Weekly Calendar

Latino Urban Forum

Meetings, activities and events that promote our mission as of

July 9, 2007

1. LA RIVER, River Improvement Overlay (RIO)

2. Do Real Planning

3. Friends of the Southwest Museum

4. Farm Lab: Do Real Planning

5. Northeast Open Space Coalition Meeting

6. Does LA have the funding to END THE GRIDLOCK?

7. How do Great Streets Get Made?

8. ART: LA Botanical:

9. ART: American Parking Space

10. ART: Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden,"

11. Articles: LA Times 60 Million Inhabitants in California

“How does the eastside impact the river rather than the river impact the eastside”

The Los Angeles River Revitalization Master Plan (LARRMP) was adopted on May 2007 by the Los Angeles City Council largely from the efforts of Councilman Ed Reyes and support from eastside residents and organizations. Many of us worked hard making sure the interest of our communities were being heard and incorporated through outreach. The Latino Urban Forum helped host two design charretts which attracted more than 1,000 people and allowed them to build and share their ideas.

The next step to implement the LARRMP is to examine zoning along the LA River. Zoning is a very powerful tool to promote, protect and enhance our communities through the regulatory process. The Los Angeles City Planning Department is conducting meetings for the proposed River Improvement Overlay (RIO) District. The River Improvement Overlay District is the landuse component or zoning details to the River Master Plan.

It is important the RIO respect and address the needs of the eastside communities such as affordable housing, jobs, and open space.

The RIO outreach should incorporate the following issues:

Culturally Sensitive Outreach: Because of the politically charge immigration issues, the meetings/workshops need to be a sensitive to the community in order to attached them. We want residents want to attend the meetings, feel comfortable at the meetings, with the presenters, presentations and information sharing.

Community Based Presentation: The presentations should highlight the needs of the community and how the master plan can full fill these needs.

Productive Discussion and Input: It’s important the every one feel comfortable to share their ideas and that their ideas are heard.

We have all worked hard on the LA River Master Plan and its delivery of this plan’s next stages is just as important and should be as effective and productive as possible.

James Rojas

The following are meeting dates and locations involving the Eastside:

Saturday, July 21, 9:30 – 11:30 a.m.

Glassell Park Community Center

3750 Verdugo Road

LA, CA. 90065

Saturday, August, 4, 9:30 – 11:30 a.m

Goodwill Center

342 N. San Fernando Road

LA, CA. 90031

Saturday, August 11, 2007

Council District 14

Boyle Heights Office

2130 E. First Street Suite 202

LA ,CA 90033

Visit www.latinourbanforum.org or Myspace.com/LatinoUrbanForum

http://latinourbanforum.blogspot.com/

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Wednesday, July 11, 4:30 p.m.

Joint East LA Area Planning Commission and City Planning Commission Meeting on a discussion for “Do Real Planning: 14 Ways to Make L.A. a More Sustainable City”

Location: Ramona Hall Community Center

4580 N. Figueroa

LA, CA 90065

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Thursday, July 12, 2007 from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm

Friends of the Southwest Museum Coalition meeting
Location: Ramona Hall Community Center

4580 N. Figueroa

LA, CA 90065

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Friday, July 13, 12:00 p.m.

Farmlab Public Salon
“Do Real Planning: 14 Ways to Make L.A. a More Sustainable City”

Jane Usher, Mike Woo, and Diego Cardoso

Location: Farmlab / Under Spring

1745 N. Spring Street #4, LA, CA 90012
Across the street from the site of the Not A Cornfield project, in a warehouse colocated at Baker Street and N. Spring Street

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Friday, July 20, 2007 at 7:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m.

Does LA have the funding to END THE GRIDLOCK?
Westside Urban Forum: Last year Californians approved $20 Billion in transportation bonds and Metro just approved a fare increase. How much will LA County receive for its critical needs, moving both people and goods? And will the bond funds survive the budget process in Sacramento? Join us for a lively discussion with Metro Board Chair Pam O’Connor and California Transportation Commissioner Larry Zarian moderated by Norman Emerson, president of a southern California firm focusing on infrastructure planning, funding and public policy. Do we have enough to really address our transportation needs? What else can we do? What does this mean for important Westside transportation projects?

