An eight-mile gap keeps Los Angeles from having a continuous river bike route through the heart of the city. Voters approved hundreds of millions of dollars to help close it, but years of planning have pushed the project toward a possible billion-dollar price tag. Carlee Alm-LaBar is joined by transportation advocate Dave Snyder, Pasadena city councilmember and longtime local government leader Rick Cole, and Strong Towns chief technical advisor Edward Erfurt to examine how a straightforward connection became a megaproject. Flood control, emergency access, environmental concerns, neighborhood connections, labor requirements, and long-term reliability have each added something defensible to the plan. Meanwhile, a simpler path could reportedly close the entire gap with the money already available.
Hello and welcome to Upzoned. My name is Carlee Alm-LaBar, the chief of staff here at Strong Towns, and I'll be your host today. Wow, do we have a great show planned for you all! Los Angeles has an eight-mile gap in its river bike path. A decade ago, voters approved hundreds of millions of dollars to help close it, but construction still hasn't started, and the full project could now cost more than a billion dollars.
A recent Los Angeles Times article by Mac Basinger, titled "The Eight Mile Gap in the LA River Bike Path Downtown Has a Billion Dollar Problem," looks at how a relatively straightforward connection became such an expensive and complicated project. A lot of the things driving that complexity are reasonable on their own, from flood control and emergency access to neighborhood connections and long-term reliability. But together, they've turned closing that gap in a bike network into a billion-dollar megaproject.
So what we're going to be talking about today is: When does designing the best possible infrastructure project become the reason we can't build infrastructure at all? We have three folks with us today who are going to be wonderful, three rock stars, in fact. Joining me today are Edward Erfurt with Strong Towns, Dave Snyder, and Rick Cole.
I'm going to start by introducing Rick. Many Strong Towns listeners may be familiar with Rick. He is an urbanist and longtime local government leader based in Pasadena, California, where he currently serves on the city council. Relevant to this article, he was deputy mayor for the budget for the city of Los Angeles prior to serving as its controller. He spent more than four decades in public service, including leading cities across Southern California, with much of his work focused on housing, transportation, infrastructure, and how local government responds to the needs of a place. Rick, thank you so much for joining us.
It's an honor. I love Strong Towns, and I love the fact that we're going to talk about a subject that doesn't get enough attention, which is the basic infrastructure that underlies our lives.
Wonderful. We also have with us Dave Snyder. Dave is a transportation advocate from the northern part of the state and a strategist based in San Francisco, California. He's founded and led three nonprofits that work at the intersection of transportation policy and social justice, and he's spent decades helping communities win safer streets and better access to cycling. A quick shout-out to Lorelai Bailey from Strong Towns Artesia, who connected us with Dave. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dave.
Oh, my pleasure. I can't say the reason why I'm here any better than Rick just said it.
Wonderful. Then, of course, we have Edward Erfurt, our Strong Towns chief technical advisor. He's an architect and urban designer with more than two decades of experience in development, placemaking, and getting projects from plans into the real world. Among Edward's many other talents, he is also one of the folks we at Strong Towns send on the road for our events. So if you're interested in learning more about or having Edward in your place after today's show, visit strongtowns.org/events. Thank you, Edward, for joining us.
Great, thanks. I'm excited to be here, and I'm excited to be here with the guests we have today.
Yeah, Rick, if it's okay, I would love to start with you because, as a resident of the area, I feel like you can provide some context. Tell us a little bit about what you know about the area and the bike path, and what the average person in LA might know and might have thought when they were reading that article.
There's a lot to unpack in that article and in the themes that it touches on. But first, I think for people everywhere else in America besides the Los Angeles area, you have to explain that we actually have a river. The Los Angeles River is not an oxymoron. It was a lush river when the Spaniards arrived and found the Gabrielenos and the Tongvas on its banks.
We have mountains that surround the Los Angeles Basin, and when it rains, the water comes down. A lot of people think that Southern California is a desert. We have deserts, but Los Angeles is a Mediterranean climate. It's obviously a pleasant environment. It's getting a little hotter with climate change, but it's still a wonderful place where we seldom have rain. Again, we're sort of like Italy, Greece, South Africa, Australia, and when we get rain, we get a lot of it. It's fed these river systems throughout the basin.
