Los Angeles's Tens of Thousands of Vacant Lots: Mapped

There are still plenty of empty lots in Los Angeles—thousands of them, actually—that are just sitting around fenced off and collecting trash. Many of them are even publicly owned. As part of their effort to try and do something good for the communities with some of those lots, LA Open Acres has created a map of all the vacant parcels in Los Angeles, from the Valley to South LA. The map is searchable by neighborhood council area, community plan area, and city council district, as well as according to the kind of development the empty lots are zoned for and the size of the spaces.

For all points on the map, there's a status update (is it in the process of becoming something, or is it waiting for someone to get the ball rolling?) and the name of the property owner, which really helps for anyone looking to take that first step toward turning unused land into useful neighborhood space. The map allows for filtering according to privately or publicly owned land, too.

LA Open Acres focuses on the approximately 3,000 vacant lots in South LA, some of which have been sitting empty since the Watts Riots of 1965, reports KPCC (the group has turned lots into parks, playgrounds, and pop-up cultural fairs, and has ambitions for many more). The San Fernando Valley also has a solid share of vacant lot clusters (a lot of them publicly owned, it seems). Smaller, higher-demand areas like Miracle Mile and West LA have far fewer empty lots, but there are some in nearly every part of the city, even those, like Downtown, that are teeming with new construction.

· LA Open Acres Map [Official site]
· Groups work to turn South LA lots into children's playgrounds [SCPR]
· 23 Years Later, Fallow LA Riots Site in South LA Will Become a Flashy Shopping Center [Curbed LA]