sidewalk

In the wake of January’s horrific fires, detractors of Los Angeles — an urban reality often seen as a toxic mixture of unsustainable resource planning and structurally poor governance systems — are having a field day.

Los Angeles knows how to weather a crisis — or two or three. Angelenos are tapping into that resilience, striving to build a city for everyone.

Their criticism is not new: For most of the 20th century — and certainly for the last five decades or so — Los Angeles has been seen by many urbanists as less city and more cautionary tale — a smoggy expanse of subdivisions and spaghetti junctions, where ambition came with a two-hour commute.

Planners shuddered, while architects looked away, even as they accepted handsome commissions to build some of L.A.’s — if not the world’s — most iconic buildings.

In 1961, Jane Jacobs, the famed urban theorist and community activist, referred to “the ballet of the good city sidewalk” in her landmark 1961 book “The Death and Life of Great American Cities.” If Manhattan was her “ballet of the sidewalk,” L.A. was a suburban parking lot with delusions of grandeur.

“Los Angeles is a city of pleasure and peril; we’ve always known this,” Zeina Koreitem, founding partner of Downtown L.A. architecture studio Milliøns, said following the fires. “We consume our environment instead of living with it.”

And yet, like so many Hollywood plot twists, maybe we misunderstood the protagonist.

What if L.A.’s so-called flaws — its low density, car culture and decentralized sprawl — weren’t liabilities in a changing world, but underappreciated assets? Not because they were the right urban solutions all along, but because the systems beneath them are shifting?

Urban form has always followed transportation infrastructure. Roman roads influenced the creation of grid-based military cities. Railways shaped satellite towns. Subways gave rise to vertical density.

Today, the emergence of autonomous mobility solutions like robot taxis as well as distributed energy — decentralized, small-scale energy generation located near where energy is actually consumed — is redrawing those relationships once again — and the L.A. model just may be a big beneficiary in the long run.

Dismissed as the nemesis of sustainable urbanism, L.A. can, in fact, be well-positioned for the next chapter. Technologies like rooftop photovoltaics, vehicle-to-grid systems and AI-optimized resource flows do not depend on compactness. They benefit from space, sunlight and flexibility — qualities that Los Angeles has in abundance across its 1,600 square miles of urbanized area.

That vast, polycentric mass — long derided by urban experts residing in denser cities — can also be an asset in the years ahead as autonomous mobility becomes ubiquitous. Elastic, demand-driven autonomous services — which will inevitably also extend to Los Angeles airspace — can and will complement an increasingly built-out Metro light rail system and increased bus rapid transit routes, helping open up economic opportunities to those in once disadvantaged, isolated neighborhoods.

Instead of forcing the city into a European mold, perhaps the question is how the city’s existing DNA might evolve. Could its low-rise form become a testing ground for neighborhood-scale energy networks? Could it become a solar-powered metropolis built on microgrids, where each district produces and manages its own resources?

There is already a shift underway. L.A.’s wide boulevards and streets are being reimagined for a new mix of mobility modes: e-bikes, delivery bots, shared shuttles, autonomous vehicles. A city that was once an ode to the freeway is fast becoming a globally recognized source of innovations in multimodal transport. This is what CoMotion LA has been looking at for the last eight years: bringing together public and private stakeholders to imagine a city of seamlessly connecting mobility options.

Young Angelenos increasingly prioritize neighborhoods where walking, biking and public transit are viable. Following a COVID-induced hiatus, downtown’s renaissance, with banks converted into lofts and vibrant public spaces, is showing — once again — a new appetite for urban living.

Cul-de-sac homes in Calabasas in October 2024. Dismissed as the nemesis of sustainable urbanism, L.A. can, in fact, be well-positioned for the next chapter.

(Brian van der Brug / Los Angeles Times)

Los Angeles is even emerging as a global pioneer in rethinking the curb — often treated as an afterthought — looking at ways those stretches of sidewalk can serve new functions: a charging node, a logistics port, a civic gathering point.

Meanwhile, the scattershot green spaces across Los Angeles offer another opportunity. Rather than a singular large park like New York’s Central Park or Boston Common, the city could develop an ecological mesh, a “sponge city” capable of managing stormwater and heat while fostering public life. Because sustainability is not only about emissions or energy. It is also means access, health and shared space.

