If Only the Streetlights Worked

Our evenings in the Social District have started to get a little bit brighter with the shifting of our clocks forward for Spring. I’m grateful for the extra hours of light this time of year – for walking Larry David (our schnauzer), sitting in the stands at little league games, and walking home from the restaurants at LA Live. And I understand why it’s become popular to support making daylight savings permanent, but I’d settle for working infrastructure keeping our district bright all year.   

There is obviously no replacement for the sun, but I’m a huge believer in streetlights that work, ground lighting trees, pedestrian focused security lights, and corridor enhancements like our tree lights on 11th and string lights across Pico. Lighting is a primary principle in both Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED) and improving quality of life while creating vibrant places to linger, appreciate, and spend. Lights that work won’t help with vitamin D deficiency, but you can feel safe walking to one of our neighborhood pharmacies for supplements if your path to and from is well lit.

Over the last few weeks of winter darkness, our ambassador team walked the district in the evening to identify broken streetlights across the district. Lighting is a basic feature provided by every modern urban municipality, but within the 54 blocks of our district 145 streetlights are out!  We host 19 million visitors annually in DTLA, and we welcome them with dark strolls back to their hotels, poorly lit attempts to find and support our restaurants, and unsafe paths back to parking after a Lakers game. And residents live with this every day, except for those few extra hours of blessed sunlight during daylight savings time!

Within her first 100 days, Councilmember Jurado introduced a motion to assess streetlights in CD14 and direct city departments to address this as a priority issue.  We applaud and appreciate Councilmember Jurado and her team for stepping up to this challenge and trying to solve this problem. We will continue to invest in proven methods to enhance our district, including using political capital to try and hold city departments and leaders accountable for delivering basic services. We will continue to join DTLA Residents Association and other stakeholders to push this issue so that lighting in our community isn’t only studied and reviewed, but it’s enhanced and resolved. 

Working streetlights are also about setting expectations.  Not just the expectation that a place is cared for, using broken windows theory, but setting up the possibility for community development that goes beyond the basic delivery of minimal services. If we can manage to keep the lights on (and pick up the trash), we can lift our eyes and imaginations toward a new park, community gardens, artistically designed crosswalks, murals, and much more.  If only we could just get the lights to work, maybe we could focus on creating pedestrian plazas ahead of the Olympics for our international guest and locals to enjoy when the crowds have gone, maybe we really can expand our convention center to compete with the best and focus our attention to addressing those horribly blighted graffiti towers.