I Want You To Have Nice Things

In case you were wondering, there is a new plan for the LA River. This is the tenth scheme since 2000, but more on that later. The 272-page draft of the Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan lays out a $4.8 billion, twenty-five-year case for rethinking the design and use of the nearly 2,000-acre swath of land as a “Central Park” at the south end of the sprawling San Fernando Valley. Released last fall, the plan was produced by a cast of thousands, including the City of Los Angeles Department of Public Works, Bureau of Engineering; the city’s Department of Recreation and Parks; and LA Sanitation and Environment, together with the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, the Mountains and Recreation Conservation Authority, and a host of private consultants, including Geosyntec, OLIN, Agency Artifact, and Psomas. On offer is a seductive vision of the Southern California good life, but the plan in its current form also raises the question of whether this kind of investment in an existing park within an area primarily zoned for single-family residences is the equitable climate action LA needs. As the wider city densifies and develops (despite government dysfunction), do we need more plans that preserve the status quo in wealthy neighborhoods?

Owned by the Army Corps of Engineers, with about 75 percent leased to the City of LA on a long-term basis, the Sepulveda Basin is a flood control operation that straddles the LA River. Recreational fields, two golf courses, and various cultural and social amenities dot the landscape. The basin’s capacity to store water is critical for preventing much of the downstream flooding that has historically plagued the city. Storage is only part of the equation, as the concrete channelization of much of the LA River hastens stormwater conveyance toward the river’s outlet into the Pacific Ocean. The fact that the river was singularly engineered since the 1930s for flood control at the expense of nature, recreation, culture, and climate pretty much sums up the challenges with any plan seeking to transform it.

Like most socio-political documents produced by the City, the new Vision Plan is certainly ambitious. Its sections include “History,” “Previous and On-going Planning,” and “Community Engagement,” as well as a comprehensive overview of “Existing Conditions.” Other chapters focus on “Equity: People and Neighborhoods,” “Managing Water,” “Habitat Restoration, and Mobility.” The plan concludes with a hopeful chapter simply called “Implementation.” At its heart is a re-grading of the channelized river that would naturalize the waterway, providing islands and habitat within a 600-foot-wide channel compared to the existing hundred-foot-wide condition. This move enables new walking trails through the Basin and increases permeability to accommodate anticipated flood risk from climate change. This appears to be the main thrust of the plan’s climate action benefit, as increased flooding downstream could disastrously impact a significant urban population. Given the recent torrential rains ushered in by the La Niña cycle, any river project that doesn’t place flood control at the center is a likely non-starter.

Still, one wonders how this plan merits investment, especially if it’s compared with a previous map produced by LA Sanitation and included in the city’s Resilient LA plan from 2018. That plan identified the Sepulveda Basin as a high priority due to stormwater quality, groundwater recharge, and local flooding mitigation, but not as a “very high priority” like Downtown LA or most of the east side of the Valley. Is now a good time to introduce a “very, very high priority” category?

The “Mobility” section calls for the transformation of existing streets throughout the basin into so-called complete streets, which include those rare LA gifts: actual space for pedestrians and bicyclists, better crossing infrastructure, and street trees. A gem nested in this section, pertaining to enhanced bicycle infrastructure and mobility hub connections, claims that the “network surrounding the Sepulveda Basin is expected to expand, per the City of Los Angeles Mobility 2035 plan.” What is left out is the recent status report on the Mobility 2035 plan indicating that the city has basically stopped its implementation in any meaningful way, so much so that cycling advocates have put a measure called Healthy Streets LAon the March 2024 ballot that would force the city to follow through. In LA, real civic improvement requires a lawsuit or a voter initiative.

For anyone familiar with other planning documents from the City of LA, the Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan can sound a bit like a greatest-hits album. In the section “Equity: People and Neighborhoods,” there is an optimistic narrative about things the city could do to reduce extreme heat impacts, assuming it applies for and secures grant funding. It includes long discussions of tree canopies and the concept of developing resilience centers (both also in Resilient LA) and also weatherization and energy efficiency projects for affordable housing, which, as great as it sounds, appears to have nothing to do with the basin itself.