After Wednesday, July 18, 2007 the price increases by $10.00. Please RSVP to the Westside Urban Forum

Location: The Regency Club
10900 Wilshire Blvd. 17th Floor
Los Angeles, CA

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Saturday, July 21, 2007 @ 10:00 a.m.

Northeast Open Space Coalition Meeting
Latino Urban Forum has worked hard in preserving open space in North East Los Angeles. We are happy that the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy Board will be considering the long-awaited NELA Open Space Plan in the next month or so. Conservancy staff have agreed to present the plan to the NELA/OS Coalition on.
This is an excellent opportunity for us to preview the proposal prior to consideration by the SMMC Board. We hope that you will be able to
attend and give input and comments on the Plan. Please let us know whether you will attend, so that we can arrange light refreshments.

Location: Audubon, Debs Park
4700 N. Griffin Avenue
Los Angeles, 90031

Wednesday, July 25,2007 (6pm)

HOW DO GREAT STREETS GET MADE?

This is a panel discussion organized by AIA/LA & ASLA on how the streets in LA are designed, funded and built through the city process.

Moderator: Barbara Romero - Special Projects Manager (MRCA)

Panelists: (invited)

Emily Luddy Gabel, FASLA - City of Los Angeles Urban Design Studio

Lance Oishi - City of Los Angeles Bureau of Street services)

Jay Kim - City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation

Deborah Weintraub, AIA - City of Los Angeles Bureau of Engineering

Mia Lehrer, ASLA - Mia Lehrer + Associates

Katherine Spitz, AIA, ASLA - Katherine Spitz & Associates

Location: Los Angeles River Center

570 West Ave 26

Los Angeles, CA 90065

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ART

"Landscaping America: Beyond the Japanese Garden,"

June 17-Oct 21, 2007

This exhibition explores the history of Japanese American gardens and gardeners. The exhibit runs from. The opening day of the exhibit will be on Father's Day. We'll have live music and BBQ food vendors on the plaza.

Location: Japanese American National Museum

368 East First Street.

LA, CA.

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LA Botanical ; A project by Joyce Campbell

Until Saturday July 14, 2007

LA Botanical is an ongoing project, massive and perhaps unachievable in its full potential scope, to document each plant that grows in Los Angeles for which there is a documented use - be it food, medicine, weapon, abortive, analgesic, fuel, stimulant, building material, deadly toxin or mind altering entheogen. The plants are documented as wet-plate Ambrotypes, an anachronistic photographic form ubiquitous the 1850's-1890s, the period during in which Los Angeles grew from a dusty town of 1400 inhabitants to a major metropolitan center.

The project is an attempt to reconcile Campbell's own rural background with her life here in Los Angeles, one of the most sprawling and unsustainable metropolises on earth.

LA Botanical operates simultaneously as map, inventory, and survival guide to the city of Los Angeles. It has the potential to reveal who lives here, from where they originate, what they value, how they eat, worship, heal, harm, travel, clothe themselves, seek insight or achieve oblivion. It also serves as a tool or guide - enabling its audience to see Los Angeles, not as a desiccated industrial wasteland into which resources must flow, but as a field of abundant life that might be harvested to satisfy our needs.

Joyce Campbell is an interdisciplinary artist working in photography, sculpture, film and video installation. She is a visiting lecturer at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California.

Joyce¹s recent work utilizes anachronistic photographic techniques to examine the collision of natural and cultural systems.

In October of 2006, Joyce traveled to the Ross Sea region of Antarctica for two weeks sponsored by Creative New Zealand and Antarctica New Zealand.

While in Antarctica she shot large format negatives and Daguerreotypes, an archaic and exquisite form of photography that predates Antarctic exploration.

