We're not sure if any of you were around over the weekend to enjoy the article in the Daily News about Mayor Villaraigosa's plans to rezone "massive swaths" of the City to increase density. Its the kind of article to warm the cockles of our hearts, but then we learn that three of the City's greatest naysayers, "some", "others" and "Joel Kotkin", are less than enthused by the plans. As we all know, when you increase density people move in and they bring their cars and some of them are... gasp! - poor. But the Mayor's plans provide for building high density adjacent to our blossoming mass transit system. Makes sense right?
Villaraigosa wants to have hundreds of parcels rezoned within the next year to facilitate construction of high-density residential projects in locations that would encourage the use of public transit, aides say.We agree, a one-year timeline is fairly ambitious, but caving to NIMBYs over and over again is maddening when the City desperately needs housing. As the article states, 6.3 million more people are expected to call Los Angeles home by the year 2030 so they gotta go somewhere. As much as we'd like to put them all in Palmdale or Lancaster, we can't imagine that would go over too well.With so much at stake - houses, communities, traffic and funding - the one-year timeline hardly seems long enough to take on what is likely to be a litany of concerns from community members likely to oppose it.
· Transit 'villages' for L.A.? [Daily News]