Industrial Land Use Policy Gets an Award?
Eric Richardson
[Flickr]
Downtown's old industrial areas are home to the Arts District and an increasing number of residential developments.
DOWNTOWN LOS ANGELES — Perhaps the Downtown Art Walk shouldn't be so proud of its L.A. APA Awards win. Curbed has a list of the winners, and one of the awards went to the Planning Department and the Community Redevelopment Agency for their work on the Industrial Land Use Policy.
The Policy Project won in the category of Focused Issue Planning.
This is, of course, the Industrial Land Use Policy that was pretty much universally reviled in Downtown circles when unveiled earlier this year, and which both City Council members representing Downtown have acted to stop.
It's also the project that Planning head Gail Goldberg was repeatedly insistent to point out was not a new policy, just an application of existing directives. The January memo on the project said that:
Neither the ILUP Project nor our direction to staff contained in this memorandum takes any action that changes current land use designations or alters the City’s existing policy with respect to industrial land.
One has to wonder who would nominate such a controversial and disliked policy for an award.
Dando Guerra on June 20, 2008, at 10:39AM – #1
Maybe it got a planning award because it promoted the actual planning of neighborhoods, instead of piecemeal planning that led to all sorts of incompaitibilities.
Gail Goldberg fast-tracked the Central City North Community Plan, set to start this summer. "Reviled" developers and $700K loft-dwellers can make all the changes they want in that process: the appropriate, democratic venue for land use changes.
The Downtown Art Walk should indeed be proud of their award, as should the planners working to make sure we do real planning in LA, and not let real estate speculation continue to mold the city in a haphazard and inequitable way.