In the '30s, the Army Corps of Engineers encased those rivers almost entirely in concrete, and a variety of diversions have caused the river to become basically a trickle in some parts of Los Angeles. But in other parts, either because the underlying concrete has eroded or was never encased in concrete, you get a sense of what the river was like before the Army Corps of Engineers tamed it in the interests of flood control.
For a long time, people just assumed that it was an industrial area that we turned our backs on. Then, in the last 20 years, due to some Strong Towns-like activism, people have rediscovered that we have a river running through us. That has caused a lot of people to see an opportunity for us not to turn our backs on it, but actually turn our faces toward it, get back in touch with this vestige of nature, and revive it. That's why the bike path is so important, because it gives Angelenos of every background and every income level access to something that is sorely lacking, especially in the central part of the city, which is open space.
Wow, that makes me want to come visit and see it for myself. It sounds wonderful.
People actually illegally kayaked in it some years ago, which caused everyone to stand up and take notice because people didn't know that you could do that. Of course, it was forbidden. But now, actually, it's a commercial business. You can go kayaking in the Los Angeles River.
Wow. Dave, in learning about you, you seem like a gentleman who can really get things done. I'm not sure how much you have the opportunity to follow this story from the other side of the state, but as a transportation advocate, what was your first reaction when you read the article?
I've been following this story very closely. I'm working with a group called the Festival Trail, which has a proposal to take advantage of all the attention around the Olympics coming up and the need to get millions of people to the various venues without getting anywhere near them with a car because of security reasons. It's also an opportunity to show Angelenos that they actually do have a transit system that's pretty good. They have the longest light rail line in the country. They have pretty decent ridership on Metro and their buses, and a lot of Angelenos barely know that it exists. It's an opportunity to help people see a new way of getting around in their city, which is going to have huge benefits for the quality of life of all Angelenos, whether they drive or not.
I've been following this for a long time. The Festival Trail proposes making permanent some of the infrastructure improvements. They propose having a system where people can close streets more easily, which will happen during the Olympics so that they can have watch parties outside of the venues. They should be able to close streets easily on a regular basis for all kinds of community reasons, and the infrastructure of transit lines and bikeways that will have to be built to help people get to the venues should be permanent and serve Angelenos indefinitely. I'm working with them to make that vision a reality.
One of the most important parts of that vision is this eight-and-a-half-mile gap of the LA River. When it's complete, you'll be able to ride all the way from Griffith Park and, eventually - and eventually means soon - all the way from the headwaters, 52 miles from the San Fernando Valley to Long Beach, on a car-free bike path. For some parts, you're riding next to industrial infrastructure that might not be beautiful. Other parts are absolutely gorgeous. You're close to nature. You can feel the cooler temperatures. You can see birds and trees. In any case, it's joyously car-free and easy to ride.
It is salve for the mind, for your mood, not to mention for your body. So I'm really excited about finishing this project and look forward to making it happen a lot sooner than was implied by that article. It's not actually a $1.1 billion problem. They manufacture that, and we're trying to get around that.
Right. Well, this is a good segue for Edward. When you read it, what stood out to you with the Strong Towns lens on it? I know you're good at digesting and dissecting things through how we think about projects. So what stood out to you?
Well, whenever I see numbers, I pull up my calculator because I can't do math. I've always been told, don't do math in public. It's not a polite thing to do. When I see a big-number project like this, the headline that dragged us into it is eight miles for a billion dollars. We're building roads and bridges and tunnels all across the country for far less than that, and here we're talking about a bike path, trail, kind of multimodal piece. The Boring Company is doing work in Las Vegas, boring underneath the Strip at about $10 million a mile. So that's what really caught me.
Then I started to look at the plans, which are really compelling. It makes a lot of sense. For me, Rick, I knew about the LA River because I liked The Terminator, and it's a critical component of the movie. It's this weird space. I also grew up in the Midwest and have been in a lot of these Rust Belt cities. There is something really cool when you can be up against rail lines or industrial areas where things are happening.
