Happy New Year

Lack of blogging due to life being good. Can't wait for Jason, Victor and Aileen to post shots of that which will be happening soon.

Merry and Wise

Transit is free this weekend. Take advantage of city buses and rail from 9 p.m. Saturday to 12 a.m. Monday.

Back

Christmas was wonderful and difficult - the way anything worth anything always is.

Even though I'm in LA, blogging might prove to be difficult. I'll be at somewhat of a conference so it is unclear whether or not I'll find a free internet connection. At least I'll be enjoying the creature comforts of Pacific Palms.

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UPDATE:

Well well well, things are looking up. The signal is steady and the signal is strong. Perhaps I'll be live blogging from the hotel.

Merry Christmas

I will be out of town for the weekend so no blogging until Monday. God bless us, everyone.

Movies

My personal movie motivation seems to come and go rather quickly. I have yet to see Narnia and I'm already feeling buzz for another film. Hopefully the Lewis adaptation won't go the route of Passion of the Christ, which I would like to see before I die.

Granted, I fully expect The New World to be very, very slow - but somehow Terrence Malick always makes my day.

Strikes

I normally wouldn't comment on a NY strike except for two factors. The impact of their action really puts my union's action(s) in perspective. Also, it's related to pensions. And that's all I have to say about that.

Angel Issues

Thank you Jerry Crasnick for some good Angel reporting by ESPN (link requires paid subscription):

The Angels' biggest problem is all the money they have tied up in unproductive veterans. Garret Anderson drove in 96 runs last year, but had a lower combined on-base plus slugging percentage (.743 OPS) than Casey Blake. Erstad is a great teammate and a favorite of manager Mike Scioscia, but seven homers and 66 RBI just don't cut it for an $8.25 million first baseman. And Cabrera's .309 on-base percentage isn't the worst news. He has three years and $24 million left on his contract, so he's blocking the path of two hot shortstop prospects, Wood and Erick Aybar.

Then there's Finley, who looked perilously close to finished while hitting .222 with a .271 on-base percentage at age 40. If the Angels play Erstad or Chone Figgins in center field in 2006, it's hard to see how Finley fits at all.

The article is primarily about the teams relucatance to trade prospects, thus making deals like Manny to LA very unlikely. Personally, I wouldn't have it any other way.

LA = Density

From Virginia Postrel's Dynamist blog:

Timberg's profile also makes the never-repeated-too-often point that the densest metropolis in America is Los Angeles. Just because the city goes on and on and on doesn't mean you can't find just about anything you want, not to mention thousands and thousands of people, within a short walk.

The post is primarily about Bruegmann's Sprawl book, which I really need to read. More on LA's density is here.

Restrictive Zoning

Samuel R. Staley at the Reason Foundation writes about the relationship between zoning and high home prices. Apparently, these zoning laws not only inflate cost but are so antiquated that even the Amish are being held back from thinking outside the box.

Zoning laws are so arcane, even the Amish are trying to get the government to eliminate or modernize them. Amish farmers in a small Ohio town are confronting the declining profitability of their small, family-run farms. Instead of asking for handouts or taxpayer subsidies, the Amish want to adapt to the market by opening woodworking shops and other small businesses as they shift away from agriculture. Rather than commute into the nearest big city (the Amish do not drive), they want to start up new businesses on their farms.

One would think these aspirations would be welcome in an era of smart growth, where professional planners and environmentalists are scrambling for ways to get people out of their cars and preserve open space. But the home-based businesses the Amish want to start—carpentry, custom cabinet making—don't fit the tidy little boxes of land uses allowed in the local zoning code. Local zoning laws say home-based businesses can't be bigger than 1,000 square feet.

OK. I get it! But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. The baby being Urban Planners, of course.

Transportation in LA

Councilmember Wendy Greuel, Chair of L.A. City’s Transportation Committee, discusses transit in LA with Metro Investment Report.

Here's one interesting tidbit related to the Planning Department:

You make the point that planning and transportation are linked. LA is about to pick a planning director and a new director for its redevelopment agency. What’s at stake; and, what candidate profile would get your support?

I’ve been really pleased with our interim planning director, Mark Winogrond. He’s been leading the effort to select his replacement, which gives me great comfort because he’s had the kind of experience that I think we’re looking for in someone in the planning department. We need someone who understands not only the visions but also the operations to make sure that we’re moving projects through and that the public is participating.

