For black stakeholders eager to shed the despised "Death Alley" label and address the damage rooted in segregationist policies, the stakes feel especially high

Before the connection cuts, I hear the plea underlying the panic that pushed him to this point: "Officer, I don't have nowhere else to go."

“I knew where I was,” muses Slimm, the 25-year-old road captain from the Los Ryderz Bike Club regarding his fateful decision to roll past 65th on Broadway – the heart of East Coast Crips territory, “but I was just riding by…” Keeping track of whose territory you are in is key to survival for many […]

While curbing the power of the I-got-mine-so-go-away-peasant crowd to veto growth is indeed a most urgent imperative, the fact that the zoning changes are tied to transit lines means that, here in Los Angeles, it is disproportionately lower-income communities of color that will be affected by the bill.

She had had enough of hearing her community spoken about in offensive ways by well- (and not-so-well-) meaning planners and advocates, enough of giving 110 percent of herself only to realize a fraction of what she put forward was being seen as having value, enough of how disinterested those with power over what happened in marginalized communities remained in the larger picture, and enough of being tokenized.

I love doing the bike/ped counts. I move through the communities I cover constantly, but rarely get the chance to stand in one place for two hours and observe how a particular corner functions.

Deeply imperfect as Triangle 1.0 was, it had had shade in its favor.

What a hideous and untenable thing, we collectively agreed in pausing our trajectories to render assistance, to see this poor woman so fragile and afraid in the street like this. Yet data suggests we generally don't appreciate how vulnerable others are or how much power we have to hurt each other until it's too late - and pedestrians and cyclists tend to pay the steepest price for that.

In many historically marginalized urban neighborhoods, decades of disenfranchisement and the repressive policing that accompanied it created great insecurity in the public space and, over time, eroded bonds of social trust between neighbors. With the public space essentially rendered off limits for too many, community had to be nurtured in private spaces.

The divide between the communities I write about and the people who seek to plan or advocate on their behalf has never felt deeper.