Urban Living in California

Photo and article from the Los Angeles Daily News.

Two Los Angeles city councilmembers on Wednesday proposed an ordinance that calls on outdoor advertising companies to voluntarily remove their signs – a welcome plea for critics who say the city is saturated with 8,000 billboards that contribute to urban blight.

The proposal doesn’t just rely on the good hearts of outdoor advertisers, who have shown little regard for city billboard ordinances in the past.

Read the rest of this entry »

Image from Damian Dovarganes/AP

When the Century Plaza Hotel emerged on the LA landscape in the 1960’s, it was modern and sleek. Now that it is dwarfed by taller, thinner buildings, new owner Michael Rosenfeld wants to demolish the building and replace it with two sleek new towers.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation and actress Diane Keaton stand in opposition to this new project. They want to protect this historic hotel because of its cultural value and distinctive shape. Other concerns include the un-green notion of tearing down a perfectly good building and building another for mainly aesthetic reasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

Forbes columnist Joel Kotkin offers five suspects…

Read the full article at Forbes.com

Photo from LA Times

Read the LA Times article detailing the effect Michael Jackson’s death has had on the Los Angeles community. Many hotels have seen unseasonal capacity in the days following Jackson’s death and leading up to his public memorial service. The city has even issued a public plea for donations so that Los Angeles taxpayers will not have to foot the huge police and security bill for the Staples Center event.

From LAist.com by Zach Behrens

Jobs, environment, public transit, crime and education were the focus of Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s second inaugural address today on the south steps of City Hall. “I stand, hopefully a little bit wiser as well, chastened and enlightened both by our successes and failures over the last four years,” he said. “Angelenos, I offer this oath today. In the next four years, we are going to judge ourselves plain and simple — based on what we build. We intend to write our record in concrete rather than poetry, focused on deadlines over headlines. And you have this in writing, we are going to track our promises and put the results online. And we are going to build our efforts around five clear goals for the next four years.”

Of note in his lengthy speech, was about the building of twelve rail projects funded by Measure R, the additional sales tax that began today in LA County. “The people did their part,” he explained, “now it’s time to do ours; to get that investment off the drawing board and into the ground; to connect the eastside to the airport, and Downtown to West L.A; to build housing for our workers along transit lines and near job centers; to take action to build all 12 Measure R rail projects on time or ahead of schedule.”

Read Mayor Villaraigosa’s full speech here:

Read the rest of this entry »