Urban Form | Lascher at Large

A Renter’s Market?

By Bill Lascher

For the first time in decades it’s cool to be a renter. So why is it so hard to rent a home and still be “green”? This week, as news outlets across the board reported a steep decline in home sales and prices in July, especially in the West, some reported increased preferences for renting, especially with the added uncertainty wrought by high unemployment levels. Particia Orsini of AOL’s Housing Watch reported Aug. 26 that Americans, particularly homeowners, are now more likely to think that renting a home is more prudent than buying one. Other news outlets, such as Forbes and the Real Estate Channel and Time’s “Curious Capitalist” blog, also recently dissected the growing preference for renting. Orsini cited statistics from Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies. I took a glance at that report – titled State of the Nation’s Housing 2010 – and found it shows that rental vacancies grew from 2006 to 2009, even though the renter pool was growing at the same time. In fact, U.S. Census Bureau housing vacancy survey data cited by the report shows that fewer people own homes in the West compared to any other region in the nation. The same numbers also show that nearly three-quarters of white Americans own homes while fewer than half of minority populations do. So, what does this all have to do with the environment? [...]

I don't just write

By Bill Lascher

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Ducking the Elephant in the Room

By Bill Lascher

The day takes shape slowly. Getting out the door just happens. Once you do the bus is ten minutes late. Then so is the MAX, but you don’t mind. You’ve been quietly extricating yourself from time. You wait in the chill beneath an interstate, listening to teenagers gossip. Staring at the spikes lining the steel beams beneath the roadway you think perhaps a bit too long about pigeon deterrence.

Boarding the wide slick new cars of the Green Line, you laugh occasionally at a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me podcast and take another stab at the crossword you started two days prior. Disembarking in Lents, you pass a crop of green, swirling, solar panel-topped sculptures, walk beyond cold, new planters toward Foster Road and gaze on Lincoln’s giant face on the side of the New Copper Penny.

This landscape is neither foreign nor familiar, a domestic banlieue swept to the edge of the green movement’s model city.

Continue reading “Ducking the Elephant in the Room”

R We There Yet? Re-evaluating Los Angeles's Transit Future

By Bill Lascher

“Out of service,” the driver tells me as I step on the #4 in Downtown Los Angeles.

It is nearly 3 a.m. and Broadway‘s indoor swap meets, electronic stores and jewelry shops sit darkened behind me. Shadowed by the marquee of an ancient movie house my face betrays concern, perhaps even desperation. I’ve waited to catch a bus for nearly an hour alongside the vacant thoroughfare after staying out with a friend and missing the night’s last Red Line subway. It’s cold. The bus already carries about a dozen riders, so I don’t understand why the driver seems to be telling me I can’t board. Not wanting to linger on the street much longer, I pause on the bus’s steps.

“Out of service,” the driver repeats. I step back down to the sidewalk. She laughs, smiles, and rolls her eyes.

A story still in transit

Though much has happened in Los Angeles’ transportation scene since this story was completed last Spring, the central challenges discussed here largely remain the same. Some light edits have been made to the text to reflect some of the changes. More developments include the following: The California Transit Association and allies in local government won a lawsuit against the state’s raids on local transit dollars, though what that means for transit agencies statewide remains murky; Metro hired a New CEO in Art Leahy and opened its Gold Line light extension to East L.A; Metro also released its timetables to Google, allowing travelers to plan trips using transit instead of by car or foot using Google Maps.

Does L.A. Really Love its Cars?

Does LA really love its cars?

Any great city exists amidst a great mythology. Los Angeles, so the tale goes, became the place it is today in a post-war economic boom. As the Cold War fueled a booming aerospace industry, the city grew to become the quilt of suburbia and highways it’s now readily dismissed as. One of the nation’s first freeways, the Pasadena Freeway, was built between L.A. and Pasadena even before World War II. The automobile quickly became a staple of the American dream and the Southern California ethos.

