UI’s Lori Tierney and Walter Njboke attended the Downtown Breakfast Club’s morning meeting where the City of Los Angeles Planning Department shared their new community plan for Los Angeles.
The City of Los Angeles maintains 35 Community Plans, one for each of its Community Plan Areas. The Community Plans establish neighborhood-specific goals and implementation strategies to achieve the broad objectives laid out in the City’s General Plan. Together, the 35 Community Plans make up the General Plan’s Land Use Element, which plays an important role in bolstering housing and job opportunities, conserving open space and natural resources, and balancing different neighborhoods’ needs.
Each Community Plan consists of a policy document and a land use map. The policy document lays out the community’s goals, policies, and programs, while the land use map identifies where certain uses (such as residential, commercial, and industrial) are permitted. Together, the policy document and land use map inform local zoning decisions. Proposed changes to the City’s zoning are usually initiated though Community Plan Updates. Learn more and get involved at https://planning.lacity.org/
Los Angeles City Planning is partnering with the Downtown community to update the Central City and Central City North Community Plans. The Downtown Community Plan will describe a collective vision for Downtown’s future and include policies, plans, and implementation programs that frame the City’s long-term priorities. Downtown will have the first Community Plan in the City to apply new zoning tools developed as part of the comprehensive update to the City of Los Angeles’s Zoning Code.
The update of the Downtown Community Plan takes cues from the City’s General Plan, particularly from its Framework Element, which describes the City’s long-term growth strategy. The Framework Element lays out goals, objectives, and policies for the range of land uses throughout the City, including Downtown, and guides the development of Community Plans. The Framework Element describes Downtown as “the principal government and business center of the region, with a worldwide market,” “the highest-density center of the City,” and a “hub of regional transportation.”
The Plan will build on Downtown’s concentration of transit options. With support from Metro’s Transit Oriented Development Grant Program, the City is promoting Downtown’s role as the convergence point of regional transit lines that connect multiple cities across Los Angeles County.