This isn’t about longing for midcentury Los Angeles, or about replicating Copenhagen. It’s about testing new possibilities — much like what we’re exploring this year at the Biennale Architettura in Venice. There, participants from diverse disciplines are investigating how we can adapt to a changing planet. We begin with the understanding that climate change is no longer a distant threat; it is a present condition. Our response must be adaptive, experimental and iterative: a continuous process of design evolution, shaped by trial and error, much like nature itself.

But the United States and the world do not need a single model of urban sustainability — they need many. New York might go vertical and social. Barcelona is building out superblocks for pedestrians. Rotterdam is going resilient and water-wise. And Los Angeles? It could — and we believe, it will — become a solar-powered, biodiversity-rich metropolis that helps us rethink what urban sustainability really means.

The sustainable city of the future should not look the same everywhere. It should build on the best of what each place already is and push that to its most imaginative conclusion. “No city has ever been produced by such an extraordinary mixture of geography, climate, economics, demography, mechanics and culture,” said Reyner Banham, the British architectural historian who wrote about Los Angeles a half-century ago. “Nor is it likely that an even remotely similar mixture will ever occur again.”

Los Angeles may have been the warning of the 20th century. But it could become the blueprint of the 21st.

John Rossant is chief executive of CoMotion and international impresario of the multimodal transportation world.

Carlo Ratti is the director of the Senseable City Lab at MIT and the curator of the Biennale Architettura 2025.

Musician Dennis Henriquez woke up in a doorway in East Hollywood last month, hidden behind cardboard and sheltered by a tarp.

When he peered outside, half a dozen sanitation workers were standing nearby, waiting to carry out one of the more than 30 homeless encampment cleanups planned that day by the city of Los Angeles.

Henriquez eventually emerged, carried out a bicycle and deposited it on a grassy area 20 feet away. He also dragged over a backpack, a scooter, two guitars, a piece of luggage and a beach chair.

The city sanitation crew grabbed the tarp and the cardboard, tossing them into a trash truck. Then, the contingent of city workers, including two police officers, climbed into their vehicles and drove away, leaving behind Henriquez and his pile of belongings.

This type of operation, known as a CARE-plus cleanup, plays out hundreds of times each week in the city, with sanitation crews seizing and destroying tents, tarps, pallets, shopping carts and many other objects.

The cleanups have emerged as a huge source of conflict in a five-year-old legal dispute over the city’s handling of the homelessness crisis. Depending on how the cleanup issue is resolved, the city could face legal sanctions, millions of dollars in penalties or increased outside oversight of its homeless programs.

A construction loader plows through the remains of a homeless encampment on Wilshire Boulevard, just west of downtown.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Sanitation crews grab a mattress during the cleanup. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

A notice about the cleanup is displayed on a utility pole on Wilshire Boulevard. (Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

In 2022, city leaders reached a legal settlement with the nonprofit L.A. Alliance for Human Rights, promising to create 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities by June 2027. Eventually, they also agreed to remove 9,800 homeless encampments by June 2026 — with an encampment defined as an individual tent, makeshift structure, car or recreational vehicle.

To reach the latter goal, city leaders have been counting each encampment removed from streets, sidewalks and alleys during the Bureau of Sanitation’s CARE-plus cleanups — even in cases where the resident did not obtain housing or a shelter bed.

The alliance has strongly objected to the city’s methodology, arguing that destroying a tent, without housing its occupants, runs afoul of the 2022 settlement agreement. Any “encampment resolution” tallied by the city must be more permanent — and address the larger goal of reducing homelessness, said Elizabeth Mitchell, an attorney for the alliance.

“If the person insists on staying where they are and nothing else has happened, that’s not a resolution,” she said. “They can’t count that.”

City leaders have carried out CARE-plus cleanups for years, saying they are needed to protect public safety and restore sidewalk access for wheelchair users, the elderly and others. Some encampments are strewn with debris that spills across an entire walkway or out into the street, while others carry the smell of urine, fecal matter or decaying food waste.