So I look at this and I'm thinking, this seems well thought out. It's a great connection. It's an area that historically has been a transportation corridor because the rails and highways and everything run along it, and here we have a concrete ditch that we can film movies in. Water flows through it at known times. It's not every day; a couple times a year this thing fills up. To me, it just seems like if I was a kid on a bike, I would be riding down there that eight-mile stretch all the time.
If I had to do a commute, from an outsider's perspective, LA is not the place I want to ride on the street with my bike. But here's an eight-mile stretch of uninterrupted area where maybe I have to jump over some cracks and skirt around some water conditions. That's the trade-off of this uninterrupted ride.
It caught me because we talk to folks all the time around the country who are struggling with much more difficult problems, with lower numbers, to get that done, and they don't actually have the base there to get started. Here, there are piles of plans. There are beautiful images. There's already eight miles of uninterrupted concrete. For me, I think the most complicated thing I looked at is how we get people down to it in an easy way and move this stuff forward.
When I look at this, I don't see the problem as a billion dollars. I don't even see it as $100 million. I don't even see it as a million-dollar piece. I'm always perplexed by that when it seems pretty simple. What can we do with the resources we have today? That's the first question I have, and it seems like it would be pretty easy just to get people down in there. So I don't know if I'm missing something in the river. Of course, I love all the beautiful designs that they propose, but what is holding that up?
I think that's a great question for Rick. Rick, what is the smallest thing that we could do? To Edward's version, I guess maybe the next smallest step beyond sending the eight-year-old kids to just bike in the concrete anyway. As a policymaker from the area, how do you wish this project could be broken down?
It's a Hollywood version of something that really happened, which is when Apollo 13 was in trouble. The iconic line, of course, is, "Failure is not an option." So you start with: What's the most expeditious way of closing this gap? It can always be enhanced later, and it can always be improved later, but how do we actually close the gap? Time was of the essence during those moments ticking by in Apollo 13. We're not talking about minutes here, but we shouldn't be talking about years. We should be talking about the next three months: What would it take for us to open up that eight-mile gap? If there's a quarter mile that's more difficult, okay, then let's tackle that.
But that is not the mentality. Los Angeles is famously siloed. That's a reality for most large organizations, but Los Angeles city government is actually built on silos intentionally by reformers 100 years ago. Long story, but historic fact. The result is that everybody thinks they're doing their job. The safety people, the flood control people, bike people, the car folks, and, for that matter, the environmentalists, the labor people, the bird watchers, and on and on. Everyone is thinking, what can we add here? It's only an incremental cost, and it's a no-brainer. Certainly, we shouldn't have anything below prevailing wages or union wages on a project of this magnitude. We absolutely need to have X, Y, and Z. That's what adds up to these gold-plated numbers.
All of those interests are legitimate, and in democracy all those voices should be heard. But what's lacking is a sense of urgency and a sense that we actually have to get results. What happens is that people become very cynical when they get together, make these plans, and people say, "Oh yes, you're going to get this, and you're going to get that, and here's the beautiful rendering, and this is what it's going to look like when it's all done." Then years go by, and even decades go by. We see that famously with Madison Square Garden and Penn Station.
One of the realities is that we've concluded that America can't fix its infrastructure. If we start with the assumption of not what can we add on, but how do we get the job done, I think it's a completely different lens.
I totally agree. I'm curious, Dave, from a transportation advocacy standpoint, how do you balance exactly what Rick just described: the different people who have legitimate interests at the table, but the accumulation of those interests then sometimes creates a project that makes it harder to get off the ground? So you're balancing the listening with the execution. I'm curious how you approach that balance.
I think it's, in this case, a little simpler than a whole lot of various interests with a lot of different perspectives, because there's a consensus that this thing should be done. We have been pretty successful in educating Angelenos about the opportunity of an in-channel path that can be built and completely finished with existing money. I think that the officials don't have that sense of urgency that Rick referred to. They don't see that it's absolutely imperative that we get the bike network finished as quickly as possible, even if it's not perfect.
When this project came before Metro with money set aside to build it, $365 million in 2016 is more than $400 million today. When they had all that money, they thought, "Huh, maybe we can do this above the channel, despite all of the challenges of infrastructure and private property and train tracks and utilities that abut the channel, unlike along the rest of the river. Despite all of that, we're going to look at it."