Location: Gallery 727

727 S. Spring Street #12

LA, CA. 90014

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Friday, June 1, 2007

Pavement Paradise: American Parking Space

Eighty-one percent of Downtown Los Angeles is covered with surface parking. The average car is parked 95% of the time. What are the consequences of devoting huge amounts of land to cars that sit empty most of the time? Questions such as these are posed in the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s exhibit Pavement Paradise: American Parking Space. This exhibit “about the liminal, substanceless, and static space of automotive transience” is on display at CLUI - Los Angeles.

http://clui.org/clui_4_1/ondisplay/parking/

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Articles:

60 million Californians by mid-century

Riverside will become the second most populous county behind Los Angeles and Latinos the dominant ethnic group, study says.

By Maria L. La Ganga and Sara Lin, Times Staff Writers
July 10, 2007

Over the next half-century, California's population will explode by nearly 75%, and Riverside will surpass its bigger neighbors to become the second most populous county after Los Angeles, according to state Department of Finance projections released Monday.

California will near the 60-million mark in 2050, the study found, raising questions about how the state will look and function and where all the people and their cars will go. Dueling visions pit the iconic California building block of ranch house, big yard and two-car garage against more dense, high-rise development.

But whether sprawl or skyscrapers win the day, the Golden State will probably be a far different and more complex place than it is today, as people live longer and Latinos become the dominant ethnic group, eclipsing all others combined.

Some critics forecast disaster if gridlock and environmental impacts are not averted. Others see a possible economic boon, particularly for retailers and service industries with an eye on the state as a burgeoning market.

"It's opportunity with baggage," said Jack Kyser, chief economist for the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corp., in "a country masquerading as a state."

Other demographers argue that the huge population increase the state predicts will occur only if officials complete major improvements to roads and other public infrastructure. Without that investment, they say, some Californians would flee the state.

If the finance department's calculations hold, California's population will rise from 34.1 million in 2000 to 59.5 million at the mid-century point, about the same number of people as Italy has today.

And its projected growth rate in those 50 years will outstrip the national rate - nearly 75% compared with less than 50% projected by the federal government. That could translate to increased political clout in Washington, D.C.

Southern California's population is projected to grow at a rate of more than 60%, according to the new state figures, reaching 31.6 million by mid-century. That's an increase of 12.1 million over just seven counties.

L.A. County alone will top 13 million by 2050, an increase of almost 3.5 million residents. And Riverside County - long among the fastest-growing in the state - will triple in population to 4.7 million by mid-century.

Riverside County will add 3.1 million people, according to the new state figures, eclipsing Orange and San Diego to become the second most populous in the state. With less expensive housing than the coast, Riverside County has grown by more than 472,000 residents since 2000, according to state estimates.

But many residents face agonizingly long commutes to work in other areas. And Monday, the state's growth projections raised some concerns in the Inland Empire.

Registered nurse Fifi Bo moved from Los Angeles to Corona nine years ago so she could buy a house and avoid urban congestion. But she'd consider moving even farther east now that Riverside County is grappling with its own crowding problems.

"But where am I going? People used to move to Victorville, but [housing prices in] Victorville already got high," the 36-year-old said as she fretted about traffic and smog and public services stretched thin. "We don't know where to go. Maybe Arizona."

John Husing, an economist who studies the Inland Empire, is betting that even in land-rich Riverside County, more vertical development is on the horizon. Part of the reason: a multi-species habitat conservation plan that went into effect in 2005, preserving 550,000 acres of green space that otherwise would have vanished.

"The difficult thing will be for anybody who likes where they live in Riverside County because it's rural," Husing said. "In 2050, you might still find rural out by Blythe, but other than that, forget rural."

Husing predicts that growth will be most dramatic beyond the city of Riverside as the patches of empty space around communities such as Palm Springs, Perris and Hemet begin to fill in with housing tracts. The Coachella Valley, for example, will become fully developed and seem like less of a distinct area outside of Riverside, he said. "It'll be desert urban, but it'll be urban. Think of Phoenix," he said.