Simultaneous with the auto’s rise, a once robust railcar network known as the Pacific Electric collapsed. Cynics alleged collusion between the oil and automobile industries for ushering in its demise, but court cases making those allegations failed. A more likely explanation: legislative decisions encouraged by a public enamored with the new-found freedom that car ownership brought made the streetcars economically unfeasible.

Another myth: Angelenos love their cars. In fact, The city isn’t the nation’s most car dependent. Residents of four other metropolitan areas drive more miles each day than people in the greater Los Angeles area, according to data from the Texas Transportation Institute. Los Angeles is also fifth in average automobile ownership per household — even residents of eco-minded cities like San Francisco and Seattle own more cars per capita. When it comes to drivers isolating themselves in their cars, Los Angeles ranks ninth in the percentage of employees who drive alone to work.

The same statistics also describe just how extensive the region’s transit network is. Only the New York City area offers more total bus service miles, for example, and Los Angeles still has the most bus-service miles per square mile covered. Los Angeles even ranks in the middle of the pack when it comes to measurements of its rail-based transit (a measurement that combines light rails, subways and commuter rails such as the region’s Metrolink system).

Transportation Terminology

A train is a train and a bus is a bus, right? Not exactly. All the different forms of mass transit can get confusing. When planners discuss transportation, they’re not just discussing whether commuters are carried on wheels or along rails. Each form of transit has champions in Los Angeles and elsewhere. Here are some brief descriptions of the different forms of transportation scholars and policymakers are currently discussing to keep track of the possibilities for Los Angeles.

Heavy Rail: Electric-powered trains carrying multiple cars capable of transporting large numbers of passengers at high speeds along rails separated from foot and automobile traffic. The Red and Purple Line subways are Los Angeles’ only heavy rail mass transit.

Light Rail: While some light rails — such as portions of the Blue Line and the new Gold Line Eastside Extension — can have underground portions, light rail generally travels above ground and is differentiated from heavy rail by short trains (usually electric powered) on fixed railways not separated from street traffic and pedestrians. Trolleys, trams and streetcars are some examples. In L.A., the best examples are the Gold Line, the Blue Line, the Green Line, and the currently under construction Expo Line.

Commuter Rail: Regularly operating railroads with trains powered either by diesel or electricity and connecting job centers and urban cores with suburban communities. Los Angeles’ metropolitan area is served by Metrolink, a service run by five county transportation agencies throughout the region. Tragically, the system received nationwide attention in September, 2008, when a Metrolink train collided with a freight train outside of the Chatsworth suburb of Los Angeles. More than 25 people commuting between Los Angeles and Ventura Counties died in the accident.

Bus Rapid Transit: Los Angeles’ popular Orange Line service in the San Fernando Valley is an example of bus rapid transit. This type of transit uses buses (powered by various fuel sources such as compressed natural gas, diesel, hybrid battery technologies) on specialized roadways or lanes dedicated to the buses. The systems can be integrated to deal with local conditions. In the Orange Line’s case, this meant converting an out of service rail right-of-way to carry the line’s buses. Metro also calls its new Silver Line, a consolidation of conventional bus routes using bus-only lanes, BRT as well.

Sources:

American Public Transportation Association

National Bus Rapid Transit Institute

Metrolink

Los Angeles Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro)

“I didn’t say you can’t get on,” she teases, as if she’s going to finish the sentence with “rookie.”

It’s the farebox that’s “Out of Service.” I jump back onto the bus and find a seat along the center of the bus, where its two sections connect like an accordion. None of the other riders pay me any heed. Each haggard face exudes fatigue. Two women, both dressed in identical white pants and white sweatshirts, sleep leaning against one another. Perhaps a mother and daughter, perhaps middle-aged sisters, one rests her shoulder on the other, who is slumped against a rattling window. Their long brown hair tangles together.

It’s becoming clear that the age of the automobile is coming to an end, or, at the very least, changing. Los Angeles, like other cities, loses billions of dollars each year just because of people stuck on the region’s tangled roadways. Scholars, politicians, activists and numerous overlapping government agencies each offer often-competing solutions for how to get the region moving. All the while, the solution might begin not with expensive upheavals and construction of vast new transit networks, but instead with better cooperation, education and mobilization of the surprisingly robust transit network that already exists in the metropolis.

