Racial Justice, Equity, and Restorative Planning

For five years, Downtown Los Angeles has been updating its Community Plan. That means Land Use policy. Zoning is how you implement the policy.

This is a big deal for several reasons.

— For Los Angeles City Planning to name this effort DTLA 2040 tells you they think this will seriously influence what happens Downtown in upcoming years. Land Use/zoning decides what can and can’t be built.

— From a Native American perspective, land is not a commodity. Mother Earth is part of the ecosystem of community. For others, land is the commodity of commodities.

— The lack of an updated Community Plan created a culture of variances, or spot zoning. The Councilmember for Downtown, Jose Huizar, is at the forefront of one of the biggest scandals in LA history — developers using bribery and campaign contributions to get the blessing for their project to move forward against zoning regulations blocking it. An updated Community Plan offers a chance to change the culture.

— Skid Row Residents including the Unhoused Population will be greatly impacted by what this updated Community Plan does or does not do and the multi-year process to update it has been a platform to present the hopes and desires of Skid Row Residents and Stakeholders.

The Skid Row Now and 2040 coalition has been engaging City Planners with DTLA 2040 for close to four years. In a sense, all of that was to prepare for what just took place. The Planning Commissioners (community-based volunteers appointed by elected officials) worked with City Planning to present a six hour zoom called Equity Day.

Equity Day was in two sections. The first laid out the history and the problem. The second section focused on solutions. In each section, City Hall and citywide community-based groups made presentations followed by an hour of one minute public comment with folks calling in by phone.

Equity Day on January 21 grew out of the response to the murder of George Floyd. The primary City presentation was by an Office created within City Planning — Office of Racial Justice, Equity, and Restorative Planning.

City Planning structured the City of Los Angeles as thirty-five separate Communities and all thirty-five are somewhere in the process of updating their Community Plans.

DTLA 2040 is unique in that it’s the first to incorporate new zoning tools created by Recode LA. And so Downtown is positioned to be a model for the rest of the city. These five years of City Planning focus is drawing to a close as the DTLA process is now moving towards the rest of City Hall.

With so many people giving verbal comment during Equity Day, I decided to send mine as an email. My suggestion was to invite Mother Earth into the process as a Partner.

UPDATE JANUARY 30

The name Office of Racial Justice, Equity, and Restorative Planning has been changed. The Department of City Planning monthly newsletter came out yesterday. An excerpt:

“The newly established Office of Racial Justice, Equity, and Transformative Planning makes our commitment to undoing racism part of the Department’s institutional framework, and will guide us in the months and years ahead as we fight the good fight.”