York Boulevard in the Highland Park district in Los Angeles

20 August 2009 – 12:00pm

Bill Fulton consults on a boulevard in Los Angeles, and concludes that sometimes the dense, mixed-use approach is too heavy-handed, particularly when transit is lacking.

Los Angeles’s York Boulevard is a village-scale commercial strip near Occidental College.

Bill Fulton: “I was there, along with several other planners, at the invitation of Councilmember Jose Huizar, who’s thinking about doing a new plan. The trick is to maintain the eclectic character of the street – and yet upgrade it at the same time. Striking this balance won’t be easy, but we planners had better figure out how to do streets like York really well. There are lots of emerging places in California that could be as good as York’s going to be, and in many ways they represent the future of the state.”

Full Story: Precision Required to Make California’s Great Places via Planetizen

Source: California Planning & Development Report, August 18, 2009