Esperanza Elementary added 20,000 square feet of California native plants and trees, a real grass field, and a bright blue running track to what was previously an asphalt schoolyard. LA Neighborhood Land Trust
During these hellacious face-melting final weeks of our tropic thunder summer, I've often wished I was back at the opening of Esperanza Elementary's newly greened schoolyard. As butterflies flit across a lawn fringed with oak and sycamore trees, I sat with Robin Mark, director of partnerships for SALT Landscape Architects, our shoes off, while students yelped happily around us, even on a 90-degree morning. "The entire campus has been improved," she told me, "because we believe that kids should have park-like environments to play on."
These projects are the work of the Living Schoolyards Coalition, a partnership between the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, the nonprofit that's become a school-greening powerhouse, and the Trust for Public Land, the organization that ranked LA's park system 93rd out of 100 U.S. cities, the plummeting statistic that Torched readers know all too well. I feel like I don't even need to show you the "before," because if you live in LA, you know exactly what it looked like. The shadeless, all-asphalt, chain link-fenced schoolyard is a signature fixture of the LA landscape, found at most LAUSD schools.
Bleak
Later that week, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass held a press conference celebrating the opening of a new community school park in Boyle Heights, less than three miles from the rotting meat stench of the Lineage cold storage warehouse fire. This is the 12th such park to open in a schoolyard — I wrote about the first one in 2024 — made possible by a now-formalized joint powers agreement between the city and LAUSD. The guaranteed boost in access for kids is why the city's own Park Needs Assessment heavily recommends opening schoolyards in every high-need area. At a time when our public school communities are facing so many threats — declining enrollment, attendance challenges due to ongoing ICE raids, extreme heat, lack of trees, the flooding impacts of our forthcoming El Niño season — a greened and opened campus, programmed in partnership with schools, on land that already belongs to us, truly checks every single box.
In the original bid documents, the organizing committee that became LA28 promised the legacy of hosting the Olympics and Paralympics would be exactly that: "new community green spaces" and "after the games, these spaces will contribute to the expression of our diverse communities, and provide access for Angelenos to be active and healthy through additional sports and cultural programming." That's not what we got; instead, LA28 ponied up $160 million for PlayLA, the free (or heavily subsidized) youth sports lessons at LA's city parks. Unfortunately, as I wrote last month, PlayLA is downsizing the program due to low enrollment and/or the reduced capacity of our underfunded parks department. And it never was a true legacy as the commitment ends in 2028.
But, interestingly, now some of that PlayLA money is being redirected to LA's community school parks program. And, there's a bit of LA28 money going to green schoolyards as well. LA28 recently opened round two of its sustainability grants, and in the first round, awarded in May, one of the grants went to Active SGV to fund school greening projects in El Monte, a partnership with the Trust for Public Land. As I've written before, can we even administer youth sports lessons if the facilities themselves are literally crumbling? Investing $160 million to upgrade where LA's kids play is what LA28 could have been doing for the last ten years. Esperanza was only a $4.5 million project!
The Trust for Public Land is aiming to transform 28 asphalt playgrounds into those park-like green spaces by 2028. More than 28, actually; there are about 40 additional nonprofit partner-led projects across LAUSD that could be accelerated as well, says Nola Eaglin Talmage, Trust for Public Land's Los Angeles Parks for People program director. "We have an opportunity to make real progress on green schoolyards by 2028," she says, but the challenge, as always, is funding. Approving Measure PRK, which will be on your November ballot, can help unlock more campuses. But if LA28 went all in on green schoolyards we'd see measurable increases in park access and cooler neighborhoods — plus even more places to actually play. 🔥
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Things will be great when you're downtown
The 2028 prioritization list from ULI's presentation on downtown's revitalization
The Urban Land Institute presented its ideas for downtown at a Downtown Breakfast Club program at the California Club this week. Building upon similar work by the DTLA Alliance I wrote about earlier this year, some of the ideas to potentially be implemented ahead of 2028 include quick-build plazas, kiosks, entertainment zones, and more frequently recurring CicLAvia events. I also concur with the report's love for 11th Street. But the main takeaway from Thursday's event was the exploration of an Enhanced Infrastructure Financing District, or EFID, to fund localized improvements. You can check out the presentation for now; a full report will be coming soon. Coincidentally, I sat next to Rick Cole, who told me he's leading the transition team for mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, a role that probably just became a bit more interesting this week as Raman is now leading Karen Bass by double digits — if you believe in such "outlier" polls.
LA28 is awarding human rights grants after intense pressure from anti-trafficking advocates who say the organizing committee is not doing enough to prevent human rights abuses. Like LA28's sustainability grants, human rights grants will be awarded across five priority areas: human trafficking, labor rights, accessibility, unhoused communities, and civil rights. It's a good first step, Stephanie Richard, director of the Sunita Jain Anti-Trafficking Initiative at Loyola Law School, said in a statement, "however, meaningful commitment requires letting the community know the overall level of investment, how funding decisions will be made, what outcomes will be measured, and whether the resources being committed are proportionate to the scale of need facing communities." 🦋
Add 220 more buses to the official 2028 count after Metro approved the procurement of electric buses that should be on the ground in time for the games. Attorneys at Earthjustice have been pushing for full Metro electrification. "These buses put the agency within striking distance of electrifying 20 percent of its fleet," writes Candice Youngblood, who notes that a new charging depot at the El Monte Transit Center to serve the J line is also set to be completed this fall. Earthjustice is also advocating for Metro to revise Measure M allocations to pay for new charging infrastructure as part of an Olympic legacy. Take that money away from the freeway widenings! Assuming all 220 CNG buses that Metro is replacing with these electric buses will stay in service, that could mean we just increased the number of buses used for Olympics-related service to 1,270 out of the 1,750 needed. Now we just need money to operate them. 🦋
🏈 A new Super Bowl LXI legacy fund is awarding 27 grants to "harness the momentum of Super Bowl LXI in 2027 and flag football’s Olympic debut in Los Angeles in 2028"
🪩 And next week is a Torched annual favorite, the "leave your car at home" LA Design Week/end, with highlights including a haunted house at Eric Wareheim's Serpentine
Jim Crouch, a science teacher who has planted 10,000 oak trees, is now trying to re-oak Altadena
“There’s a race with Mother Nature in terms of trying to protect the line. The rail line has been there since the 1880s, but in the last five years, there’s been no other time in history where we’ve had this much impact,” OCTA CEO Darrell Johnston told the Los Angeles Times. Will the Surfliner survive this El Niño season?
Why are helicopters still favored for news coverage? Featuring the great Zoey Tur. I know people are thinking hard about this but what is our airspace going to look like cluttered with helicopters and drones in 2028? At least we know there definitely won't be any air taxis
Thanks so much to South Bay Forward for the invitation to open up the South Bay Transit Summit at the absolutely gorgeous Torrance Transit Center. No speaking engagements in the near future — I KNOW — but I'll have some new events to announce soon. In the meantime, I posted a clip of my SCAG panel with more photos and videos from recent talks to come.
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Alissa Walker
Alissa Walker