We hear consistently the comments that going through the City of Los Angeles’ process to get a building permit whether you’re a homeowner or a developer is extremely cumbersome and is a disincentive for investing in our communities. Mark Winogrand has already started to move forward by hiring additional people, and I hope that the new general manager in will do some reorganization. I think that is going to give a lift to the Planning Department.

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President's Speech

Just finished reading through the speech. Check it out here.

News Bias

According to a UCLA study, the top three centrist news outlets are "NewsHour With Jim Lehrer" from PBS, CNN's "NewsNight With Aaron Brown"and ABC's "Good Morning America".

I think I'm going to start to check out Mr. Lehrer.

Buses

Are the LA bus crashes becoming a national story? Forbes has an article through the AP.

Some comments on buses.
1. I frequently drive Vermont and am constantly frustrated (or weaving around) buses. Clogging a lane every two blocks in a two lane major thoroughfare is poor design. Buses need dedicated areas to pick up their customers.

2. The value of seatbelts on buses is disputed but you won't convince me that a proper seatbelt is bad. Is the real issue about balancing safety with efficiency? Getting people off and on AND maximizing capacity with seatbelts is a challenging task. But I know some designers out there are up to the challenge.

3. Buses like the Orange Line will unfortunately continue to get hit for a while. People will always run reds in LA. Our driving culture promotes stretching the rules. We speed. We make left turns on reds. We roll at stop signs. And we run reds. I don't blame people, either. Strict interpretation of traffic laws in LA would either drive a normal person mad or get you shot.

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The proposed solutions? Design! Let's design better roads, buses and laws... and install cross beams at high-risk intersections while we wait.

Toys Toys Toys

The LA Times pumps up the Toy District. I love the fact that our downtown has crazy areas like this:

The toy district is, to be sure, an intensely urban scene — one where shoppers jockey for sidewalk space with dolly-wielding workers and down-and-outers asking for change. It's a place where the smells of hot dogs, urine and car exhaust frequently overlap. It is not a place for the faint of heart, but it may be just the ticket for adventurous shoppers looking for off-brand versions of popular toys, or for items in bulk.

This is the type of place that should be treasured and guided with a light hand. It's organic in a difficult to replicate sort of way. I like the typical cool downtown as much as the next guy, but we can go to dozens of places (in LA even) that have a big Apple store, next to a two-story Gap, alongside a Starbucks. Not all of downtown LA needs an extreme makeover; a shower and haircut will be just fine.

Learn Something New

I finally learned card-in-envelope etiquette. I suppose it's never too late...

For those who don't know:

1. Front of card faces back of envelope.
2. Crease of card goes to the bottom edge of envelope.

Fan Base

I'm an Angels fan but I readily admit that the fan base of my favorite team isn't very insightful. Not yet, at least.

I've taken to reading Dodger Thoughts and Athletics Nation.

With the Bradley and Perez for Ethier trade, now is a good time to check them out.

Food Markets

Careers have already been made through the evolution of asian food. There's a open wide market for those of us who were born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley. These tasty morsels are too good to not go mainstream. Production, restaurants, cookbooks, tv shows... the possibilites are endless! What will be the next salsa?

That's the second thought I had while reading LA Weekly food critic Jonathan Gold's piece on Asian bakeries.

My first thought was... me like cream puffs.

LA Convention Center Blues

Kathryn Maese of Downtown News contrasts the difficulties facing the LA Convention Center with the success of San Diego's convention business. The issues presented were correct but one crucial elephant was neglected.

For this industry, regional amenities don't matter. When I went to SF and Savannah, I hardly left the 10 minute walking radius surrounding the convention hall. That radius in LA is frankly rather scary. This is true for all of downtown. The area doesn't necessarily need big developments to thrive. Unfortunately, we need to remove or displace the homeless. It isn't a sexy answer, but it's true.

Kotkin on Villaraigosa

Joel Kotkin responds to Mayor Villaraigosa's vision of planning in Los Angeles. He isn't so fast to toss out LA's emphasis multimodal and single family homes.

Do we really want to be like Chicago, New York or San Francisco? These are all expensive cities with economies that have been creating fewer jobs and opportunities than Los Angeles. They also have fewer children per capita.

Without a doubt, such dense cities are wonderful places to visit. But young people leave these cities when they get older, usually for environments that offer more space for their families.

Mayor Villaraigosa needs to understand that we cannot build a better Los Angeles by trying to become someplace we are not. Instead, we should focus on becoming a better version of ourselves, a city that has created the new model of urbanism not only for America but for much of the world.

Here is the original LA Times report on the speech.

USC Rail

The Daily News has a story on discussions between MTA and USC for a proposed light rail train from downtown to the westside, running along Exposition Boulevard.

