Help Make Los Angeles More Pedestrian-Friendly

Metro will be hosting several two-day "Designing for Pedestrian Safety Workshops" in the coming months. The workshops will focus on ways for the city and region to become more pedestrian-friendly and will including a walking tour of areas needing improvement. All workshops will take place at Metro Headquarters, One Gateway Plaza, Los Angeles, CA, 90012 (adjacent to Union Station).

The workshops are scheduled for:

Monday, November 15 & Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Wednesday, November 17 & Thursday, November 18, 2010

Monday, December 13 & Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Wednesday, December 15 & Thursday, December 16, 2010

Monday, January 10 & Tuesday, January 11, 2011

Wednesday, January 12 & Thursday, January 13, 2011

To register, e-mail ped@metro.net and include your name, organization, department, job title, phone number, and email/mailing address, or call Adela Felix at (213) 922-4333 or Julie Leung at (213) 922-4373 for more information. Registration is required to attend.

Speak Out About Neighborhood Planning 9/21 and Online

The City of Los Angeles has a new planning director and I want to make sure he hears from you first, which is why I'm holding a town hall meeting on Sept. 21 where the new director, Michael LoGrande, will answer questions and discuss his vision for the city. See the blue "Your Los Angeles" button on the right side of my homepage for details.

If you can't make it to the meeting, you can click on the "Speak Out Los Angeles" button on the right side of my homepage and submit a question or vote for one already submitted. Anyone can see posted questions. You will need a free Google account to submit or vote on a question. Or, you can submit a question, vote for one or provide other feedback by sending an email to councilmember.garcetti@lacity.org. The most popular questions will be asked at the meeting.

No one knows more about our neighborhoods than the people who live there. So let's speak out and make sure our Planning Department knows what's on your mind.

Cutting red tape at City Hall

Cutting red tape at City Hall
Originally uploaded by CD-13

We want to make it easier to do business in and bring jobs to Los Angeles. But for some businesses - particularly small businesses - navigating the city's entitlement and permitting process can be a nightmare.

I joined Mayor Villaraigosa and Los Angeles business leaders to announce a program called 12 to 2 that will reduce the number of city departments that business owners and builders will have to visit to receive their entitlements and permits from... you guessed it, 12 to 2. They will go to Planning for entitlements and Building and Safety for permits, and that's it.

Cutting red tape not only helps our economy, it helps us make better use of our city resources. We don't need 12 departments managing paperwork when two departments can coordinate the review of business or construction plans. And by coordinating the efforts of our city departments, we can better ensure that new projects are assets to our neighborhoods.

Who's Number 1? We're Number 1!

Via our friends at Curbed LA, Los Angeles is the national leader in green development, ownership, and occupancy. While our friends around the country in cities like New York and Chicago have often enjoyed good press about their laudable green building efforts, we have more than twice as many green projects as New York and more than four times more than Chicago. This underscores that our early leadership (or LEEDership, as the case may be) is yielding results and helping lay a foundation in the public and private sector for buildings that will help us live more sustainably in Los Angeles. Considering that less than two years ago, we were seen as lagging but quickly catching up with our peer cities, this is great news for our city.

Older links on green building in LA:

• City Unveils Green Building Proposal (press release)
  
• LA Planning Commission Approves Ambitious Green Building Plan (Los Angeles Times)
• A New Green Era of Building in Los Angeles (CD13 Blog)
  
• Officials Add Incentives for Environmental Construction (LA Business Journal)
• Habitat for Humanity Jimmy Carter Work Project in LA Goes Green (Habitat for Humanity)
• MTV's Real World Goes Green (Green Girls Global)
• Silver Lake Library Strives for LEED Gold (CD13 Blog)
• Leading the Way on LEED (CD13 Blog)
• Produce Green Buildings (CD13 Blog)
  
• Going Private: LA and SF Race to Make Private Buildings LEED Compliant (The Architect's Newspaper)
  
• Los Angeles Sets Green Standard for Urban Living (interview in Verde Xchange)
  
• First LEED Platinum Home Built (KNBC)
• Building Green with Los Angeles: Enterprise and the City Award Grants to Developers (Enterprise) (also detailed here)
  
• UCLA Student Wins Bond Companies’ University Challenge Green-Building Grand Prize (press release)

Jefferson at Hollywood Gets Underway

Groundbreaking - Jefferson at Hollywood
Originally uploaded by CD-13

Community-centered design is at the core of Hollywood’s redevelopment, a principle reflected in the new Jefferson at Hollywood mixed-use complex. Ten percent of the units will be affordable, with live/work units and retail space that will front Highland Avenue. The project’s architect worked with my office’s Hollywood Design Review Committee to create a pedestrian-friendly environment along the ground floor, and to integrate the building with its surroundings. Weaving new development into the existing neighborhood fabric allows us to realize Hollywood’s potential while honoring its past.

Office of Historic Resources Launches Two New Websites

Hollyhock House
Originally uploaded by CD-13

Los Angeles has a new home for all things historical at the revamped Office of Historic Resources Website. You can take stock of the nearly 900 historic-cultural monuments (including Hollyhock House, pictured here) in Los Angeles, find out whether or not your neighborhood includes an historic preservation overlay zone, or discover preservation incentives at the city, state, and federal levels.

