The Battles on the River
There’s Frank Gehry’s team, invited by the City to presumably upscale the project and bring in worldwide publicity. The LA River, long forgotten and forsaken, has become the next hot thing.
To a casual onlooker, the LA River revitalization movement looks ambitious, visionary, and united. In the summer of 2016, a bipartisan coalition of politicians + business + environmentalists + activists + local government bodies successfully lobbied the USACE to choose the most extensive, ambitious alternative for implementing the first part of the LA River Revitalization Master Plan. During the public outreach process, LA City Councilman Gil Cedillo noted:
“Seldom in my political experience… have I been in a room where people are so committed to this idea, an idea of a visionary, an idea that can bring people together.”
Other politicians described the River revitalization as a “once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for all Angelenos” to “breathe new life into the river,” and “transform the [city’s] landscape.” Individual commenters echoed the same sweeping rhetoric in their endorsement of the plan.
But if you scratch a bit under the surface, you realize that there’s distrust, tension, and politics between the participants of this movement. Hilel Aaron of LA Weekly summarizes the disagreements:
“As river renewal becomes less of a fever dream and more of a reality, tensions are beginning to emerge. Not only is there MacAdams vs. Gehry, there’s also the naturalists vs. the urbanists, the kayakers vs. the water conservationists and the smart growthers vs. the anti-gentrifiers.”
Now that the political mood and the all-important $$$ are on the side of River revitalization, the LA River advocates are splintering off based on their priorities. There are many actors at play in any development plan, but given the scale of the LA River project, the dynamic among those groups is louder, and the disagreements even more pronounced.
As I was reading up on articles about the River, I was struck by the suspicion against Frank Gehry’s involvement and the distrust of River LA. It seemed as though everybody shared excitement for an LA River freed from conflict, and as an outsider I had difficulty parsing exactly what the unseen underlying tensions were.
On July 7 (I’m still figuring out this blogging thing), I spoke to Stephen Mejia, policy and advocacy manager at FoLAR, to get an insider’s perspective on the dynamic among the prominent actors of the LA River. Stephen immediately conceded a “lack of communication” among the different organizations working on the LA River Revitalization initiative, which exacerbated the tension between the differing visions favored by the stakeholder boards. He notes with a wry smile, “Of course, all the leaders also have their egos.” Talking with him helped me organize the different stakeholders’ roles and constraints:
Friends of the LA River / Organizers
After my conversation with Stephen, I came to define FoLAR as a grassroots organization that focuses on community education — not an environmentalist nonprofit. When I was first researching the river, my impression of FoLAR’s origin story was: a hippie artist was so moved by the sliver of nature he found at the River that he started an entire organization/movement to spread the vision of what the LA River could become. But apparently, Lewis himself told Stephen that FoLAR is “not an environmental organization.” As it turns out, FoLAR’s mission is not just to restore the River “to its former status as a habitat for native plants and animals,” but also to get people to acknowledge the “the unacknowledged backbone of life in Los Angeles.”
The activities of the organization fit well into this paradigm. FoLAR has organized River cleanups since the ’80s, and currently runs a mobile teaching center that travels to different schools teaching kids about the LA River. This summer (of 2017), it is running the Frog Spot, the first community space that is actually alongside the LA River. Given that river revitalization requires extensive technical knowledge of biological habitat and engineering logistics, this community education is crucial in giving communities voice and some degree of control in the movement.
In terms of planning the new LA River, Stephen claims that FoLAR aims to “Show them what it [the current state of the River] is, and inspire them of what it can be” model of community inclusion– rather than just “Make it and they [the common people] will come” approach. The organization is one of a burgeoning coalition of community stakeholders that are working to formalize their decades of work in their own master plan for the LA River. The importance of organizing is a relatively new realization for me. I’ve always conceived of soliciting public input as a tedious but necessary process for a government in a democratic society. I regarded advocacy groups as important actors providing voice to the voiceless, but kept a distance as I felt they often fell to oversimplifying complex issues to their perspectives. But after interning at a nonprofit that specializes in grassroots organizing, I am fascinated by the approach of semi-institutionalizing atomized individuals on the basis of common self-interests. The delicate balance that organizers must strike in empowering the less privileged/educated/experienced to political action VS taking care not to impose their own ideals to the people they seek to empower — is mind-boggling. As Stephen puts it, “It’s hard to include the unorganized,” and channeling the power of numbers for the underdog seems an admirable feat indeed.