Pop?

A few months ago, I was told that the Boston housing market was cooling down rather quickly. The Boston Globe agrees:

The median price of a single-family home in Massachusetts has dropped 7 percent in the past two months, to $349,000 for sales that closed in October. But reductions in asking prices of 10 percent or 20 percent are now common in both high and moderately priced neighborhoods, according to real estate agents and listings of homes for sale. In Cambridge, price cuts averaged $300,000 in a sampling of a dozen houses listed in the $1.25 million to $4.3 million price range. In suburbs like Tewksbury and Hopkinton, homes originally listed for around $500,000 have been slashed to the low $400,000s.

''The evidence -- both early data and the anecdotes -- are pointing more toward a hard rather than a soft landing" in the housing market, said Nicholas Perna, an economic consultant in Ridgefield, Conn. ''Prices could come down. Could it be 10 to 15 percent? There's no way of knowing, but what we're getting is more clues that you've got a decline in prices underway.

What does this mean for LA? I still think that as a local market, strong demand and the ability to densify will prevent a major pop from occuring in LA, but that's just me.

Non Topic

I've been wanting to karaoke lately. I also want to learn to disco dance.

Casting Confusion

Showtime's Sleeper Cell is a drama? But it has Andy Richter! Oops. That's Blake Shields.

Churches and Planning

Joel Kotkin is my favorite writer on Urban Planning. In Jewish Journal (hat tip to LA Observed), he takes a look at the resurgence of religious institutions in LA and restates his controversial argument on the importance of "the sacred" to great cities.

In contrast, in “The City,” I cling to the old idea that great cities, or regions, always have been inextricably connected to sacred spaces. The universality of this phenomenon is inarguable. It was expressed by the central location of temples in cities from Ur and Babylon, Jerusalem’s Temple Mount, the imperial shrines of ancient Chin, the mosques of Baghdad, the cathedrals of Medieval and Renaissance Europe and the Protestant churches in the heart of Amsterdam, London and Boston.

The moral content of these places — the statement they made about the relationship between the city and the universe — was critical to making those cities great. The ancient Judeans may have admired the architecture and fine detail of David’s or Herod’s temples, but it was the symbolic foundation of the place, not the aesthetics, that gave them transcendent importance. Similar things can be said of Paris’ Notre Dame Cathedral or the great mosques of Baghdad, Cairo or Istanbul.

The growth is also in a variety of faiths.

You can also see this in the growth of relatively new religious institutions, including the North Hollywood Thai Temple, the Northridge Islamic Center, the Hindu temple in Malibu and the 1,600-seat Korean Valley Christian Presbyterian Church in Porter Ranch. In many ways, these new buildings, many of them quite impressive, suggest the scale of renewed religious sentiment throughout the region.

He also notes that the political implications do not necessarily favor conservatism.

In sum, Los Angeles’ religious revival reflects not right-wing politics but a city that is demographically changing and vital. In fact, the big gains among many Jewish congregations — outside of the Orthodox and Sephardim — and Catholic parishes may well be more liberal than conservative in their orientation, at least on some issues.

Read the entire article!

Journalist Guide on Sprawl

I can't believe what I'm reading. There is something ridiculous about Covering Urban Sprawl: Rethinking the American Dream (linked from Planetizen). Published by the Environmental Journalism Center, the 28 page report describes itself as a "primer for reporters covering the social, economic and environmental impacts of sprawl."

Good grief.

Much more interesting is this Slate book review that a good friend emailed to me. Read the entire review. Here's how it ends.

It appears that all cities—at least all cities in the industrialized Western world—have experienced a dispersal of population from the center to a lower-density periphery. In other words, sprawl is universal. Why is this significant? "Most American anti-sprawl reformers today believe that sprawl is a recent and peculiarly American phenomenon caused by specific technological innovations like the automobile and by government policies like single-use zoning or the mortgage-interest deduction on the federal income tax," Bruegmann writes. "It is important for them to believe this because if sprawl turned out to be a long-standing feature of urban development worldwide, it would suggest that stopping it involves something much more fundamental than correcting some poor American land-use policy."

What this iconoclastic little book demonstrates is that sprawl is not the anomalous result of American zoning laws, or mortgage interest tax deduction, or cheap gas, or subsidized highway construction, or cultural antipathy toward cities. Nor is it an aberration. Bruegmann shows that asking whether sprawl is "good" or "bad" is the wrong question. Sprawl is and always has been inherent to urbanization. It is driven less by the regulations of legislators, the actions of developers, and the theories of city planners, than by the decisions of millions of individuals—Adam Smith's "invisible hand." This makes altering it very complicated, indeed. There are scores of books offering "solutions" to sprawl. Their authors would do well to read this book. To find solutions—or, rather, better ways to manage sprawl, which is not the same thing—it helps to get the problem right.

