arts, we’ve always known about rehearsing in church basements forever,” adds Huttler. “But it’s always been very informal or ad hoc. There is a lot of opportunity on the table. There are a lot of facilities that would like to do more with the arts and to get new people into their spaces. Because the worlds are so separate, it doesn’t happen as much as it should.”
Fractured Atlas is also working with the Chicago Park District to create an inventory of data about their spaces, so they can get a better sense of how are the parks being used, by whom, for what, and how they can promote what they have available. It’s a tall order with around 8,100 acres of green space in their jurisdiction.
“Artists can be a powerful tool for urban planning and community engagement and I think they realize that. They just want a tool to allow them to be a little more intentional about that,” says Huttler. “What is unususal about Chicago, which is also really exciting, is that there are all these new stakeholders that have really engaged with the resource in a way we haven’t quite seen in other regions. We’d like to see this as a model going forward.”
The Equity Factor is made possible with the support of the Surdna Foundation.
Alexis Stephens is Next City’s urban economics fellow. She’s written about housing, pop culture, global music subcultures, and more for publications like Shelterforce,Rolling Stone, SPIN, and MTV Iggy. She has a B.A. in urban studies from Barnard College and an M.S. in historic preservation from the University of Pennsylvania.
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