Can Growth Visioning Save Los Angeles?

22 May 2003 - 7:00am

A worst-case growth scenario for Los Angeles would have devastating results for San Fernando Valley gridlock.

"Planners have unveiled an extreme outlook that shows that the population of the north county could more than triple to 1.7 million residents by 2030. The new residents would send untold traffic on the I-5 and surface streets as commuters head out to jobs in the San Fernando and Conejo valleys, and downtown Los Angeles, unless new job centers and transportation centers followed the housing boom... Planners from the Southern California Association of Governments have launched the $1.4 million Southern California Compass project to develop policies to handle the 6 million new residents -- mostly from families having kids -- across the six-county region of L.A., Orange, San Bernardino, Riverside, Imperial and Ventura counties."

Source: Los Angeles Daily News, May 21, 2003
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It is hard to think of a starker contrast than that between Moses modernism and Jacobs localism. Yet the standoff between Jacobs and Moses only ever sparred two separate wings of the middle class concerning how to build and rebuild the city for people of greater rather than lesser class privilege.