The interest that is most challenging for an official who doesn't see the urgency are the millions of dollars that can go out to contractors and environmental analysts and engineers to study and plan. They've spent tens of millions of dollars, and that's a lot of jobs. That's a lot of money at stake for companies to analyze this project, so they don't have that incentive to look at something cheap and easy because it's not as good for your business to find the cheap and easy solution.
We have the cheap and easy solution that is very, very good, and that's what I'm working on. That's my job with the Festival Trail: to get the officials to adopt the simpler version that can actually be built. It's not going to be three months, Rick, but it might be a year and a half if we're lucky.
Well, two things about that. One is, sometimes you have to set an aggressive deadline to get it done in a year and a half. If you say six months, one time during my tenure as city manager in Ventura, we were way behind on a planning effort that I inherited. I asked the staff, "Do you know the motto of the French Foreign Legion?" They looked at me with great puzzlement. But who knows the motto of the French Foreign Legion? It's "March or die."
We had a deadline to get this plan done before the election, because if we didn't get it done before the election, it would be kicked over until after the election, and that would be months of further delay. So I said our motto is going to be "July or die." We got the plan done with the unanimous vote of the city council on August 7, so we missed the deadline by seven days. But by setting a real deadline, it created the concentration of urgency.
I just wanted to say, what you're describing, Dave, is endemic. This is perhaps a poster child for wretched excess, but this is my frustration. We've had accidents on Washington Boulevard, three blocks from my home. We've clocked people going 85 miles an hour on a stretch of Washington Boulevard that includes an elementary school, two churches, small businesses, homes, apartments, and a branch library. People are going 85 miles an hour down this stretch between two residential neighborhoods where a lot of people walk and want to cross this four-lane boulevard.
We are now in the umpteenth iteration in Pasadena of a plan to integrate our plans because we have a bike plan, we have a pedestrian plan, and we have a safety plan. So now we're going to do a master plan to integrate the bike plan, the pedestrian plan, and the safety plan. We'll have one big plan, and it's justified because, well, that's how you get grant money. That's where you introduce the idea that I hope we'll talk about a little bit more: cataclysmic money.
Rick, you brought up a couple ideas for me. When we look at a project like this, with how much money is on it, you described all of the different stakeholders. Of course, when we have momentum, everybody wants to be with that winner. We always follow the leader that's moving the pack forward, and we see an opportunity. Our cities are these really complicated places. It's a complex pattern, but we've added all of this complexity to it.
If we see an opportunity where we have eight miles, now we're going to have the transportation folks. We need to look at all the bus stops. We probably should use Metro and move that closer. So all that becomes more complicated in the approach. Then somebody suggests a tree, so now you get the arborists and the environmentalists. If there's a tree, anytime we have flora, we have fauna. This is what I see in cities that I'm working with all across the country.
The simple thing is just opening the gate. Let people use the concrete that's already there, and maybe we'll make small patches along the way where there are bumps or areas that flood more often. Maybe we'll only get four miles of the eight in. We try to deal with everything all at once. When I read through this article, this is the once-in-a-lifetime project to provide this piece, and cities are just so averse to failure that they don't want to have any failure.
They do one of two things: If we don't want failure, we don't do anything. We put up every barrier. We add extra forms. We add in a 12-step process so that nobody will ever get to the end. Or we invite the planners in and we do a master plan for the master plan with the comprehensive plan that will tie together all the other plans. We spend all of our time and energy talking about all the aspirational things we want, and we feel good about it because we got people together and we could say we did public engagement. But at the end of a year-long process, all that we have is another 120-page document on the shelf referencing the other 50 documents we've written that are on the other shelf.
When I see a project like this, there are definitely ways you can get down the LA River because it gets serviced. They get trucks that go down there. How do we use that to open it up, even if it's for one day, just to show people how to get there? If nobody shows up, then that means it's a project that nobody really wanted to ride those eight miles. But if we have 1,000 people show up on a Saturday and ride that, and they gawk on the sides of the overpasses about what's happening, all of a sudden I don't have to do a study. I don't have to do a survey. I immediately have had public engagement to say this is something that will take off.