What’s certain: voters in Los Angeles County are fed up with traffic. Confounding expectations, they accomplished an extraordinary feat in November, 2008 and gambled that an investment in the region’s transportation network would pay lasting dividends. Despite an economic downturn, more than two-thirds of them chose to tax themselves to pay for Measure R, a $40 billion expansion of the region's transit system. Since July 1, the county has collected a half-cent sales tax to pay for new rail lines, expanded bus routes, and improvements to existing infrastructure. But a debilitating state budget battle earlier this year put transit in a precarious position across California, including Los Angeles, whose position among the world’s great cities could be at risk.

“We’re going to fight tooth and nail for every penny from the state,” Richard Katz said in January. Katz sits on the governing board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Metro, by far the largest transit agency in the region. A former state assemblyman, Katz was appointed to the board by Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and was a key architect of Measure R. “I think we make a mistake if we don’t recognize that the voters made a clear choice in November. They said transportation is the number one issue in the county. We’re going to give you the resources to fix it and we expect you to fix it. They don’t expect us to be whining about losing $200 million a year.”

As the #4 bus carries me past Union Station it turns westward on Cesar Chavez Avenue. I notice how the prerecorded voice announcing each stop perfectly pronounces the deceased farm labor organizer’s name. A few blocks away, after Cesar Chavez Avenue becomes Sunset Boulevard, the recording stumbles over a cross-street’s name, uttering Micheltorena like a Gringo. The sleeping sisters are oblivious to their surroundings, until a few blocks later, when the bus stops at Sunset and Alvarado. Two middle-aged men drunkenly babble to one another as they board. They stumble in search of a seat, startling the women.

The bus turns down Santa Monica Boulevard. I disembark at Vermont Avenue, where I can connect with the #204, a North-South line with a stop a block from my apartment. A light drizzle falls as I wait in the dark along Vermont. A dozen or so men line the curb, peering north up the street. A few step into the road. If only they could spy the bus, it seems, they could will it to carry us out of this uneasy wait sooner. It’s about 3:30 a.m. The only passing cars are taxis hoping to pick up a few desperate fares. The drunks who earlier boarded the #4 stand next to me, talking about the relative morality of stealing bicycles versus cars and beds. They reminisce on times they’ve had to pull guns, what it felt like with the finger on the trigger and the experience of staring down the barrel of a friend’s firearm. Illustrating one such experience one of the men mimes a pistol with his fingers outstretched.

“Those days are gone,” he says.

Continue reading “R We There Yet? Re-evaluating Los Angeles’s Transit Future”

Koreatown's sign language

By Bill Lascher

This afternoon I ran an errand a couple Purple line stops away. It was such a beautiful day that instead of taking the subway I decided to meander home on foot. Fortunately, before I left the house I thought to grab my camera. I took the opportunity to look around a bit and capture [...]

Rearranging Our Pieces, Playing With Our Future

By Bill Lascher

When I was a kid, Legos were quite possibly my number one toy. Sure, I spent untold hours in front of our 13 channel Sony Trinitron with a gray plastic controller in my hand exploring pixelated worlds on my Nintendo Entertainment System, but it was the Legos that best stirred my imagination. It was the Legos that were everywhere.

That’s just what Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian captured in an article last week in which he wrote about the resilience of the toys, of their persistence, the way Lego

“seems to breed in boxes tucked under beds or in the recesses of spidery cupboards. It’s a game that generations add to. And one that children and grandparents can enjoy. From the child’s viewpoint, Lego is simply there, like St Paul’s Cathedral (a bit tricky to model in right-angled plastic bricks), the Empire State Building or St Catherine’s College.”

