Harold Meyerson argues that thanks to Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, transportation and land use in the City of Angels now focuses on the public sector, not the private realm, as the Mayor takes on a strong central identity heretofore lacking.
"Los Angeles set the template for unplanned, sprawling, privatized growth. The city became home to the largest number of backyard swimming pools and the smallest number of public parks."
"Antonio Villaraigosa has become mayor at the very moment when Los Angeles seems finally to have realized that privatized, unplanned sprawl no longer works, that decent private lives depend on a decent public environment."
"The quintessential horizontal city is about to go vertical, with 52 new high-rises slated for construction. The mayor preaches the gospel of mixed-use development, of increasing density along the city's bus and current and future rail lines...'we can no longer rely on single-passenger automobiles as our principal means of transportation in L.A.'s future.', states the charismatic mayor."
"Today Villaraigosa has assembled an activist administration of builders and environmentalists committed simultaneously to densifying and greening the city, to mandating the construction of affordable housing and pocket parks, even to scaling back L.A.'s dependence on the automobile -- and it is winning plaudits all over town. In a city with a huge number of working poor, he's determined that these projects hire locally and pay decently."
"Villaraigosa is acclimating Los Angeles to the idea that private purposes need a public sphere, and, more elementally, that a mayor can matter".
Thanks to David Tam
FULL STORY: In L.A., Visibility And a Vision
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