These big projects, we make them miles, we make them millions, and it becomes difficult. I'm always trying to figure out what can we do, where can we move that marching to just an all-out sprint, and where can we get that moving forward? A project like this is going to be tailored to a pretty small sector of folks in Los Angeles who will be using this on a regular basis. So how do we get that type of engagement on the ground and moving so that we can test some stuff, verify that it works at little to no cost, and just skip over all the plans?
Yeah. Go ahead, Dave.
Yeah, I want to touch on what incremental means in this case because it's not just four miles. We can do an incremental improvement that accomplishes completing the gap, all eight and a half miles, with existing funding. It's important for the reason that you mentioned earlier, Edward, about riding on city streets in LA. You don't do it, and most people don't.
When I ride in LA, which I do a lot, I ride on the streets and I ride on the sidewalk carefully, respecting pedestrians, of course. But it's the only safe way to do it in some parts. In downtown LA, the Los Angeles Department of Transportation has invested a great deal in protected bicycle infrastructure all over downtown LA. The Sixth Street Viaduct, which is brand new, has a protected bike lane across it. Figueroa has protected bike lanes. They have done a great job in making that area, which desperately needs that kind of mobility infrastructure, safe for people who want to ride a bike.
I don't think that when the network is complete, it'll be a terribly small sector of people who will use it. I think it will be huge. The incrementalism in this case is temporal, you could say, rather than longitudinal. We can build a bike path in the channel from Elysian Park in the north to Vernon in the south, with a concrete path elevated by a few inches that goes the entire length, well within the existing budget.
It won't be usable when it floods, but if you're familiar with how quickly a rain event gets flushed out in that system in LA, it's only 10 to 15 days a year when we'd have to close it. That's well worth it. I think we will all take a 52-mile bike path, eight miles of which we can only use 98% of the time, over a bike path that doesn't exist at all.
Dave, I have a question about that and your experience of riding in downtown Los Angeles and the efforts. I can see it when I look on Google Earth. I'm one of those geeks who has to see space with the aerials, and I do Street View of the eight miles.
I know the ideal is being uninterrupted along that corridor, but downtown, how much of that eight miles is covered with - I don't want to say safe, but comfortable - the types of improvements that make it easier for cyclists to ride downtown? I'm wondering if a large part of that eight-mile connection overlaps with downtown, why we're stuck trying to figure out how to deal with the LA River if there aren't some smaller projects or missing links that, if the city's already working toward that, maybe could be filled in.
Yeah, sure. There aren't really any parallel routes that work very well. The routes that have been improved are the feeders, you could say, from the river to downtown. To answer your question, the northernmost few miles are the area where most of those improved segments exist. But if it's extended all the way to where it continues down in Vernon and then goes all the way to Long Beach, there are a lot of ways people can get to that path from South LA and Southeast LA relatively safely.
Once they do that, they'll be able to get to downtown and then get off of the path extremely safely to their destination in downtown. So finishing that whole gap will have a transformative impact for that part of Los Angeles.
The private sector has a name for this. The contrast is between what was characterized in the software world as waterfall projects, where each step is an incredibly planned and expensive step and none of it gets implemented until you're at the bottom of the waterfall, and then the agile alternative, which is to put out the - there's a vocabulary for it, and I'm momentarily blanking on it - but it's basically the least feasible project. There's a better name for it, but something that works.
Minimum viable product.
Minimum viable. Yes. What we need and what's being proposed is actually better than the minimum viable product. It's actually a perfectly serviceable alternative that, as Dave is pointing out, is within a fairly substantial budget that is already available, and then it can be improved. That's the agile idea: the minimum viable product can be continually improved. That mentality is just not pervasive in the public sector. I found that to be incredibly frustrating.
Of course, it's the exact opposite of the public sector mentality: the Strong Towns ethic, which is find a small problem that may be part of a much bigger problem and start right now to go and fix it. I think that's the beauty of Strong Towns. That is, by the way, the way the vast majority of humanity has to exist every day across the planet. There are vast swaths of places where the government doesn't have a billion dollars and has no hope of ever getting a billion dollars. You're on your own, so people improvise. It's not as optimal, it's not as ideal, but it actually happens, and that's an actual project.