South East Asian Community Alliance (SEACA) / Organizers
But the “community” is not monolithic. Often, people in the same community have differing, conflicting interests. While the influx of attention and capital to the vision of a revitalized River is exactly what FoLAR has been working for for the past few decades, for some communities, it is raising alarm of gentrification.
According to an offhanded comment, Sissy Trinh, the leader of SEACA, believes that “all [riverfront] development is bad,” because it leads to displacement and gentrification. I can’t take Stephen’s word for it, but as Sissy did not respond to my email I’ll have to table my evaluation of that assessment.
Though I have not been able to talk with anyone at SEACA specifically about the LA River (I did meet two women who work there, before I started my study of the River revitalization movement), Sissy did give a real journalist an interview. “We are not against the River,” she said, only dedicated to ensuring that the new River won’t “push out the lowest-income residents who invested in these neighborhoods when nobody cared.” In the article, she floated the idea of Enhanced Infrastructure Financing Districts, which would allocate the tax revenue from the redeveloped riverfront neighborhoods to local infrastructure/etc projects that will help current residents stay in their homes. (I need to research this more. How would increased infrastructure prevent displacement? Isn’t transit-oriented development linked to displacement? What does “infrastructure” mean here — what projects short of housing subsidies or eviction services achieve this goal?)
FoLAR is primarily interested in ensuring that the new LA River is redesigned and reconnected according to the visions of the residents living along the River. SEACA’s a priori concern is that developers and speculators who are building along the River will displace the long-time residents. But what if the ideas advocated for by the community end up displacing them? Displacing their neighbors? I’ll talk about gentrification on the River in another post, but I just wanted to show how two parties equally dedicated to the good of the community could end up in tension with each other.
When it comes to advocating for the community, what is and is not in the community’s interest depends on who you include within that community — which can change on the basis of geographic location, identity (ethnicity, gender, age, etc), or specific situation.
Environmental agencies / Technocrats and engineers
There are lots of public and nonprofit agencies that are primarily concerned with the ecological issues of the LA River. The Northeast Trees, MCRA, the Nature Conservancy, LADWP, County Flood Control, Trust for Public Land, and many others are technically skilled, narrowly focused groups with another clear objective that may or may not conflict with those of neighborhood activists. Urban ecology is an entire field, but specifically for the LA River, the prevailing issues are flood control (there isn’t anyone who really wants the River to be able to cause mass flooding and destruction again), water quality (if you’re gonna attract people to the river, it better be safe), and habitat restoration. These issues seems to be more of a binary — either the River floods or it doesn’t, the water is safe to swim in or it isn’t, the trout returns to the River or it doesn’t — but I need to think a little more on that.
Politicians / Public sector
Elected officials must be attuned to public opinion. If they piss off enough of their voting constituents, they will find themselves out of a job. Mayor Garcetti and all the Los Angeles politicians (from the Council members to federal Congresspeople) did not make LA River revitalization politically or financially feasible. The USACE paved the LA River in concrete back in the 1930s because Angelenos were terrified of its flooding. The USACE started studying the LA River again in the 2010s because Angelenos wanted some natural relief in their concrete desert.
Thus, I think that the publicized agendas of politicians are the best gauge of the mainstream discourse — what people are talking about, what the average Jane thinks, where the tax dollars are flowing.
Politicians have neither time nor resources to truly challenge the status quo; their role is to manage the opinions of those who aim to maintain or challenge it. They are on a cyclical bureaucratic schedule, and they can’t organize the people who would benefit from organizing but aren’t organized already. The politician’s proper role is to prioritize interests that are already articulated and advocated.
When there is enough outcry (and money) to make change, that’s when you see most politicians act. That’s why certain LA City Council members who don’t have the LA River in their district are getting ramped up about the LA River — that’s where the money, and the interest, is today.
