Los Angeles Looking for New Planners, New Community Plans

Josie Huang reports that Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has announced an initiative to hire a 28 new city planners that will be tasked with updating the city's community plans.

"There are 35 of these blueprints, each one containing housing and transportation policy for one or several neighborhoods," explains Huang. "But many plans have been unchanged for decades, and Garcetti said they do not reflect the city's changing landscape and growing mass transit infrastructure."

The redoubling of efforts on community plans in Los Angeles follows a highly controversial initiative proposed for the March 2017 ballot, known as the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. The article allows John Schwada, a spokesman for the initiative, a platform to respond to the mayor's proposal. According to Schwada, as paraphrased in the article, "the city's primary problem is not outdated community plans, but developers who try to build larger projects regardless of what the plans say by getting special exemptions from the city."

Huang provides additional details on the community plans proposal, which would cost $1.9 million in the first year and $4.2 million in subsequent years. "Garcetti said that he will direct planning staff to work on a dozen community plans at any given time," according to Huang.