More Bridge to Breakwater delays & rant/editorial/perspective
In yet another delay for San Pedro's much-anticipated $500 million waterfront makeover, port officials this week said they've halted the required environmental study that began late last year, putting it on indefinite "hold."
My impression is that all this recent hesitation and delay are symptomatic of the greater issue - Bridge to Breakwater/L.A. Waterfront has never managed to really develop a focus. Sure there are five plans that are supposed to be considered in the EIR, but can you name a feature (other than low wage, de-skilled summer jobs for the kiddies) that defines them? Right now there just doesn't seem to be anything worth getting behind other than development for development's sake, and that's not sexy enough to justify the scope of the project.
Why is it that Los Angeles (because like it or not this project is bigger than Pedro and needs to serve a broad community of users), which is considered to be a world center for design & architecture, not to mention a metropolitan area housing 14 million residents, cannot get it's shit together to develop its waterfront? If this is going to get done at all, it needs to be done right and done once. When the most ambitious plan is defined by the simple increase in commercial square footage, you have a problem.This needs to be a project that stokes the envy of city planners worldwide. Urban planners in Beijing, London and Mumbai should take a look at what Los Angeles is doing along its waterfront and say "Damn. I wish I had thought of that." It's no wonder that the current plan is simply spinning its wheels.
The a few weeks back the Grand Avenue Project, designed by Frank Gehry, was big news - a great city re-envisioning its downtown, with one of the world's great architects at the helm. Last year, the Caltrans District 7 Building (if you've got tomorrow free, check out the art show in the plaza) was finished - one of the latest jaw dropping structures by Thom Mayne's firm Morphosis. It too was big news. Why must our projects be dragged down by both the ambitions of small town minds (igonrant of the real potential of the project) and the lack of ambition of the planners invloved (they should know better)?
I know this is a bit of a rant, but my neck is all screwed up and it's killing me and I'm in too much pain to make it more coherent. Flame away in the comments boys and girls.
18 Comments:
I don't know, man, somehow I can't say I'm surprised. I see the construction around town, but somehow it doesn't seem real. B2Bw has stalled, but I hope this other shit will continue, if only to prove me a vision-less pessimist.
Yes, well, what were they proposing to do anyway? Put up a 3-story, 300,000 sq ft structure here, and a 2-story 125,000 structure there, and stick the parking in the middle. The real goal of it all seemed to be wedging a new cruise ship terminal down in the Inner Cabrillo Bay, anyway, and I can wait forever for that...Oh, but I did like the idea of a public pier at the end of 7th Street.
If we don't have particular needs in mind to design for now, we should probably wait until we do, and build in an organic manner, as has been human's way for centuries.
Well, all righty. First of all, if you're going to blame the "ambition of small town minds" for the project's lack of potential, you ought not to counter it with other limited ideas. There is nothing innovative, interesting, or new about the Grand Avenue Project. Indeed, the starchitecture+retail+condos model is so depressingly common these days, and is so likely to be proposed by cities trying desperately to "revitalize" their decaying downtowns, that it is generally greeted with yawns now by people outside of city councils and/or the Cult of Gehry.
(One of the most salient charges leveled at the Grand Avenue embarrassment has been the designer's incredible blindness and insensitivity to the parts of downtown that already exist and thrive, like the crowds of largely Latino shoppers, workers, and residents that daily pack Broadway. Now, just picture billionaires and starchitects "transforming" Pedro into a "world-class" waterfront. Or just picture a great big steamroller--same thing.)
But you're sort of right about doing it once and doing it right. The big, big, big question is, what is it? I submit to you that it is not new commercial development, however "world-class" its pretensions may be, based on speculative projections about what sort of stuff people will want to spend money on in twenty years.
If the Port really wants to give San Pedro a big ol' Christmas present, then let it give us something that the private sector can't or won't give us. That means boardwalks, piers, boat launches, lagoons, nature preserves, and whopping big gathering places for kids and grownups to play, festivals and concerts to be held, etc.
Believe me, this can be done in such a way as to inspire plenty of people around the world to eat their hearts out, if it's really that important to you. Waterfront park development is something that is often done in a mediocre, if not outright bad, way in major cities.
It can also be done in a way that doesn't bulldoze the essence of the town's character. There are plenty of underused buildings down there just waiting to be brought back to life to host businesses to serve the people using the public amenities.
Build us a Bitchen New Waterfront Public Gathering Place®--build it once and build it right--and let commercial development proceed organically from that, based on demand. Wow, what a concept.
