Our Walkability Is Priceless

It's good to get away, but it's great to come back. 

We arrived back in Los Angeles late Saturday night after a trip to New Orleans to visit friends, family, and celebrate my mom's 76th birthday. In New Orleans, my wife's childhood home has a walk score of 18/100 and a transit score of 32/100. That this exists in a city known for being walkable drives me insane. While downtown and historic corridors are thriving, some neighborhoods that were healthy inner ring suburbs never fully recovered from Hurricane Katrina. Every morning during our visit, I would wake up and drive 15 minutes to a coffee or matcha shop, and every evening we would make sure we had clear dinner plans before returning to what has essentially become a food and beverage desert.  

Amidst the doom loop in downtown that we've been unable to extricate ourselves from, it's either easy to take for granted how special our neighborhood is, or it's exactly how special it could be that leads to frustration. But our 94/100 walk score and 100/100 transit score in the Social District is something I won't be taking for granted anytime soon. I haven't even seen my car since returning to Los Angeles. I've had coffee and breakfast sandwiches from Starbucks, donuts from Duchess, hand rolls from Mafia Sushi, noodles and buns from Pine and Crane, a great steak salad from Flemmings, pizza night delivered by Emmy's, and restocked the fridge with a few basics from Whole Foods to supplement all the eating and ordering out. Later this week, I'll walk to get a haircut, stop by my dentist to reschedule an appointment, and drop off dry cleaning all without stepping into the car.  I'm incredibly grateful that it takes me less than 5 minutes to walk to work, which frees up a lot of time for all these errands that have to get done.   

Hopefully all this walking balances out the donuts and the pizza we had to start the week.  

There's a lot of work for us to do to make downtown the neighborhood of choice for visitors, Angelenos, and investors. Walk and transit scores don't take into consideration the experience people have when walking past graffiti, stepping around dog waste, staying out of the way of someone having mental distress, or witnessing open drug use. To maximize and leverage what makes this neighborhood such a great place to live, we need a zero-tolerance policy on street disorder and more robust diversion and intervention programs that don't just shift the problem from one neighborhood or district to the next. 

Our challenges are as clear as what makes this place great.  Centralized access to the rest of the region, and the ability to walk to countless amenities and cultural institutions whether you choose to visit, work, or live here, is what makes downtown worth continuing to invest in, and the will to solve the problems so critical. In a city like Los Angeles, known for traffic, our walkability is priceless.  But we still need to the city to quantify how much they're willing to invest to realize the return we've all been led to expect.