One thing that I think is a great example that has opened the door to things like the 52-mile bike path is something we call CicLAvia here in Los Angeles. It's a play on the Bogota original, Ciclovia, the L.A. being the pun in the middle. It transformed the way people looked at the city. They couldn't imagine riding a bike on the streets that Dave referenced as being terrifyingly unsafe. But close those streets, and suddenly the pace of life slows to a manageable bike speed, and people are experiencing the city in a completely different way. It just happened.
It isn't something that needed to be planned for 50 years in some ideal. It was, in Edward's words, incremental, but it's also somewhat spontaneous. Pilots are the way we should be doing things, and that's a fundamental sea change where we could learn from the private sector.
CicLAvia is the highest level of public engagement because we're asking folks to participate. The folks who actually show up for that are intentionally there, but everybody else who's around it, we're not asking them to show up to a meeting. We're asking them to experience this in their daily lives.
Those are transformative moments because, Rick, as you were describing, try to explain that to somebody who's never seen it or experienced it. We have all of our biases. We have all of this: There's no way anybody would ever want to walk or ride a bike here. Then you see this momentum happening where people actually do, and it functions, and the world doesn't stop. There are actually some benefits out of it. I find those to be the highest level of public engagement that we can't bottle up into many of our planning practices today.
Our listeners can't see it, but Dave has a Cheshire cat grin on his face as we talk about CicLAvia.
Oh yeah. Thank you, Rick. I just wanted to shout out CicLAvia. I have attended Open Streets events, which is the generic term for those things, across the country. I've attended those kinds of events in a dozen cities in the United States, and if you're not from LA, you might not appreciate that the Los Angeles CicLAvia is the best of them all.
If you like to ride a bike, it changes your perspective of LA. LA was built for cars in a way, so when you're in the middle of the street safely and you can look at the architecture and the views and be surrounded by thousands of other people who are absolutely joyous because they came from somewhere else and they couldn't believe that they could ride in LA, it is so much fun. So check out their schedule at ciclavia.org when they post it sometime for next summer and make your way to LA to participate. It is such a fun event.
Los Angeles has the equivalent of flyover country. The stereotype is that there's nothing in Nebraska for sophisticated people who live on the coasts to experience. The reality is that because of our freeway system, there are vast swaths of the city of Los Angeles and the Los Angeles region that people think, well, there's nothing there to see. It's just a freeway sign. You're passing through Artesia, you're passing through Cerritos.
Then when you're on a bike in Artesia or Cerritos, or their equivalent neighborhoods in Los Angeles, you suddenly see this incredible dynamism and vibrancy of one of the world's great metropolises at a scale where the entrepreneurship, the immigrant food, and the street life of Los Angeles are quite vibrant. But you would never experience it flashing by at 60 miles an hour, or even crawling by at five miles an hour when the freeway is full.
Definitely. We'll put information about CicLAvia in the show notes because there are great things, so maybe some of our listeners can make summer plans.
Before we start to wrap up, Rick, you've referenced a couple times cataclysmic money in these projects, and I'm curious how you think about that as an elected official, as a former public administrator. How can we take this billion dollars and really help people think about it? I loved the parallel with agile infrastructure in the private sector. Can we get away from this cataclysmic money and start getting things done faster in our places?
Yeah, it's actually a phrase from Jane Jacobs in the iconic "A Death and Life of American Cities," which everyone worships and hardly anyone reads. Tragedy.
There you go, Rick. You're calling everybody out now.
It is such an extraordinary book because the thing that people get wrong about Jane consistently is that they think that what Jane wrote about for Greenwich Village in 1962 should be applied always and everywhere, at least in concept, to every urban environment. It was exactly that kind of monomania that she was critiquing. In fact, you have to customize everything based upon what actually works and how people actually behave.
While there are some universals about how people behave, there are also some very particular things shaped by climate, shaped by the kind of place it is, and the kind of economy that's growing there. She was just absolutely terrified by what she called cataclysmic money, where money sluices in.