Expect a lot of the new development in Riverside County to go up along the 215 Freeway between Perris and Murrieta, according to Riverside County Planning Director Ron Goldman. Thousands of homes have popped up in that area in the last decade, and Goldman said applications for that area indicate condominiums are next. The department is so busy that he's hiring 10 people who'll start in the next month.

"We have over 5,000 active development applications in processing right now," he said.

No matter how much local governments build in the way of public works and how many new jobs are attracted to the region - minimizing the need for long commutes - Husing figures that growth will still overwhelm the area's roads.

USC Professor Genevieve Giuliano, an expert on land use and transportation, would probably agree. Such massive growth, if it occurs, she said, will require huge investment in the state's highways, schools, and energy and sewer systems at a "very formidable cost."

If those things aren't built, Giuliano questioned whether the projected population increases will occur. "Sooner or later, the region will not be competitive and the growth is not going to happen," she said.

If major problems like traffic congestion and housing costs aren't addressed, Giuliano warned, the middle class is going to exit California, leaving behind very high-income and very low-income residents.

"It's a political question," said Martin Wachs, a transportation expert at the Rand Corp. in Santa Monica. "Do we have the will, the consensus, the willingness to pay? If we did, I think we could manage the growth."

The numbers released Monday underscore most demographers' view that the state's population is pushing east, from both Los Angeles and the Bay Area, to counties such as Riverside and San Bernardino as well as half a dozen or so smaller Central Valley counties.

Sutter County, for example, is expected to be the fastest-growing on a percentage basis between 2000 and 2050, jumping 255% to a population of 282,894 , the state said. Kern County is expected to see its population more than triple to 2.1 million by mid-century.

In Southern California, San Diego County is projected to grow by almost 1.7 million residents and Orange County by 1.1 million. Even Ventura County - where voters have imposed some limits on urban sprawl - will see its population jump 62% to more than 1.2 million if the projections hold.

The Department of Finance releases long-term population projections every three years. Between the last two reports, number crunchers have taken a more detailed look at California's statistics and taken into account the likelihood that people will live longer, said chief demographer Mary Heim.

The result?

The latest numbers figure the state will be much more crowded than earlier estimates (by nearly 5 million) and that it will take a bit longer than previously thought for Latinos to become the majority of California's population: 2042, not 2038.

The figures show that the majority of California's growth will be in the Latino population, said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at USC, adding that "68% of the growth this decade will be Latino, 75% next and 80% after that."

That should be a wake-up call for voting Californians, Myers said, pointing out a critical disparity. Though the state's growth is young and Latino, the majority of voters will be older and white - at least for the next decade.

"The future of the state is Latino growth," Myers said. "We'd sure better invest in them and get them up to speed.... Older white voters don't see it that way. They don't realize that someone has to replace them in the work force, pay for their benefits and buy their house."

maria.laganga@latimes.com

Urban Eats:

Farmer Markets in the Hood!

Tianguis: South Central Farmers Market.

Support Community Sustainable Agriculture (C.S.A.)

Music, high quality produce,

www.southcentralfarmers.com

Date: First Sunday of every month (May 6^th)

Time: 10:00 am. to 4:00 p.m.

Location: 41^st and Alameda

Caracol Farmers Market

Date: Sunday June 24, 2007

Time: 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m.

"East Los Angeles Farmer's Market" every Saturday from 9 AM TO 1 PM

Features fruits and vegetables grown locally by local farmers. In addition, you'll find one of a kind creations offered by local artisans and meet representatives from local community organizations.

Location: First Street (between Rowan and Ditman).

Homegirl Café!

1818 East First Street

LA, CA. 90014

Mama’s Hot Tamale Cafe

7^th Street across from Macarthur Park

To post events, activities or meetings that promote planning, cultural or dialogue contact James Rojas at 213 892-0918 or email Latinourbanforum@yahoo.com Please submit post in a word document.