The cleanups have a Sisyphean quality. Many seasoned residents drag their tents across the street, wait out the cleanup, then return to their original spots in the afternoon. The process frequently restarts a week or two later.

The alliance’s legal team, alarmed by the inclusion of CARE-plus cleanups in the encampment reduction count, recently spent several days trying to persuade a federal judge to seize control of the city’s homelessness initiatives from Mayor Karen Bass and the City Council and turn them over to a third-party receiver.

U.S. Dist. Judge David O. Carter, who presides over the case, declined to take that step, saying it went too far. But he has made clear that he, too, objects to the city’s approach to eliminating the 9,800 encampments.

In March, Carter issued a court order saying the city may not count CARE-plus cleanups toward its goal because, as the alliance had argued, they are “not permanent in nature.”

Last month, in a 62-page ruling, he found the city had “willfully disobeyed” that order — and had improperly reported its encampment reductions. Clarifying his position somewhat, the judge also said that the city cannot count an encampment reduction unless it is “accompanied by an offer of shelter or housing.”

“Individuals need not accept the offer, but an offer of available shelter or housing must be made,” he wrote.

Attorney Shayla Myers, who represents homeless advocacy groups that have intervened in the case, has opposed the 9,800 goal from the beginning, saying it creates a quota system that increases the likelihood that city workers will violate the property rights of unhoused residents.

“Throwing away tents doesn’t help the homelessness crisis,” she said. “Building housing does.”

Shayna, a person experiencing homelessness, moves things out of a tent during the June 24 encampment cleanup.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo, who helped negotiate the settlement, told the court last month that his office does not count the tents that homeless people move temporarily — around the corner or across the street — during city cleanups. However, the city does include those that are permanently removed because they block the sidewalk or pose a public health or safety threat, he said.

Szabo, during his testimony, said that when he negotiated the promise to remove 9,800 encampments, he did not expect that every tent removal would lead to someone moving inside.

The city is already working to fulfill the alliance agreement’s requirement of creating 12,915 homeless beds or other housing opportunities. On top of that, Szabo said, encampment residents have “free will” to refuse an offer of housing.

“I wouldn’t ever agree that the city would be obligated to somehow force people to accept [housing] if they did not want to accept it,” he said. “We never would have agreed to that. We didn’t agree to that.”

For an outside observer, it might be difficult to discern what the different types of city encampment operations are designed to accomplish.

Mary, a person experiencing homelessness, speaks with a police officer during the June 24 cleanup.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Bass’ Inside Safe initiative moves homeless people into hotel and motel rooms, and at least in some cases, permanent housing. By contrast, CARE cleanups — shorthand for Cleanup and Rapid Engagement — are largely focused on trash removal, with crews hauling away debris from curbs and surrounding areas.

CARE-plus cleanups are more comprehensive. Every tent must be moved so workers can haul away debris and, in some instances, powerwash sidewalks.

Sanitation crews are supposed to give residents advance warning of a scheduled CARE-plus cleanup, posting notices on utility poles. If residents don’t relocate their tents and other belongings, they run the risk of having them taken away.

In some cases, cleanup crews take the possessions to a downtown storage facility. In many others, they are tossed.

A construction loader transports the remnants of the Westlake encampment to a city garbage truck.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

One of the largest CARE-plus cleanups in recent weeks took place in the Westlake district, where nearly three dozen tents and structures lined a stretch of Wilshire Boulevard. A construction loader drove back and forth on the sidewalk, scooping up tents and depositing them in a trash truck.

Ryan Cranford, 42, said he didn’t know the cleanup was scheduled until minutes beforehand. He wound up losing his tent, a bed and a canopy, but managed to keep his backpack, saying it contained “all that matters.”

Sitting on a nearby retaining wall, Cranford said he would have accepted a motel room had someone offered one.

“Hell, I’d even take a bus to get all the way back to Oklahoma if I could,” he said.

On the opposite side of the street, Tyson Lewis Angeles wheeled his belongings down the street in a shopping cart before sanitation workers descended on his spot. He said an outreach worker had given him a referral for a shelter bed the day before.

Tyson Lewis Angeles, a person experiencing homelessness, holds his dog, Nami, before city sanitation workers descended on his spot on Wilshire Boulevard.