It could be a giant project, a baseball stadium that suddenly is plopped down in the middle of either a cornfield or an urban neighborhood. It could be an interstate highway that comes plowing through farmland or a denser neighborhood. It could be a giant infrastructure project with millions and billions of dollars.
One of the contemporary deleterious effects of that is gentrification. The change is so dramatic and invisible that it causes people to be attracted to this area that suddenly has this giant amount of investment poured into it, versus the kind of incremental growth that benefits the people who live there. They can see it and they can be part of it. They can get jobs in that small business versus maybe a job from 100 miles away for that giant new mall.
There's the Strong Towns, small-is-beautiful ethic. It's more respectful of the way cities have evolved over 10,000 years, and it is more in tune with what Jane Jacobs actually preached versus these ossified ideas that people have about what she believed in. Finally, it avoids catastrophic mistakes, and the country is littered with catastrophic mistakes. So people would say, "Well, if we only had a billion dollars, look what we could do." Well, we could do a great deal of damage.
Right. And we have, at times, with a billion dollars, done a great deal of damage. So Dave, I know this is a project that you're actively working on. Before we start to close out the show, could you tell us a little bit about what your folks have planned next and how you're going to make sure that this does happen incrementally and sooner, and not for a billion dollars?
Sure. Thank you. The urgency is not just the Olympics, but the investment that is going in that area. Billions and billions of dollars of new housing projects, with zoning that requires no parking, by the way, are going in on both sides of the river in this area. So we really have to get this done.
The proposal that we have is to start at the Elysian Park end of the path and build a connector down to the bottom of the channel, where you'll be able to ride next to the river the whole way. There's a section where we have to dig a deeper central channel so that the water all stays in the center, but we can do that for probably half of the approximately $400 million that we currently have and use the balance of the money to improve the connections to the river path.
We have done analysis with GOEs Tech to get those cost estimates. We have studied the flood protection systems that other cities that have done exactly this use to be able to close the path when necessary. We know exactly how to get it done.
What needs to happen is that the city of L.A. and the county, and that means Mayor Bass, need to agree to accept the $400 million to build the path. Their hesitation is due to approximately $1 million necessary to maintain it in perpetuity. To decline $400 million because of $1 million a year reflects a lack of understanding of how popular this is. The opportunity for the mayor to get an easy win, to get $400 million for safe infrastructure, is sitting right in front of her.
The article that you mentioned at the beginning referred to her wanting to get all the obstacles out of the way of this project. The biggest obstacle is a decision by her office to just agree to take that money and get this thing started.
Well, I find it ironic that a Strong Towns rationale of not understanding the maintenance cost is preventing the Strong Towns approach to actually building it. I think ideally, if the housing and the other things take place along the corridor, maybe some of the associated tax revenue would increase, et cetera, to help care for it into the future.
Yeah, you mentioned that, so now I'll mention another aspect that I thought was just a little too technical. Our proposal includes the creation of a new agency that will be responsible for building and maintaining the path, and that could be expanded to build and maintain the entire LA River Path and other aspects of the bike infrastructure in Los Angeles.
That agency could be a climate benefit district that is authorized by the California State Legislature and could indeed get some of that tax increment funding to maintain the path. There are a lot of ways that we can generate revenue to maintain the path, from events in the path, you name it. It is a silly reason to decline a $400 million infrastructure investment.
It feels like, a lot of times when faced with projects like this, there are a lot of different ways that we could eat the elephant. I hope for you folks out in California that your local leaders come together with you guys and figure out how you can move this forward in a Strong Towns way.
I'd love to transition now to the Downzone. Since Edward's a regular guest with us, I'd ask him to go first and set the stage. For those of you who might be listening for the first time, the Downzone is where we ask our guests to talk about something interesting they're reading, learning, listening to, or otherwise want to share with our audience. So, Edward.
I'm reading a book now that totally diverts away from what we talked about, other than being local. In my town in Charlestown, West Virginia, we have a new restaurant that opened up called Homespun. It is a locally owned hamburger-and-hot-dog kind of joint, a really great place. It's a second location opened by a regenerative farmer who grew up in our area and was pushing back on development and wanted to protect the family farm.