Agreed!

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Same Day Update

Just saw that the LA Times covers Robert Bruegmann's book too! I really think the conventional wisdom on sprawl is wrong. I'm glad better ideas are here.

Team Turnover

Career Angels Bengie Molina and Jarrod Washburn won't be back. The Angels website has the story.

These aren't bad moves but a number of factors suggest that 2006 might be a slight step back before taking a big step forward in 2007.

Consider the following:
1. Who to spend money on? The team has reduced payroll and can afford a big ticket player but the free agent market is thin.
2. The team will be young. I'm excited to see Santana, MacPherson, Kotchman, and Mathis get playing time but there will still be a learning curve.
3. Waiting game. It is unlikely that high salary/low production veterans Erstad and Finley can be moved until their respective contracts end (after 2006).

Of course, a step back simply means that the Angels will be a darkhorse for the AL West. In 2007, they may be the favorites for the World Series.

Port Executive Director

The Mayor has appointed Geraldine Knats the Executive Director for the Port of Los Angeles. Here is the press release.

Trashy Tribute

Everyone's favorite band you've never heard of, Trashcan Sinatras, will be performing two songs in the BBC John Lennon tribute. The concert will be online for about a week. More details here.

Christmas Time Is Here

Snoopy is skating as I type...

Someone else said it first but I'll say it again. Christmas season doesn't start until A Charlie Brown Christmas is on TV.

Best Video Clip of 2005

You might have heard about it, but seeing is believing.

The shot.

Maintenance

Archive links have been fixed.

More Union Talk

So far, only the blog Mayor Sam Yorty mentions the EAA protest outside DWP this morning (and that was before it happened).

The blog comments from my brethren are pretty funny...

Damn Shame

Oooh I wish I could go to the Getty for this. If it was only on a different night...

Note: I heard of the event through Flavorpill, which my superstar architect cousin wins concerts from.

More on Wilshire Subway

D.J. Waldie writes an excellent commentary on the burgeoning transit shift in LA. Read the entire piece. Here's my favorite part:

Big public transit projects are essential to the future of Los Angeles, even if they never add up to a coherent system....

If you've been reading these pages for a while, you may have caught the half-anxious, half-amazed tone of city watchers who seem to be wondering what to make of Los Angeles when it isn't Los Angeles any more, when all of our cliched assumptions — bright and noir — are questioned by our encounters with a city that isn't Raymond Chandler's or even Joan Didion's.

Public transit has the unsettling capacity to redefine our experience of a built-up, built-out and densified Los Angeles. If it's ever built, a subway into the west will carry more than passengers; it will bear our imagination into a city as yet unrealized.

I love The Big Sleep LA but I'm all for moving forward.

Airport Expansion

It's a shame that LAX won't be able to develop a people mover, but at least the two new runways were part of the settlement. I feel for the Planners who worked on the LAX master plan but that's part of the process, isn't it.

To Do List

Budget Travel Online has 20 affordable ideas for LA entertainment. Here's one that I didn't know about:

The "Garden in the Sky" on the third floor of the New Otani Hotel (120 S. Los Angeles St., 213/629-1200), a half-acre version of the historic 400-year-old garden in Tokyo's New Otani, provides much-needed zen relaxation.

I think I'll visit after my next tuna bowl at TOT.

Pictures

I signed up for Flickr but don't have anything to post.

Good thing my brother takes pictures. Here is his collection from Thanksgiving weekend. Yeah, you can see baby Colin as well as visual references to the funny stories you heard about but never read here.

Port

Day in and day out, the Daily Breeze has the best LA coverage of the Port. Here's a good summary article.

Weekend

I'm going to Palo Alto for the weekend. I return on Saturday night.

Sports

Tomorrow stops the streak of six days in a row of basketball. I'm falling in love with playing all over again.

When talk at the office turned to Angels vs. Dodgers, a girl said, "I like the Dodgers. They are more ghetto."

APA Mixer

I plan to get more involved in the Los Angeles Section of the APA this year. Went to a holiday mixer in Old Town Pasadena. Met some fellow public sector planners, consultants and students. Everyone wants to know what the Port will do about the Port's environmental impacts.

Planners are great for parties. We're the right balance of interesting without snootiness.