Dammit, Redrider beat me to it with the organic development thing. Now everybody will think I'm biting her style, and my rep will be ruined. I'm never posting here again. Goodbye.
Oh, but while I've got you on the line, check this out from the Breeze story:
John Mavar of San Pedro, who favors one of the higher density plans, expressed concern at the delay, but added that he was encouraged by the way several disparate groups came together recently to hammer out an agreement that allowed the interim projects to finally move forward.
"It's unfortunate," Mavar said of the latest setback. "I hope they can make the proper adjustments. We need to hurry to get it back on track. We do need to keep the flow going.
"The real estate market is at a plateau and this development on the waterfront is what's driving our downtown (housing) market."
Well, there's a reason for supporting the Superdupermax project that I hadn't thought of. We must do it now, people, or else we'll never be able to sustain San Pedro's housing prices at their current level of unaffordability!
Quickly, while we're on the subject of the Port as Santa Claus, let's ask them for passenger rail to the MTA headquarters building (or there'bouts)...
But as much as I concur with objections to "railroading" thru bland development along the waterfront, I do want to build housing here. The more housing we build, the more affordable it can be. And make it great housing, built to last a long time, and to enhance what we already have here. And make it about the people, not the profit.
Affordable housing? For the people? Next you'll be advocating syndicalist artists' collectives at Warehouse One, or some such hippie-dippy crap.
the breeze is pushing a load of crap.
the Port isn't going to put the breaks on the project, after they've spent so much on it already.
this is all much ado about nothing...
Redrider wrote
"The more housing we build, the more affordable it can be."
Yeah, that's working reeeeeally well in downtown LA.
I said it "can be", not that it "would be", with capital controlling itself as is the current paradigm. If housing is undersupplied, it is pretty much guaranteed to be overpriced.
However, if there were sufficient political will to build affordable housing, it could be done. One of the facets of the solution is to build a sufficient housing stock so that supply is closer to demand. Then, you have to make the decision to cut back on parking requirements, as 2 spaces per unit should not be required to house persons who earn, by choice or default, less than the median income (remember that providing for those spaces costs big bucks). Then, figure out what else it takes to break even (or, gasp, subsidize....) and encourage a not-for-profit organization to build it.
hey, this is totally off the topic, but as an avid reader of this blog, i did want to give you a head's up on something i noticed:
a lot of the links to newspapers are dead because the breeze and LA times takes down their stories a week or two after they are posted. so a lot of the links in the archive aren't active anymore...which is a shame because they are a great resource for anybody doing research or catching up on local issues.
not to create more work for you guys...but it might be worth keeping a separate HTML file somewhere else for any articles you want to link to.
just a suggestion...
Redrider wrote:
If housing is undersupplied, it is pretty much guaranteed to be overpriced.
True, but housing is overpriced right now for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with undersupply.
IMBG is right on this - the housing market is out of control not because of excessive demand. Buyer's willingness/desperation to pay outrageous prices for homeownership and a lending industry that is running fast and loose are really what's driving the current housing market.
Avid Reader - I am aware of the news item/old links issue. I think it sucks that newspapers archive and restict their old content.
I'm not aware of a solution to that problem within blogger. If you've got any suggestion on how to implement a solution to our problem, I'm all ears. I'm not sure if legally we can archive their articles. Anyone have ideas on this one?
hey calamari,
the best thing to do would be to somehow convert the articles to images, so you could upload them to blogger and the links would stay up as long as blogger doesn't screw with their photos.
i think there is software out there that can capture a screen. and sometimes the newspapers have "to print" links that strips the articles of any advertisements or anything. that'd be my suggestion.
In Windows, all you have to do to capture the screen is press the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard. This puts a bitmap of your current screen into memory. Open your graphics program (Photoshop, GIMP, Pixia) and paste the bitmap into a new file. Crop it as appropriate and save it as a JPEG. Archive it, and you're done. You'll be in court for copyright violation in no time!
If you're a Mac-using hipster, it's Shift+Command+3 to capture the screen. You Linux socialists apparently have to do it from within The Gimp or some gnome (kde, whatever) applet, which serves you right for using a free OS.
ah...shift+command+4 is the real kicker though.
you can choose what portion of the screen you want. it even comes with a nifty camera sound, like you're taking a picture.
macs RULE!
hey calamari,
it works...check it out:
the archive
Very pretty design! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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Very pretty design! Keep up the good work. Thanks.
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