Considering the thousands of pages of analysis and countless creative ideas that have been generated over the years by the city and county in the name of the LA River, we may come to the conclusion that the planning of the future of the river is the project itself—a collection of historical documents for understanding the foundational myth of LA as a land of promise in a paradisiacally blessed climate, undermined at every turn by the harsh reality of the actual lived experience of a large share of its population. The LA River is like the central character in a film noir script: We are never quite sure why there is another plan and who stands to gain from it, but we have suspicions that something is amiss when so many official people in LA come together to agree on something.

In the 1945 film noir masterpiece Mildred Pierce, based on the James M. Cain novel, Joan Crawford plays the title character—a poor but determined divorcée who works her way up from a job as a waitress to owning a successful restaurant chain in the heady days of postwar Los Angeles. The film and novel strike at the heart of LA’s myths, where a new car and a better house paper over the social costs borne by the ambition to earn them. Crawford’s glamour aside, Mildred Pierce’s face betrays a life that has known desperation, a fate from which she works tirelessly to shield her spoiled daughter, Veda (Ann Blyth). In a pivotal scene, Pierce comforts a distraught and class-conscious Veda by offering what may be LA’s official motto, saying, “I want you to have nice things. And you will have. Wait and see. I’ll get you everything, anything you want. I promise.”

Who doesn’t want nice things? There is nothing in the city’s and county’s plans for the LA River that is not nice. The plans even offer a hopeful spin on the not-so-nice parts, like the burgeoning homeless population and the high cost of housing, which contributes to precarity. They also address the climate crisis, which leads to increased periods of extreme heat, among so many other environmental risks. But like Mildred’s promises to her daughter, the city seems intent on placating us with more plans, which are mostly unfunded. Envisioned for decades in the future, they do not actually address climate and equity in a way that would meaningfully impact the everyday lives of the city’s residents.

In LA, nice things are possible only if you can afford a house with a backyard. Apart from the commercial districts around Van Nuys Airport to the basin’s north, the neighborhoods bordering the extent of the Vision Plan are largely single-family homes, many with swimming pools and leafy yards. According to a 2022 study by UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, nearly 74 percent of the city of Los Angeles is zoned for single-family housing. The “Central Park” vision for the basin is nothing at all like its iconic New York inspiration, but rather a suburban park laden with amenities, such as the two golf courses the city is keeping in the plan. What does climate resilience mean for a family with a pool in the backyard?

While recent developments, such as the state of California’s accessory dwelling unit policy and new zoning incentives for adding duplexes to single-family lots, effectively override local control and allow for infill and densification in places like the San Fernando Valley, these alone will not solve LA’s housing needs. If rethinking 74 percent of the city’s land use as something other than single-family housing or duplexes is off the table, there is little left to plan for the Sepulveda Basin, other than reconsider how its amenities can better satisfy wealthy constituents. There is no real rebuttal to this in the Vision Plan, which leads one to believe the existing parklands of the basin are perhaps not the right location for a major public investment in the river, especially if galvanizing affordable housing development is among the city’s main priorities, as LA’s mayor, Karen Bass, claims.

Several miles downstream the LA river passes through denser and, not surprisingly, poorer and browner neighborhoods. These places offer obvious opportunities for equitable climate action, with many clearly spelled out in the city’s 2007 LA River Revitalization Master Plan (one of the ten aforementioned plans). Of the twenty opportunity areas, including the Sepulveda Basin, that plan identified, none have been fully addressed after almost seventeen years. In the places where work has started—a pedestrian bridge at Taylor Yard in Frogtown, a new entrance and pedestrian amenity for Canoga Park near the river’s origin on the city’s western limits—progress has been slow and tentative. The Downtown LA opportunity areas, along the industrial core and north of Union Station, remain stark concrete channels, disconnected from the spotty urban revitalization occurring on either side. The 6th Street Viaduct replacement project connecting Boyle Heights to the Arts District is still a work-in-progress, the park aspect lagging the all-important vehicular bridge by several years. Even that park won’t touch the river proper, only land under and around the bridge.