Last weekend, in between an afternoon in Santa Barbara with former colleagues of mine from the Pacific Coast Business Times and an evening with a freelancer who wrote for me when I edited the Ventura County Reporter , I passed a night at my childhood home. I arrived at my mom’s in the early evening. She was out watching a close friend perform in a play. A houseguest staying over while completing a residency at one of the city’s hospitals was also out. I had the house to myself.

Much as i might have done returning home from school, I dropped a bag off in my bedroom — now painted a rather cheerier color than it ever was during my childhood — and walked straight to our family room. That room really hadn’t changed much in the 11 years since I graduated high school and wandered out into my life.

Sprawled across the coarse carpet of mottled dark and light greens were winding feet upon feet of wooden train tracks assembled by my three-year-old niece more than a month earlier. I smiled, both at the reminder of how the frenetic pace of my family’s life sometimes keeps such clutter unchecked, and at the memory of spending a lazy holiday weekend playing with my niece.

She enlisted me in building an elaborate network of railroad tracks and bridges and boat docks. Nearby, the surprisingly elaborate complex of building blocks she had constructed still stood. Wrought by her own imagination and design it looked like a modern civic center any city would be proud of. I smiled at how she had determinedly created her own world that weekend (my only role was to take instruction from my young forewoman and occasionally solve vexing engineering struggles such as the proper support for a railway bridge).

Continue reading “Rearranging Our Pieces, Playing With Our Future”

Take offs

By Bill Lascher

The thing about L.A. before you even land is the lights. Everywhere. Like a circuit board. Beneath or at least near each is a story, a life, a world. Only a glance and I’m reminded of that.

It’s late, but I know the way it would look in the sunlight, the circuit boards stretching [...]

Landings

By Bill Lascher

Lately I’ve been thinking a tremendous amount about places I’ve been, places I am and places I may be going. As this week’s “Seen This Week” mentioned, since Friday I’ve been in Portland, Oregon. While here, I’ve had the opportunity to connect with a number of old friends, beloved members of my family and a city I am finding so full of meaning to me, even though I’ve only lived here a few months.

Yesterday morning I drove along Lombard Street. Stopped at a light where Lombard intersects with Albina, I pondered a craft store in a small house on the north side of the road. A large shingle hanging in the yard read “Yesterday and Tomorrow.” From the road I could see through the windows to view what looked like vases and sculptures and other knick-knacks, but the store’s name and the fact the sign featured a dragon (See postscript) made it hard not to think it catered to lovers of fantasy novels and science fiction. I thought of Renaissance Fair fans and Trekkies and how the two groups share a category somewhere in my brain.

Something dawned on me. Fans of these genres spend so much of their entire lives concerned with either what has been (in a loose sense, since we’re talking about fantasy), or what might be (as fanciful as such visions may be constructed). I don’t say this out of judgment, for I admittedly enjoy a great deal of science fiction and the odd medieval-themed book or movie. Still, it’s an unsettling thought. What about the beauty of the present?

I’d rather not delve into a cultural/literary critique, especially because I don’t want to discount the power and beauty of imagination. Nonetheless, these thoughts arose as I’ve pondered the intersection of my own present with my past and future. Here in Portland this week I’ve seen how so many paths have intersected. I’m always awed as I drive East and West by the 10 bridges spanning the Willamette River, and only now am realizing that Portland itself has been the backdrop for so many transitions across my own life.

Over the past year I’ve flown into this city three times. There’s something about landing here that stirs a tremendous amount of nostalgia. When I land in Portland, it feels like home. I understand where I am. I see where I’ve been. It feels like a real arrival, unlike any other city I’ve been to. It makes a certain amount of sense.

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Seen This Week: Feb. 23 – Mar 2

By Bill Lascher

[Show picture list]

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Seen This Week: Paradise for $5

By Bill Lascher

Most mornings, I stand near the corner of 3rd Street and Vermont with a crowd of strangers in front of a planter between a McDonald’s and a discount store. There, in the northern extremities of Koreatown, we wait for the Metro Rapid 754 (some riders are waiting for the DASH Wilshire Center/Koreatown instead). [...]

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