10 Things For A Downtown to Be Proud Of

I think we've all spent enough time exasperated and distressed at the unending challenges and pervasive headwinds we often feel in Downtown.  What attracted me to DTLA and my role at the South Park Business Improvement District nearly 3 years ago, wasn't the depth of the crisis the district was climbing out of, but the breadth of opportunity that could still unfold in its future.  In Vancouver, I'd taken over for the founding CEO of Downtown Vancouver.  In Los Angeles, our legacy work still feels very much up for grabs and ahead of us.Our neighborhood has a bright future.   These are the 10 things I'd like to see us do in partnership with Mayor Bass, Councilmember Jurado, their colleagues on the City Council, and the many partners who advocate and work daily with us to make our downtown a place we can all be proud of.

1. The lights in Downtown have to work.  Society began lighting public streets in the 16th Century.  I can assure the importance of well-lit passages hasn't decreased over the last 500 years, but it seems the amount of time and number of engineers it takes to change a light bulb has.  We cannot be the diverse gathering place for international visitors and Angelenos, let alone the growing and thriving residential community, if pockets of downtown are as dark as the stone ages.  Streetlights are safety affirming and economic investment prerequisites for the city center of the world's third largest economy.
2. Over the last 3 years, we'd successfully advocated for at least $4 million annually in additional funding for LAPD overtime specific to Downtown.  That funding is insufficient and always in jeopardy.  LAPD needs dedicated funding for targeted downtown operations addressing graffiti, unsanctioned parties, and illegal street vending. These are serious issues that perpetuate the perception that Downtown has a lawlessness and quality of life standard that is lower than the surrounding areas.  If we expect more businesses to invest, more international tourist to visit, and more residents to establish roots, that has to change.
3. San Francisco and other cities have successfully funded alternatives to police. BID Ambassadors, like the ones employed in the Social District, Fashion District, Downtown Center, and Historic Core, are easier to hire and scale than LAPD, and can provide a supplemental presence in the community.  In San Francisco, the city allocated $6M for additional Downtown Safety Ambassadors.  With city funding, we could create a seamless 24/7 ambassador presence and double the number of ambassadors we have walking the streets and addressing lower-level quality of life concerns, at a fraction of the costs of police walking the beat. These are not a replacement for LAPD, and LAPD should make every effort to increase visibility in Downtown by restoring the bike unit that patrolled prior to the pandemic, but ambassadors can be hired and scaled within 90 days.
4. LAPD needs to establish the 24/7 real time crime center that's been eminently just around the corner for several years.  We can't host the largest events in the world – like the Olympics and World Cup, or signature moments like the GRAMMY Awards and Anime Expo – and have blind spots in policing. Most major cities across North America, including west coast cities like San Francisco and Seattle, have figured out how to deploy this program to increase response time and target areas of concern proactively.  As Downtown density increases, whether by residential growth or surges in visitors, Los Angeles can't rely on neighborhood associations like SPNA to string together pilot programs that police departments successfully operate in most major jurisdictions.
5. The City needs to reverse course on encampments, create strong anti-encampment policies in DTLA, and create a zero-tolerance policy for street disorder and illicit behavior.  Drug liberalization experiments have failed and cities like Portland and Seattle have reversed course. Further, the Supreme Court's decision on Grants Pass upheld that it was proper to impose laws that targeted conduct, not status.  Asking Downtown Los Angeles to both continue to bear the brunt of the county's homeless problem and to do so without limitation or restriction on the associated activity and behavior in the public realm will never work.  If we are to continue to provide more transitional housing than any other neighborhood, that should come with clear investment and directive to keep the surrounding area clean and safe.
6. Downtown needs an exemption to Measure ULA.  Coming out of the pandemic, the last thing Downtown needed was a tax on transactions that would create another barrier for the adaptive reuse of office buildings, the assemblage of land into new housing developments, or even the transformation of surface parking lots into public space like pocket parks or neighborhood plazas. Exempting Downtown is a recognition that the pandemic's impact was disproportionate and longer lasting in downtowns everywhere, and that billions spent in public investment to make downtown the region's job center are worth protecting through targeted programming and exemptions.
