There are so many things in this city where you find out the last update was done in the Reagan era and like do the Democrats who’ve become the establishment want to do anything? Like remember when @awalkerinla.bsky.social found out the last Dodger Stadium traffic study was from 1991 lol?

There are plenty more creative ways to speed up the E Line! What if Exposition Blvd. in front of USC was pedestrianized? What if Flower St. was only for buses and trains? What if we built a ton of curb extensions? And remember, freight trains in the 80's got higher priority than the E Line today!

This is great stuff! Lots to glean, but I particularly appreciate this: many unpreempted grade crossings not only slows light rail, but makes travel time far more unreliable. Riders have to plan around the worst average trip time, not the best.

That huge delay at 5th St in Santa Monica is especially painful given you're RIGHT outside the station. Then when you finally get moving for that last 100 ft you fucking lurch into the station.

The E Line takes 47 minutes to go from DTLA to Santa Monica - often slower than driving. Ten years ago, it took 46. This is not an accident - it's a policy failure. A group of volunteers, including me, decided to do something about it. 🧵

On Monday HCD told SCAG they were wrong and the map will be changed to add Eastside E Phase 2 to Whittier, K North, and Sepulveda.

Fantastic Steve Lopez column on San Vicente Park, a proposal to turn San Vicente in Mid-City into a 30-acre linear park, LA's High Line. (1/3)

And more to come! Nice work @futureis.la.

Also a good case study in why the peanut gallery should refrain from pronouncing that any given YIMBY reform has failed—in the real world, it takes two or three years for projects to move forward, even in the best of cases.

One of the first ED 1 projects was recently sold to the LA Housing Authority at a cost of $378,000 per unit, much cheaper than subsidized new construction housing. The authority will lease the property at a mix of low and moderate income levels. therealdeal.com/la/2026/06/0...

Very helpful level-set on LA's much talked about ED 1 policy. It's not as effective as it could have been, but it's still having a major impact. With 8,500 units under construction, the policy is helping LA produce a lot more affordable housing than it could before.

All the controversies over Mayor Bass' ED 1 obscure the big headline: it's a hugely successful program that has already led to thousands of affordable apartments built at zero taxpayer expense, and it's just getting started. A 🧵:

All the controversies over Mayor Bass' ED 1 obscure the big headline: it's a hugely successful program that has already led to thousands of affordable apartments built at zero taxpayer expense, and it's just getting started. A 🧵:

this one is a pretty flagrant disregard of the law if the legislature had meant "planned transit is eligible when it completes environmental review," they would have written the law to say that instead of "completed an LPA"!

SCAG's draft map of where SB 79 applies is out, and it leaves out the stations on two train lines - Sepulveda Line and K Line northern extension. Lots of stops on the Westside and WeHo. SCAG contends those lines haven't finished CEQA so they don't count. SCAG is wrong.

This would reduce the ULA tax multifamily projects pay but would not exempt new construction, which is what many advocates have been fighting for.

Karen Bass didn't kill ED 1 by banning it from single-family areas - it barely applied there to begin with. She killed it with her second revision in July 2024, which added design standards and other restrictions driven by NIMBY pressure and LA's unrelenting desire to control how buildings look.

Oren Hadar, a Raman supporter, said he's frustrated by his neighborhood’s broken sidewalks, pockmarked streets and decaying infrastructure. “I just get the sense that the city is...falling apart. We can’t repave streets. We can’t fix streetlights. It’s just this basic stuff that isn’t getting done."

LA deserves to be a world capital. To help us get there, we need better ideas. We need to take bigger swings. An independent policy research and advocacy think tank could lay the groundwork for this city to truly achieve greatness - a Los Angeles clock behind every hotel reception desk in the world.

Let's get Nithya to show up to her own committee meeting June 4th and give SCAG an earful about SB 79!

SCAG wants to pull the rug out from under SB 79 in LA. They want to eliminate planned train lines that haven't fully completed the CEQA process, like the K Line north and Sepulveda Line. Some of our best neighborhoods! Boo!

LA deserves to be a world capital. To help us get there, we need better ideas. We need to take bigger swings. An independent policy research and advocacy think tank could lay the groundwork for this city to truly achieve greatness - a Los Angeles clock behind every hotel reception desk in the world.

What is the opposite of displacement? Reverse displacement? This is a story of new "luxury" housing causing unhoused people to move into homes. Titi got housing and was reunited with her son because a wealthier person got a fancier place to live.

LA needs a policy research center. It's such a low-hanging fruit and would be transformative for California given how much LA's dysfunction pulls down the state.

