For decades, communities of color and low-income communities across Los Angeles County have failed to receive adequate development, operations, and maintenance services to actualize an equitable built environment. While inadequate services to these communities are not exclusive to any one period, these outcomes are most prominently understood through the impact of redlining, a discriminatory practice of denying loans or services within a specific geographic area due to the race or ethnicity of its residents. 

However, for as long as there have been inequities in communities of color and low-income communities, there have been community-based planners who are embedded in their communities developing and implementing innovative approaches to actualize an equitable built environment. Embedded Planning means the planner moves with intention to work on the ground in the community:

• Understand people’s needs,
• Build trust and authentic relationships,
• Increase participation for marginalized communities through street-level engagement,
• Participate in daily community life, and
• Advance equity.

One notable person who championed these values and gave them a national platform was civil rights activists, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. From his perspective, these values would manifest in the form of the “Beloved Community”, a vision that would ensure the alleviation of poverty, food deserts, and homelessness across all communities. These are not unlike the values we see espoused by voters within Los Angeles County and the City of Los Angeles with the passage of Measure A and Measure ULA, respectively. However, with or without the passage of much needed funding streams, and through various administrations at the local, state, and federal level, there exists a network of community-based planners who are embedded in their communities across Los Angeles County who want to actualize a Beloved Community for their neighborhood. These people and organizations cover a range of urban planning issues from zoning code enforcement, to transportation planning and mobility justice, to the development of land trust-owned parks and gardens. While they have often done this work with no funding or with various barriers in place, these people and organizations have all arrived at the same end point, success in transforming government services and urban planning.  

For City of Los Angeles native, Yolanda Davis-Overstreet, her journey into transportation planning and mobility justice occurred when she began making observations regarding speeding vehicles passing her daughter’s middle school during drop-off. In 2013, she launched a seven-year advocacy campaign that led to the installation of four-way traffic lights and crosswalks at the busy intersection of Washington Boulevard and Burnside Avenue, along with school zone signage at her daughter’s middle school in April of 2020. She would go on to discover that 450 of the most dangerous streets for pedestrians in Los Angeles are concentrated in predominantly Black and Latinx neighborhoods, including the community she grew up in, now known as West Adams. From 2009 to 2019, Adams Boulevard alone was the site of 59 severe and fatal collisions. As a community-based planner embedded in Los Angeles’ West Adams neighborhood, Yolanda spent three years advocating and building relationships through community engagement to advocate for infrastructure changes, including traffic signal upgrades, bike lanes, lane reduction, and pedestrian islands that were installed in 2021 under the direction of the Los Angeles Department of Transportation’s Vision Zero Initiative. 

The Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust (LANLT) was founded in 2002 with the vision of developing parks and gardens within walking distance of every family in Los Angeles County, with a focus exclusively in communities of color that have little access to green space to ensure an adequate level of service. To date, LANLT has completed 30 parks and gardens that equate to over 22 acres and 500,000 Angelenos impacted. However, in the organization’s attempt to produce a beloved community, LANLT often has to sustain development and advocacy work for decades. For example, Wishing Tree Park, an 8.5-acre park located in West Carson, CA on a former superfund site, required three decades and over $16 million to open the park. LANLT acquired the site from Shell in 2015 and subsequently became the park developer and navigated a variety of regulatory barriers, government budgets and funding sources, and cleanup plans and park designs to support the community in moving forward. Recently opened to the public, Wishing Tree Park includes a variety of sports fields, exercise equipment, walking trails, and office and community space. 

As embedded community-based planners move street knowledge and the needs of their community through various planning processes to remove barriers, possibilities exist even in the places that are not receiving adequate government services and are experiencing inequitable built environments. The work of these people and organizations, is a reminder that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it does bend towards justice. 

Please RSVP to join Yolanda Davis-Overstreet, Jonathan Pacheco Bell, and APA Los Angeles for a special screening of Biking While Black on January 18th, 2025.