7. I was asked to be a part of the Urban Land Institute's Revitalizing Downtown San Francisco project and their Revitalizing Downtown St. Louis project.  There are a lot of cool ideas being implemented by leaders in both cities that came from that consulting work, but the most important advice I give city leaders anywhere I'm asked to leave behind a road map of ideas is simple.  Speed wins.  The city that figures out how to take an 18-month permitting process and turn it into a 6-month process will exponentially increase the amount of both large capital and small business development that flows into their neighborhoods.  We should pilot expedited permitting and guaranteed timelines in Downtown. When they work here, we can roll them out across the city improving efficiency for businesses in other neighborhoods as a result.
8. The City should allow BIDS to innovate and invest in the public realm and special projects by a simple motion of the councilmember. Creating a lighting project like our lights on 11th Street, starting a weekly market, curating a public garden, painting crosswalks, establishing a gateway, installing temporary sculptures, or many other initiatives can take months (or years) of getting ping ponged between city departments. BIDs are quasi-public agencies with clear mandates approved by residents and the City Council.  In many cases we exist to do things faster and more efficiently than city departments can, and that is why our stakeholders have agreed to pay additional assessments beyond what they already pay for basic services.  City process that slows us down is counterproductive to expediting the recovery of our vibrant Downtown.
9. People step outside their condos and apartments, visitors fill up hotels, people brave the search for parking, or hop on the extended Metro lines, and downtown businesses thrive from the increased activity whenever we have events in Downtown.  But not only do we not do enough of them, over the last 12 months we've lost events to Inglewood, including 41 nights of Clippers games at LA Live and Crypto.com Arena. We need to invest in the events calendar.  We have the infrastructure (parking, transit, venues, hotels), we have a community full of the best production teams in the world, but we don't subsidize the growth and development of special events the way other communities have.  SXSW, Art Basel, New Orleans Jazz Festival, and many other signature events required seed money to become the international attractions that they've become. The city needs to create a multimillion-dollar downtown events fund that provides funding to cover security and other developmental costs so that we can activate our incredible venues 52 weeks a year – with specific intentionality around rough shoulder seasons for our hospitality industry.
10. We need to invest in retelling our story. When San Francisco was the nexus of every terrible news story about urban decline in major cities post pandemic, they realized that not only did they have to solve some of the real problems, but they needed to invest in shaping the narrative and framing a story about the San Francisco that they knew and loved.  Not only did they aim this multimillion-dollar advertising campaign externally to reengage potential visitors, meeting planners, and investors, but they aimed a significant portion of their ad buy internally to reignite civic pride.  When we've done the first nine things on this list, it's critical that we shout from the mountain tops how truly great DTLA has become.

Downtowns are dynamic.  We'll be in the midst of recovering from one challenge, when new ones will arise.  We'll be investing in priorities that were determined through extensive process to reach hard fought consensus, when a new and decidedly more urgent and exiting priority will emerge as a clear winner.  There are initiatives like creating a linear park along Figueroa alongside LA Live and the Convention Center (by removing lanes of traffic) that I could have added to the above list.  Or pedestrianizing 11th Street along what was once planned to be a streetcar line to create a series of neighborhood plazas leading to and from LA Live.  Or having the city set a 60-day deadline for proposals to complete the development of Oceanwide before proceeding with eminent domain so that those blighted towers don't take center stage at the Olympics. This list could have easily been 20 things we need to do to revitalize Downtown. 

In DTLA, our fate hasn't been written.  We have paths we can take if we simply follow what other cities have already done with great success, and paths where we lead the way as Los Angeles should – creating a new legacy. These paths are clear; they're just waiting for lights.