(Etienne Laurent / For The Times)

Angeles, 30, said he was not interested, in part because he deals with panic attacks, PTSD and other mental health issues. He also does not want a roommate, or the rules imposed by homeless shelters.

“Basically, it’s like volunteer jail,” he said.

While Angeles managed to safeguard his possessions, others are frequently less successful.

Nicholas Johnson, who is living in a box truck in Silver Lake, said city crews took the vast majority of his belongings during a CARE-plus cleanup in mid-June. Some were destroyed, while others were transported by sanitation workers to a downtown storage facility, he said.

Johnson, 56, said he does not know whether some of his most prized possessions, including letters written by his grandmother, went into that facility or were tossed. City crews also took books, tools, his Buddhist prayer bowls and a huge amount of clothes.

“All of my clothing — all of my clothing — the wearables and the sellables, all mixed in. Hats, scarves, socks, ties, a lot of accessories that I wear — you know, double breasted suits from the ’30s, the suit pants,” he said.

Nicholas Johnson, who lives with his dog, Popcorn, in a truck parked in Silver Lake, said the city took many of his prized possessions during a recent encampment cleanup.

(Jason Armond / Los Angeles Times)

Johnson said the city’s cleanup process is a “harassment ceremony” that only makes life more stressful for people on the street.

“They hit you in the kneecaps when they know you’re already down,” he said.

Earlier this year, city officials informed the court that they had removed about 6,100 tents, makeshift shelters and vehicles — nearly two-thirds of what the agreement with the alliance requires. Whether the city will challenge any portion of the judge’s ruling is still unclear.

In a statement, a lawyer for the city contends that the ruling “misconstrues the city’s obligations.”

“We are keeping open our options for next steps,” said the lawyer, Theane Evangelis.

The amount of money that the city of Los Angeles pays annually for police misconduct, trip and falls, and other lawsuits has ballooned, rising from $64 million a decade ago to $254 million last year and $289 million this fiscal year.

The reasons are complicated, ranging from aging sidewalks to juries’ tendency to award larger judgments to possible shifts in legal strategy at the city attorney’s office to an increase in the sheer number of lawsuits against the city.

The biggest chunk of payouts over the past five years were for “dangerous conditions” — lawsuits singling out faulty city infrastructure, such as broken elevators — at 32%, followed by civil rights violations and unlawful uses of force at 18%, and traffic collisions involving city vehicles also at 18%.

City officials have cited the legal payouts as a significant factor in a nearly $1-billion budget shortfall for fiscal year 2025-26 that was closed with layoffs and other spending cuts.

City Atty. Hydee Feldstein Soto, who took office in December 2022, heads the office that defends the city against lawsuits.

In an interview with The Times and public appearances throughout the city, Feldstein Soto cited a backlog of cases from the COVID-19 pandemic, when courts were barely moving, that were settled or went to trial in recent years.

“Structured settlements” negotiated by her predecessor, Mike Feuer, which are paid out annually rather than in one lump sum, have also contributed to the tab, she said.

Feldstein Soto also said she believes juries are increasingly antagonistic to city governments, resulting in larger verdicts.

Feuer said in an interview that the city was entering into structured settlements before he took office, and he does not believe he increased their use.

To explain the rise in legal liability payouts during his tenure — from about $40 million in 2013 to about $91 million in 2022 — Feuer cited a lack of investment in city infrastructure like streets and sidewalks during the 2008 financial crisis.

In public appearances, Feldstein Soto has sometimes blamed plaintiffs for trying to get financial compensation for what she characterized as risky behavior or interpersonal disputes.

Speaking to the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association earlier this year, she said that two types of lawsuits — “dangerous conditions” lawsuits and those brought by city employees over working conditions — are ripe for abuse. Some employees who sue the city simply don’t like their bosses, Feldstein Soto said, citing a lawsuit by an LAPD captain, Stacey Vince, who alleged that higher-ups retaliated against her after she complained about her boss. Vince was awarded $10.1 million by a jury, and the city subsequently settled the case for just under $6 million.

Feldstein Soto also described one man who sued the city as an “idiot.” The man was riding his electric scooter without a helmet, Feldstein Soto said, when he crashed on an uneven sidewalk and into a nearby tree, suffering a traumatic brain injury.

