Which is good, because absent an actual football team, they'll need something other than Comicon and Porn conventions to populate it.
Chris Hawthorne describes the City of LA's breathless pursuit of a 1B$ stadium project.
But the mayor and his top advisors have also proved vulnerable, even more than politicians elsewhere, to the distracting appeal of the flashy mega-project. (via Atrios)
I don't really care whether or not LA picks up an NFL team (and if history is any indication, neither does anyone else in Los Angeles, 1, 2), but I do care to see a vibrant downtown.
Glitzy constructs with boring restaurants and over-priced bowling aren't sufficient to attract actual residents (i.e. the living things that make urban areas livable). If they were, there wouldn't be empty condos up and down Figueroa, Wilshire, Olive, 7th, Olympic etc., just blocks from the Staples Center.
Downtown LA doesn't need another commercial outgrowth, it needs greenspaces, dog runs, and bike lanes. And less bloody traffic, a London-style tax on non-commercial vehicles, maybe close a street or two.
And please: buildings with mixed commercial/residential zoning. Here are a couple street-shots near my old office, bland commercial/residential buildings with zero street-level retail.
Isn't it bleak? No parks, no stores, no cool little shops that attract residents, no bars, not even a fucking Starbucks. And this is the nice part of downtown - head a few blocks south of Los Angeles Street and it feels like you wandered into Gary, IN.
People want parks and stores and cafes and places where their kids can play; a stadium without those will just yield more of what we already have: a boring downtown, barren and gloomy after 6:00 p.m.
