In an interview with housing and transportation advocate Oren Hadar, who has been closely tracking Los Angeles street maintenance data for months, a striking pattern emerges: Los Angeles has quietly stopped repaving its streets, and the consequences are already beginning to show across the city.
Hadar, a Mid-City homeowner who writes about local infrastructure and housing issues on his blog, The Future Is LA, began digging into the issue after noticing worsening conditions on his own block. What he found in the city’s own data was stark.
Since July 1, the start of the city’s fiscal year, StreetsLA has resurfaced exactly zero miles of roadway, according to the city’s own StreetStat dashboard. This is not a temporary pause or scheduling delay. Under the city’s draft budget, Los Angeles is proposing to repave zero miles again next year, marking a sharp departure from decades of routine street resurfacing.
Instead of full resurfacing, StreetsLA has shifted most of its street maintenance budget to what it calls “large asphalt repair,” a practice that involves patching only portions of a street rather than resurfacing it curb to curb.
“It literally doesn’t exist,” said Oren Hadar. “If you Google it, you get no results. It’s a thing they made up.”
While patching may sound cheaper, it is often more expensive and less effective than repaving. The same trucks, crews, and equipment must be mobilized, but the work covers only part of a street and does not bring the roadway up to modern standards. Over time, this approach accelerates deterioration rather than preventing it.
“You still have to get the same trucks, the same crew,” Hadar said. “You’re laying less asphalt, which means you’re actually getting less bang for your buck. They’re bringing out all the same stuff, but not actually getting the job done.”
The city measures street quality using the Pavement Condition Index, which ranges from 0 for a failed street to 100 for a street in perfect condition. Under the current patch-heavy strategy, Los Angeles projects its index will fall to 56 next year, a 4% drop in a single year. Nearby cities provide a sharp contrast. Santa Monica’s index is 82, West Hollywood’s is 77, and Culver City’s is 74.
Deferring resurfacing also drives up long-term costs. Streets that remain in decent condition can be slurry sealed for roughly $30,000 per mile. Once a street deteriorates further, resurfacing costs rise to about $200,000 per mile. Streets that fall into severe disrepair may require full reconstruction, which can cost up to $1 million per mile. Each year the city delays repaving risks multiplying future costs many times over, not including the millions Los Angeles already pays out annually in pothole-related claims and injury settlements.
Why has the city stopped repaving its streets? The shift appears to be driven by renewed federal attention to accessibility requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act. When a street is repaved, adjacent curb ramps must be upgraded to meet accessibility standards. Many corners in Los Angeles still lack curb ramps entirely, and many existing ramps are decades out of date.
For years, Los Angeles did not upgrade curb ramps when streets were repaved, despite federal guidance dating back to the 1990s and a 2020 memo from the city’s own Bureau of Engineering outlining how compliance should work. That long-standing noncompliance created a massive backlog of accessibility improvements.
Earlier this year, updated federal guidance known as PROWAG clarified accessibility requirements for public rights of way. At that point, the city could no longer repave streets without confronting the scale and cost of its ADA obligations. But rather than funding curb ramp upgrades and coordinating compliance, the city changed course. By reclassifying what would previously have been called resurfacing as maintenance, StreetsLA avoids triggering ADA curb ramp requirements altogether.
The city continues slurry sealing without interruption because federal regulators have explicitly stated that slurry sealing qualifies as maintenance. Since July, more than 200 lane miles have been slurry sealed while full resurfacing has stopped entirely, underscoring how carefully the city has drawn this distinction.
The workaround reflects a deeper problem: Los Angeles does not currently have the funding or structure in place to comply with ADA requirements at scale, and instead of addressing that gap, the city has chosen avoidance.
In fact, LA stands out as an outlier in both how little it raises for street infrastructure and how much it spends on projects. The city spends about $267 per resident on streets and sidewalks, roughly half of what New York City and San Diego spend and about a third of what Chicago, Seattle, and San Francisco invest. At the same time, Los Angeles pays far more per curb ramp than peer cities, often spending $35,000 to $50,000 per corner, or up to $200,000 per intersection. Research by Streets For All shows that cities investing more per capita see safer streets and lower traffic fatality rates, while Los Angeles combines lower overall investment with unusually high per-project costs.
These outcomes reflect deeper structural problems in how Los Angeles manages its streets. Transportation planning and striping fall under LADOT, while paving and sidewalk work are handled by the Bureau of Street Services within Public Works. In most major U.S. cities, a single department manages streets from property line to property line, reducing delays, duplication, and conflicting priorities.
“It’s crazy that there’s one department that paves the street and a different department that stripes the street,” Hadar said. “No other city works that way. One department needs to be responsible for the whole street, from property line to property line.”
In Los Angeles, Public Works governance is also unusually diffuse, with multiple bureaus reporting simultaneously to the Board of Public Works, a director, the Mayor, and City Council. Streets For All has documented how this structure contributes to missed deadlines, unspent funds, and stalled projects even as backlogs continue to grow.
The implications extend beyond accessibility. Measure HLA, passed by voters last year by a nearly 2-to-1 margin, requires the city to implement bus, bike, and pedestrian improvements when streets are repaved. If projects are classified as patching rather than resurfacing, those voter-mandated improvements never trigger.
In at least one case, the city argued that a Hollywood Boulevard project did not require full Measure HLA compliance because it was categorized as large asphalt repair rather than resurfacing. That interpretation was upheld on appeal.
Partial repaving has also introduced safety concerns. Uneven pavement created by patchwork repairs can pose hazards for people biking, using scooters, or relying on mobility devices. In some locations, large asphalt repairs have buckled within a few years, creating new potholes rather than resolving existing ones.
Who ultimately decided to halt repaving remains unclear. What is clear is that the decision followed definitive federal guidance, and the city responded by restructuring its work to avoid triggering legal obligations rather than expanding capacity to meet them. There is also uncertainty around enforcement. Federal oversight of disability rights has been inconsistent, raising questions about whether compliance is being deferred rather than addressed. At the same time, future litigation could force the city to confront years of deferred obligations at once.
Proposed charter reforms would consolidate street construction and maintenance under a single department, guarantee stable street funding through a dedicated share of assessed property values, move the city to a two-year budget cycle with a formal five-year capital improvement plan, and replace the Board of Public Works with a single director accountable for delivery.
For Hadar, the issue comes down to the basics of governance and public safety.
“You can’t not pave your streets,” Hadar said. “It’s the most basic city service.”