The book is Start Your Own Farm, and the tagline is the best part of it: the authoritative guide to becoming a sustainable 21st-century farmer. It's written by Forrest Pritchard. I think there's a lot of robust voice in saying that this is the authoritative side.
What I love about this book is that it goes through and outlines just the really dumb things that you should know about farming. In the middle of it, there are the three golden rules, and it's, you have to fix stuff right when you realize it's broken. I love that refreshment of stepping away from all the city stuff I do. But in fact, everything you do on a farm is what we're doing in the work we do. That's not just Jefferson and his idea of Monticello and his city building. It's just a great book, and it's somebody who's an author and business owner locally in my community. So I always love the opportunity to pitch something like that.
That's great. Rick, how about you? What are you listening to or learning?
These are dark times, and perhaps the media even magnifies the darkness and polarization and the economic stress, and even as we speak, war going on. So I'm looking for hope always.
I have a young assistant. The council in Pasadena is a part-time job, so we are given one person to help us with everything from barking dogs to policy analysis and social media. She decided to organize a youth engagement, so we commandeered a section of a coffee house in the day and beer bar in the evening. We had a little over a dozen young people, ranging from a high school student to recent college graduates, many of whom are a little bit active, or a lot active, or not active yet but want to be active. What an inspiring group of young people! I came away tremendously inspired, and they're going to start a Discord group, which is what young people do.
The second is Mayor Bass is presiding over Los Angeles. She hums "Happy Days Are Here Again" even as Los Angeles is clearly in decline, and we are petrified about putting on an Olympics in less than two years because the city is just not ready in any way for that. It's functionally bankrupt. Homelessness is growing. We had to deal with a billion-dollar budget gap just a year ago. 3,200 jobs have been eliminated. You can see it on the streets. Streets are not as well maintained. The trees aren't, and there are more potholes. There are more broken sidewalks.
So we don't know what the outcome of that election will be, but just the fact that the status quo is being challenged gives me hope.
Dave, your first Downzone. Do you have something for us that you've been learning that you want to share?
Sure. I understand what Rick says when he says we're in rough times, and my hope comes from all of the local organizers who are doing neighborhood-level, town-level advocacy to make their community a safer, more convivial, healthier, more joyful space. I think that is how we're going to rebuild our country.
I don't have a lot of hope about changes at the national level. I have a ton of hope in all of the work that organizations like Strong Towns and people who live in cities and towns are doing locally. That's what turns me on these days. I have a newsletter on Substack called The Movement Newsletter that addresses that very topic.
These days, my advocacy push is to simply encourage bicycling. My entire career, I have understood that infrastructure is the biggest challenge, and I still think that. But I also have come to learn that there are people who choose to use a car for a trip where there is a perfectly safe bike route because it's just habit. I think that we can do a lot to strengthen the community of people who enjoy their towns and enjoy their cities without having to get into a car, just by having community events like CicLAvia. So supporting local advocacy through community, I guess, is the thing that is my Downzone contribution for this podcast.
Wonderful. Well, I was going to give a different one, but Rick inspired me. I was able to speak to a group of high school students last week in Lafayette, Louisiana, where I'm based, and they are participating in a youth advisory council. We were able to walk down one of the streets in one of our core neighborhoods in Lafayette, and they spent their afternoon designing a city center. To hear their enthusiasm and see their passion for their community gives me hope too. So we've got hope in a lot of places, and hopefully we're building hope by listening to things like this.
I want to thank you, Dave Snyder, Rick Cole, Edward Erfurt. Thank you so much for joining us for today's episode of Upzoned. That's it for this episode. If you all have a reaction to this conversation or want to take part in it yourself, you can visit us on the Commons at commons.strongtowns.org and participate. We've shared the article there. As always, we'll be back next week with a new article and a new team to chat about. Please keep doing what you can do to build a strong town. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for joining me today.
Thank you, Carlee.
This episode was produced by Strong Towns, a nonprofit movement for building financially resilient communities. If what you heard today matters to you, deepen your connection by becoming a Strong Towns member at strongtowns.org/membership.