Rios Clemente Hale Studio for Streets for People

A rendering of Sunset Triangle Plaza.

​If you are going to close a street in L.A., you better have a good excuse or an effective strategy to mollify enraged drivers. One group's answer? Polka dots.

Griffith Park Boulevard between Sunset Boulevard, Maltman Avenue and Edgecliffe Drive closed Sunday, The Eastsider LA reports, and it will remain closed for at least a year. Streets for People (what the kids are calling S4P) plans to transform the area, which is already home to two farmers' markets, into a pedestrian plaza complete with planter boxes, green umbrellas and, yes, polka dots.

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southpasadena.blogspot.com

You don't even want to know what's going on down there.

​Awesome.

The Pasadena Star-News has released a two-part expose on South Pasadena's almost incomprehensibly crappy sewage system (complete with violation maps and damning documents). Turns out the consequences of its crappiness have extended far beyond one quaint little village of antique lampposts and leafy sidewalks.

It's almost painful to say, but here goes, without further ado: Federal and local investigators discovered that "26 separate raw sewage spills over the past four years" dumped "121,040 gallons of untreated wastewater" ...

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Union Station in downtown Los Angeles

​Nothing is certain yet, but we can already see a major brouhaha brewing over the future plans for Union Station if it's sold to the California High-Speed Rail Authority and the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.

The much-beloved Union Station is actually not the property of the city of Los Angeles, but owned by a private, Denver-based real estate company called ProLogis. ProLogis is looking to sell various assets, and Union Station is one of them.

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In this week's cover story, "Community Watchdog Cary Brazeman Fights Villaraigosa's Crusade to Allow Development Everywhere: L.A.'s postwar zoning code on the chopping block," writer Steven Leigh Morris interviews Cary Brazeman, the former CB Richard Ellis exec turned community activist whose unincorporated watchdog group, L.A. Neighbors United, is trying to unmask what he claims are the the Planning Department's clandestine efforts to gut the Zoning Code, allowing for ever larger condos and commercial property everywhere in the city. L.A. Neighbors United has now filed two lawsuits against the city for its recently passed on pending ordinances violating the California Environmental Quality Act. The first two videos are of Brazeman in Peet's coffee shop in West Hollywood.

The third video is of Deputy Planning Director Alan Bell, in his City Hall office, explaining that what Brazeman asserts "just isn't so," and that the Planning Department is out to protect individual communities. Watch the videos after the jump...

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Daktronics

You'll never have to shop alone again

​No one ever claimed we built the Los Angeles mall-topia on rock 'n' roll (except maybe Hot Topic). But here to erase all remaining illusions of quaint grunge in our sprawling "city" is the self-proclaimed global leader in massive outdoor LED displays: Daktronics.

The company is poised to install 18-foot video displays with "world-class image processing, high contrast, and consistent brightness" in the Westfield Topanga mall. According to the shopping-center chain, the massive rotating technology is merely "phase one" in its conversion to a "Digital Spectacular Network" (and world domination).

Boasts the joint Westfield-Daktronics press release:

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West Hollywood City Councilwoman Abbe Land

​When the Metropolitan Transportation Authority shot down a subway route through West Hollywood a few weeks ago, it probably shook up no group of people harder than West Hollywood City Council members John Heilman, Abbe Land, Lindsey Horvath, Jeff Prang, and John Duran, especially Heilman, Land, and Horvath, who are up for re-election in 2011.

As former West Hollywood City Councilman Steve Martin points out in his column at WeHo News, in one of the worst and wacky urban planning decisions made by local politicians, the City Council counted on a subway with no official route and no official groundbreaking date to ease traffic congestion when they approved high density redevelopment projects in already gridlocked neighborhoods.

The City Council's big dreams of subway-oriented development went horribly sideways on them, but residents are still going to have to deal with nightmare traffic that's only going to get worse once various projects get built.

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Giga Granada Hills blog

Drought resistant landscaping? Pay a fine.

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File this under: Your city government, not helping. (But with a nice ending.)

Here's the story, as reported by the Giga Granada Hills blog. Several years ago the Department of Water and Power enacted an incentive program to get residents and businesses to rip out their lawns and put in drought-resistant plants. One Granada Hills resident was instead rewarded with a notice that he was in violation of city code.

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Los Angeles has been lucky to be part of the Streetsblog family, along with New York City, Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

As in the other cities, the local version here is an important source of news and advocacy around the general proposition that streets don't just belong to cars. It sounds like a simple idea, but it actually has enormous ramifications. Just for instance: If our streets should be friendly to pedestrians, bikes and what could broadly be called street life, then it follows that certain kinds of development (walkable, dense urbanism) should be favored over others (sprawl.)

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This is not in Long Beach.

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You know what a bar really needs? Free parking!

Although drunk driving fatalities have been on the decline for decades, someone still gets killed by a drunk driver every 45 minutes or so.

So why on earth do cities such as Long Beach require that bars provide off-street parking?

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