Archive: Planning

This is the kind of completely new development turn for Los Angeles that should get a thorough debate in the political arena but that rarely does.

The downtown civic push to (re)reinvent Pershing Square took a step forward today with the naming of four final design concepts from which the actual plan will be chosen.

One of Hollywood's most visible landmarks is the site of a proposed mega-project.

Tom Rothmann is the senior city planner overseeing Re:code LA, which could rein in some of the confusion and excesses of LA's protection of neighborhoods.

The draft EIR is out and shows that Renzo Piano's giant ball remains in the plan and that a big Oscar statue may take over the old May Co.'s iconic sculpture at Wilshire and Fairfax.

On Saturday morning I'm taking part in an LA Conservancy panel on suburbanization and sprawl in Woodland Hills. It's part of the Curating the City: Modern Architecture in L.A. series, which itself is included in Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. Info inside.

These new towers would be built on the parking lots around the Hollywood Palladium near Sunset and Vine. "Holy shit," says Curbed LA, "there have been rumors about some kind of development at the site of the Hollywood Palladium for ages now, but here they finally are, for real....two big-ass towers."

On Thursday morning I moderated a panel on the future of Los Angeles at the Getty Research Institute's symposium, Urban Ambition: Assessing the Evolution of L.A. The participants included Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times architecture critic.

The City Council on Tuesday gave final approval for that $2 billion development around the Century Plaza Hotel in Century City. Here are details and what the front of the hotel would look like.

NBCUniversal has killed a controversial proposal to build 3,000 homes on its property at Universal City. Instead the expansion will feature a new hotel and more room for the movie and TV studios and the theme park.

Interesting exercise on the New York Times website, with six writers or experts from Los Angeles taking part.

City code since 1974 has required helipads on top of tall buildings. (Luckily for the First Interstate Building, circa 1988.) Things could be different, though, if plans move ahead for skyscrapers along Hollywood Boulevard. Empire State Building anyone?

Bill Fulton, a well-known writer on California affairs and the nitty gritty of urban planning before and since he became an elected official in Ventura, is moving away largely because he is losing his eyesight to retinitis pigmentosa.

Here's how the developer foresees the streetscape of Hollywood miraculously changing if approval is forthcoming for high-rise towers around the Capitol Records building on Vine Street.

Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne makes a civic splash in the L.A. Times by pointing out that the Downtown NFL stadium Tim Leiweke and Casey Wasserman are pushing is another case of Los Angeles going about it all wrong.

Two experienced downtown planners from Michigan and Florida argue on the Times op-ed page that fooitball stadiums tend to be a bad choice for downtowns.

Chase, the author of several books on urbanism and Los Angeles, died Friday of an apparent heart attack. He was the godfather to the daughter of Frances Anderton, host of...

Mark Winogrond, who served Mayor Vilalraigosa as interim planning director and vetted his 2006 selection of Gail Goldberg, strongly rips the selection of Michael LoGrande as city planning director.

Here's the release from Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa's office on Michael LoGrande, his new nominee to take over the city planning department.

Mayor Antontio Villaraigosa today named defeated City Council candidate Christine Essel to be the top executive of the Community Redevelopment Agency.

Josh Stephens is the new editor of California Planning & Development Report, the Ventura-based land-use publication

D.J. Waldie picks up on my post on Jane Ellison Usher's resignation as chair of the city planning commission and runs with it at his KCET blog. He starts with...

City Council president Eric Garcetti, who represents Hollywood, said provisions added to the project will help alleviate concerns that the 16-story residential project next door will affect Capitol Records' underground...

Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, becoming the go-to voice raising questions about the urbanists' rush to let developers densify new areas of Los Angeles, took his cause to Sunday's LAT Opinion section....

City ethics commissioner Bill Boyarsky heard from friends what the scene was like inside the exclusive, closed "VIP reception" before last week's political roast at the Century Plaza. He posts...

Short piece in the U.K. magazine on L.A.'s move toward more density — and how cities around the West want to avoid becoming the next Los Angeles. Excerpt: The original...

CityBeat's L.A. Sniper columnist Alan Mittelstaedt captures Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky's persuasive argument that the Times' cutback of local coverage through the years contributes to the city's bad traffic by letting...

The Los Angeles City Council voted 10-5 this morning to stop work on the annexation application of the heavily lobbied Las Lomas project in Newhall Pass. Rick Orlov and Kerry...

With seven residential projects containing 900 units already under construction — and another two dozen projects approved — the most upscale shopping street across the Valley is evolving. But the...

Developer Dan Palmer falsely claimed that his company is the sole owner of the property in Newhall Pass where he wants to build the Las Lomas project with L.A.'s blessing,...

Before a City Council committee voted yesterday to tentatively approve a controversial condo project in Van Nuys Valley Village, a planning staffer for the city called the developer and told...

The L.A. Weekly's David Zahniser is out with a cluster of stories on one of the least talked-about big stories in Los Angeles: the push by planners, pols led by...

Times critic Christopher Hawthorne welcomes the revived interest in tunneling a subway under Wilshire Boulevard all the way to the ocean. He writes today about its possible effect on the...

I just received an email from a local editor-in-chief which reads, "David Zahniser's piece in this week's LA Weekly .. is brilliant. I'm jealous." The subject of the rave is...