Why doesn't LA have a policy research and advocacy think tank dedicated to making the city better? Like SPUR, Sightline Inst., MPC, RPA, etc. LA has so much untapped potential - there should be an org working on furthering ideas to support its growth.

This is a real moonshot vision for what could be LA's High Line. I'm on the board of this group, and we have big plans!

I hope the next governor is willing to take this city on. We are completely skirting housing laws. Please, sue the f@#$ out of us.

LA can't get out of its own way. The city's new SB 79 plan, called Low Rise, supposedly upzones some single family neighborhoods, but it does it in such a controlling way that it's hard to see much getting built. A short 🧵:

Wow! This would instantly become one of the most desirable locations to live in the city, steps from the La Brea Tar Pits, LACMA, and the subway.

Requiring parking to be behind the building or underground really kneecaps LA's proposed Low Rise program. Digging is $$$. Including just four surface spaces on a typical lot reduces the size of the building by 42%! Most residential streets don't have alleys, so you need a driveway from the front.

✅ Large Asphalt Repair = $6.80/sq ft ❌ Repaving = $3.30/sq ft ❌ Slurry Seal = $.50/sq ft Why is the City of LA wasting taxpayer dollars doing the most expensive option, especially when it’s broke? It’s time to stop this nonsense.

TIL that LA owns 12 golf courses? That's a lot of land.

Is this a poison pill for LA's proposed Low Rise program (5-16 unit, 3-4 story buildings)? Parking has to be either underground or behind the building. Most of the lots where Low Rise applies are small, 5-6k sq ft. Feels like only zero-parking projects would work using this program - not great!

Is this a poison pill for LA's proposed Low Rise program (5-16 unit, 3-4 story buildings)? Parking has to be either underground or behind the building. Most of the lots where Low Rise applies are small, 5-6k sq ft. Feels like only zero-parking projects would work using this program - not great!

Staggering how much LA has let its infrastructure languish. This year departments got *half a billion dollars* less than they requested for infra projects. The number of projects requested keeps going up, and the number of projects funded is going down. h/t @jawshv.bsky.social

Update! The map now shows what's being upzoned to 16 units (red) and what to only 10 (orange). In the LA Basin 61% of parcels are red, mostly thanks to rail lines that don't exist yet - Sepulveda, D Line to Westwood, and K Line North.

Is that...all there is? Here's a map of all the places (red) that are set to be upzoned to 3-4 stories in LA next month in response to SB 79. Less than 30,000 lots, mostly in the Valley. (We'll get more upzoning in 5 years.) Join me for a quick tour... hellomynameisoren.github.io/SB-79-in-upz...

Front yards are actively bad - useless as a private recreational space, and make the area less walkable by reducing shade and (usually) visual interest.

Just got confirmation that this was in fact a sloppy mistake and will be corrected in the final ordinance.

Like potholes? Last year LA stopped repaving streets. In new research the Data/Dev team finds by 2036 under the City's current approach a majority of LA streets will be failed and we will have more than $15 billion in outstanding street maintenance. https://data.streetsforall.org/blog/repaving/

This is just one of several bizarre edits to the up-to-now useless Corridor Transitions program that the city is proposing to make the program generate housing in SB 79 transit zones. The changes feel hastily written and kind of nonsensical. A quick 🧵:

SB 9 is taking off in LA the way ADUs did 7 years before.

A huge percentage of the CHIP projects submitted so far have been on "Lower Income Rezoning Sites", which, due to state law, have by-right approval, including with unlimited waivers. There's a lesson in there for the city, if they choose to pay attention to it.

Love to see Nithya mention shared housing as a way to get unhoused people indoors. I wrote last year about a great kind of brand new shared housing - double duplexes - that LAHSA has used to bring hundreds off the streets. But of course city leaders hate these buildings and have tried to kill them.

Great to see Janice Hahn advocating for more Metro riders on the Metro board. It's currently almost entirely comprised of politicians.

This project is a headscratcher because they designed it to the specs of the (never before used) Corridor Transition program but then applied under the TOIA program, which has stricter affordability requirements. 🤷

UNACCEPTABLE

Great explainer, thanks. I was curious what the age composition was of those for and against delayed implementation and it stacks up how you'd expect.

The expansion of development incentives was the least aggressive of three options the Council considered

🚨🚨🚨Gov. Newsom threatens to withhold homeless funding from LA over SB 79 implementation: "I cannot in good conscience provide any additional resources…if you have cities like LA who are violating state law - SB 79. I mean, you don’t build, we’re not going to fund. Period."