At a Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design event last year, community activists asked whether the $588 million cost of the bridge replacement could have been better spent on converting the original bridge to pedestrian use. No one seems to ask whether we need as many bridges over the river as we have now. The recent fire under the 10 Freeway suggests that even critical infrastructure can be closed in a pinch while the city continues to function.

The contrast between Downtown and the Valley is obvious, but let us consider only one of the Vision Plan’s metrics—tree canopy. According to TreePeople’s tree canopy maps for LA County, the basin’s neighborhoods have a canopy varying 20 to 30 percent in its coverage of land area, compared with the county’s average of 18 percent (which is pretty good for a semiarid city). Neighborhoods east of Downtown LA, on either side of the river, have tree canopies that average around 8 percent. Tree canopy, which is not necessarily a product of single-family zoning, can act as a proxy for air quality and urban heat island effects, so it generally follows that tree-poor neighborhoods often experience worse air quality and what we might term “uncomfortable” pedestrian microclimates.

Of course, river park projects alone will not improve the microclimates of underresourced, existing urban neighborhoods, where more people rely on public infrastructure along streets in their daily lives as opposed to distinct nature preserves. Ultimately, does LA need more parks or more streets that act like parks?

As the climate crisis unfolds in a region already plagued with significant environmental impacts, Angelenos’ ability to survive depends on the personal infrastructure they each have—such as a house and backyard—to mitigate some of these factors, but also how insulated their daily life can be within a climatic bubble of private-vehicle commuting and work-from-home employment. Our planning regime does not say this out loud. A project to develop affordable housing at scale and center it around a $5 billion investment in an LA River park could actually start to move the needle on both equity and climate action. It could also free the city’s politicians, already a mixed ethical bag, from having to make hard choices about single-family zoning.

The draft version of the Sepulveda Basin Vision Plan is only the latest example of how cannily we have designed our public data, analytical systems, and policy tools in California to make anything appear to be an investment in social and environmental justice or, perhaps more vaguely, about climate and community resilience. That the California Environmental Quality Act has been exploited by NIMBYs to stop the development of multifamily housing or otherwise encroach on single-family zoning is now well understood, if not yet addressed through policy changes. The City of LA’s Green New Deal, a sustainability agenda put forth by the former mayor Eric Garcetti in 2019, wrapped itself in visions of social equity and climate justice, but as the city’s controller recently reported, that plan has achieved very few of its goals that were not already underway, mostly due to statewide programs. (As the technical adviser to the city for the Green New Deal, I am not surprised by this outcome. Let’s just say I have learned a lot since then about the the way politicians use planning more as a system of accommodation and patronage than as a means of exercising leadership.)

Architecture has long been complicit in this cover-up of inequality through planning policy. The Case Study House program from the 1940s onward still figures in the global image of LA as a city filled with garden houses extending across a wild urban landscape, but you could go back to Rudolph Schindler’s Kings Road House, from 1922, to find the canary in the coal mine for “indoor-outdoor” living. These projects contributed to a view of climate and nature in Southern California as a private domain, played out behind a fence, affecting only personal pleasure and health. The Vision Plan implicitly accepts this condition, suggesting that the city should be limited to what already exists.

Housing affordability impacts and the potential for gentrification from the basin’s improvement are addressed on half a page out of the 272 pages, even while trumpeting that adjacent private property values will likely increase because of this public investment. The many professional architects, engineers, planners, and landscape architects who contributed to this plan know better and would likely welcome the opportunity to rethink the San Fernando Valley as a denser, richer urban place.

When considering how to prioritize funding for future planning endeavors, should we not count single-family residential zoning proximity as a strike against LA River projects? Can we finally say that having a private backyard, whether you own or rent, is actually a mark of privilege in LA rather than a promise, a sort of individual mitigation strategy that remains hidden within public datasets?

This is not to say the plan for the basin is not good—it would be a transformational project for that site. But its vision of habitat restoration, increased connectivity to the surrounding city, improvements to water quality, and better amenities, among many other things, would be transformational in just about any LA context. If anything, the focus on the basin is purely cynical—not a single homeowner in its vicinity has anything to lose and everything to gain. As for the rest of us? Sure, I want you to have nice things. I promise.