Also, be sure to fill out SurveyLA – an ambitious, multi-year LA Historic Resources Survey.

Planning on the web

The new city planning website has gone live. It's very good looking. The department's general manager Gail Goldberg writes,

The new web site is not only improved in contents and organization of information, the graphical presentation has also been completely re-designed. The site was beta-tested by many City Planning employees, Commissioners, and members of the public.

Try it out to download forms, read up on local zoning, review upcoming agendas, investigate demographic statistics, and much more.

The First Annual Sustainability Summit

More than 350 developers, advocates, and community stakeholders packed into the LEED-certified La Kretz Hall at the UCLA Institute of the Environment at the first-ever Los Angeles Business Council Sustainability Summit. A broad spectrum of thinkers and policy makers convened to share how companies are incorporating sustainable practices into their business model, from building green structures to providing cash incentives for carpool and alternative fuel vehicles.

Much as corporate America is streamlining sustainability into their operations, so too has the city. We have the largest fleet of hybrid vehicles in the nation, and we were the first big city to mandate that all of our buildings be LEED-certified.

Government’s role in facilitating a green future for Los Angeles was stressed. The threat of climate change has brought environmentalism to the forefront of the public’s attention. It’s our responsibility to engineer the local solutions that will solve this global crisis.

Read more...

The strongest commitment the city can make to fight global warming is to green our building standards and spur the private sector to achieve the highest levels of sustainable construction. As I’ve written in this space before, the city has proposed a far-reaching green building program that includes new standards of sustainability, a city bureaucracy well-versed in environmental building, and expedited processing through each of the 21 departments involved in the development process for buildings that commit to going LEED Silver.

Towards the end of the day, the conversation shifted from the nuts and bolts of green business models and green building standards to a broader discussion about the nexus of planning and the environment. With the predicted arrival of 20 million more people to California over the next 40 years, we need to plan smart. Parts of Los Angeles, like the new urban trend in Hollywood’s development, can help model the future of California. The environmental impact of 60 million Californians demands that it must.

A New Green Era of Building in Los Angeles

I joined several department general managers—Gail Goldberg from Planning, Andrew Adelman from Building and Safety, Dee Allen from Environmental Affairs, Commissioner Paula Daniels of Public Works and Department of Water and Power Commission President David Nahai—and dozens of developers, builders, and environmental advocates as the city unveiled its green building proposal. Developed in partnership with non-profit Global Green, the legislation would fundamentally transform the city's built environment. As I noted in my post on DO REAL PLANNING principle # 7 (Produce Green Buildings), buildings consume 36% of our total energy, account for 30% of our greenhouse gas emissions, and use up 40% of raw materials worldwide.

We’re asking more from developers, but at the same time, we’re demanding much more from ourselves.
Read more...

Our new proposal includes a new environmental baseline for building in the city, including a requirement that all buildings greater than 50,000 square feet or more than 50 units of housing be LEED Certified compliant. This requirement is matched by a city commitment to educate its staff about green building to handle the new baseline, and to provide public education and outreach on green building. Finally, the city is offering new incentives: expedited processing, financial grants, and technical assistance for developers and builders that chose to achieve an even higher level of sustainable building.

As a city, greening our buildings is the strongest tool we have at our disposal in the fight against global warming. In terms of global greenhouse gas (GHGs) production, buildings account for roughly the same percentage of GHGs as cars do, even though the burgeoning national consciousness has had disproportionately more focus on tailpipe emissions and MPG efficiency. While our counterparts at the state and federal level pursue higher emission standards for automobiles, Los Angeles is taking the lead in developing local solutions to a global crisis.

Buildings are the prism through which we can see many of the environmental issues that affect all communities - from greenhouse gas emissions to landfilling to urban runoff. Making it easier to build green in Los Angeles will help us all reduce our ecological footprint.

Planning 102

Building on the success of our inaugural Planning 101 workshop, where more than 50 people learned about urban planning and land-use processes in Los Angeles, Council District 13 will be hosting Planning 102, entitled "Parking Regulations and Policy." The session will provide information on the city's parking requirements for different land uses and an update on the proposed parking code amendments, and will be topped off by presentations on parking by experts Mott Smith and UCLA professor Donald Shoup.

The workshop will be on Saturday, June 16, from 9:30AM-1PM at the Will and Ariel Durant Branch Library, located at 7140 Sunset Blvd. Refreshments will be provided - please RSVP by email or over the phone at (213) 473-7013 by June 13^th.

Planning 101 Coming Your Way

Interested in learning more about planning in your neighborhood and around the city? Join staff from CD13 and the Planning Department on March 31^st at the Edendale Branch Library, as we explore the basics of planning and engage in some of the hot planning issues in Los Angeles, including parking reform and the City-wide historic resources survey. Please contact our Planning Deputy, Helen Leung, at (213) 473-7013 if you are interested in attending or have more questions about Planning 101.