According to Feldstein Soto, taxpayers ultimately pay the price for these lawsuits.

“Please understand that every dollar you award is your money,” she said.

The number of lawsuits filed against the city has risen each year since the pandemic, from 1,131 in 2021 to 1,560 in 2024.

At the same time, the average amount the city pays per case has increased dramatically, from under $50,000 in 2022 to $132,180 in 2024. A contributing factor is the increase in payouts of least $1 million, with 17 such cases in 2022 and 39 in 2024. (The city counts settlements or jury verdicts in the fiscal year they are paid out, not when the dollar amount is decided.)

From July 2024 to March 2025, the city paid $1 million or more in 51 lawsuits.

Feldstein Soto said these “nuclear verdicts” cut deep into the city budget and could raise payouts for similar cases in the future.

Total annual payouts in police misconduct cases jumped from $15 million in 2020 to $50 million in 2024. Dangerous conditions cases rose from around $41 million in 2020 to about $84 million in 2024.

Earlier this year, the city paid $21 million to plaintiffs in a series of lawsuits related to a botched LAPD bomb squad fireworks detonation that injured more than 20 people and displaced many residents.

Also this year, the city paid out a $17.7-million verdict to the family of a man with mental health issues killed by an off-duty LAPD officer.

This coming fiscal year, the city increased its allocation for liability payouts from about $87 million to $187 million — far less than what it has been paying in recent years — out of a $14-billion budget.

City Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who chairs the council’s public works committee, said the rising payouts stem in part from the city’s long-term lack of investment in infrastructure. The city spent about 10% of its overall budget on streets and other public works last year — substantially less than it spent on police, said Hernandez, who favors a smaller LAPD.

“As a city, we don’t invest in the maintenance of our city,” she said. “I have felt like I’ve been screaming into the void about some of these things.”

In one lawsuit paid out this year, the city agreed to give $3 million to a man who tripped over a slightly uneven sidewalk and suffered a traumatic brain injury.

Last April, the city reached a $21-million settlement with a man whose skull was broken by a street lamp part that fell on him. The city had gone to trial, with a jury awarding the man $22 million, but the parties eventually settled for the slightly lower amount.

“I believe the driving force is the delays and lack of maintenance of the city that has caused an increase in such incidents,” said Arash Zabetian, a lawyer for the man hit by the streetlight.

Some plaintiffs’ attorneys say that Feldstein Soto’s legal strategies are contributing to the rising liability costs. They assert that she is taking more cases to trial, resulting in larger verdicts than if she had settled.

Matthew McNicholas, an attorney who often sues the city on behalf of police officers, said he recently went to trial in five cases and won all of them, for a total payout of more than $40 million.

He would have been happy to settle all five cases for a total of less than $10 million, he said.

One of the lawsuits, which ended with a $13-million verdict, was filed by two male officers accused of drawing a penis on a suspect’s abdomen. The officers alleged that higher-ups did not cast the same suspicion on their female colleagues.

In another of the lawsuits, a whistleblower alleged that he was punished for highlighting problems in the LAPD Bomb Detection K-9 Section. A jury also awarded him $13 million.

“It’s not a tactic to say we’re going to play hardball. It’s just stupid,” McNicholas said. “I am frustrated because she goes and blames my clients and runaway juries for her problems.”

Greg Smith, another plaintiffs’ attorney, said he has also noticed a tendency at Feldstein Soto’s office to push cases to trial.

“Everything is a fight,” Smith said. “I have been suing the city for 30 years, and this has been the worst administration with respect to trying to settle cases.”

Feldstein Soto said her office settles “every case we can.”

“It’s in nobody’s interest to go to trial. It’s a waste of resources,” she said. “But we will not settle cases where we don’t think we’re liable or where the demand is unreasonable.”

To stem the flood of large payouts, Feldstein Soto is looking to Sacramento for help, proposing a bill that would cap lawsuits against California cities at $1 million or three times the economic losses caused by an incident, whichever is greater. Caps on damages exist already in 38 states, according to Feldstein Soto’s office.

She has yet to find a state legislator to sponsor the bill.