I think Stephen made an important point when he commented, “Images are good for politicians.” The imagery of a blue river connecting the infamously sprawling Los Angeles is a sexy one, and one easily captured by stump speeches, ads, travel guides, and clickbait articles. It’s the mantra that captures the imagination for those constitutents who don’t have the time (or interest) in becoming deeply familiar with the headaches of the movement.
Frank Gehry / the Private sector. If politicians are the gauge for the mainstream, it seems to me that the private sector takes cues from this gauge. Profit-seeking enterprises seem in order to profit off of this mainstream. The stereotype is that private actors are more efficient than the public sector — but that’s because they err, by definition, on the side of exclusivity. Private firms don’t work faster or achieve results because they are using their own money — politicians are just as constrained by the availability of funds when defining their agenda and target legacy. No, they work faster or achieve results because they’re not obligated to the public comment period.
Going back to the point that politicians are concerned with image, there’s also the important element that Frank Gehry is a ‘starchitect’ — politicians have probably calculated that his involvement will upscale the project and bring in worldwide publicity. But this ‘starchitect’ status implicitly connotes that Gehry’s model of development would be top-down– which is the source of most of the tension on the River.
River LA / Consultant for Public-private partnership
River LA is a nonprofit organization founded by the City government to implement the LA River Revitalization Master Plan. While the org was founded by the public sector, but also closely aligned with the private sector (Gehry). They claim,
“…as a social enterprise, we bring the know-how to translate good works into good business. As a convener, we bring public, private and philanthropic partners together to enhance the quality of life across our region.
- When I started my research into the LA River, I found River LA’s website to be helpful and comprehensive in its compilation of the issues surrounding the movement. I could understand the fears of gentrification evoked by the rampant real estate speculation. The oft-cited LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne observes how River LA has been staying below the radar, presumably to avoid the same kind of outcry that roared when it was leaked that Gehry was working on a separate master plan for the LA River. But given all of River LA’s data, maps, and the fancy LiDAR imaging — which I assume were collected with the help of Gehry — I couldn’t help but feel that this accomplished and experienced architect must know what he is doing.
The day of my conversation with Stephen, the River groups had received notice of the newly available $100 billion in funds from the State Proposition 1 for water infrastructure. Even amidst celebration was the underlying tense suspicion of River LA; whereas the Prop 1 funds were supposed to be split evenly among the Upper and Lower LA River Working Groups, $10 billion had been allocated specifically for River LA. Not knowingGiven the complete lack of trust for River LA in FoLAR, it seems that these “partners” only include the government, Gehry, and rich donors.
I’m not sure how much weight to give to this, but transparency does seem to be a problem with River LA and Gehry. If you keep it secret, people can’t really protest anything but the fact that you’re keeping it secret. And that’s (probably) exactly what River LA means when they say they know how to make “good business” out of “good works” — streamlining the *inefficient* public engagement process.
But it’s difficult to parse where the power actually lies within this streamlined decisionmaking process. Stephen was describing the shorter, abridged version of public outreach conducted by outside consultants with no long-term connections to local communities, when I finally understood why there was so much frustration on the part of the activists when such *experts* are brought in.
- Whereas organizers bring together individuals to fill in the blank space of what demands they want to make, consultants provide multiple choice options for the public to choose from. This inherently constrains the voice of the residents whose lives are directly or indirectly impacted by the development.
Neighborhoods inevitably change. People come and go, the economy rises and falls, locations become hot and cold. Communities are not static, nor are their needs. But intentional development is political, because the outcome directly alters people’s lives — their livelihoods, their homes, or their wallets — within a short, observable period of time. The stakeholder parties of any urban planning project have different powers and constraints. Theoretically, everyone has an equally important role — it’s important to understand where one side may be getting shut down.
That’s all I have for now — thanks for reading through this rambling post. I felt that a few longer entries were necessary to at least get the main issues on the table, but any tips on how I may better employ the blog form would be greatly appreciated.
Originally published at audncity.com on July 26, 2017.

