On a hot Saturday evening, dozens of Westside residents walked into a Westchester pole dance studio to talk about zoning. That alone might count as a small victory for civic engagement.
Last Saturday, Mar Vista Voice partnered with LA City Planning, Lee Andrews Group and Office of: Office to host a community meeting about Missing Middle LA, the City’s effort to make it easier to build smaller, neighborhood-scale housing such as ADUs, duplexes, townhomes, small-lot homes and starter homes. The goal was to bring together people who don’t necessarily agree about housing and give them a chance to tell the City what they think.
The room at Sadie’s Studio was intentionally mixed. We invited renters and homeowners, tenant organizers and housing advocates, neighborhood councils, pro-housing organizations and residents with a wide range of views about development. Some wanted substantially more housing, while others were concerned about neighborhood design and change. Still others questioned whether Missing Middle does enough to address LA’s much more urgent need for deeply affordable and social housing.
Housing debates on the Westside are often flattened into a predictable fight between people who want more development and homeowners who want nothing to change, but the conversations Saturday were considerably more nuanced. The event was the largest of five community meetings held as part of the Missing Middle community engagement process, and at least one participant noted that the discussion challenged some of their own expectations about the Westside.
After a presentation from City Planning, attendees rotated through small-group discussions about different aspects of the proposals. Tenant advocates raised concerns about affordability and tenant protections. Other participants argued that Los Angeles simply needs far more homes, while some focused on whether new housing could be designed to create more interaction among neighbors. The conversations were engaged enough that facilitators repeatedly had to push groups to move on to the next station.
The evening was also an experiment in spicing up civic engagement. Sadie’s donated the space, and we hired a local street vendor through the Westside Vendor Buyout to provide food. Instead of spending the entire time sitting through presentations and formal public comment, people moved around, ate, talked and offered their perspectives on housing. One attendee jokingly described the evening as a “fever dream” of pink lights, housing policy, aguas frescas, a Chihuahua, tenant organizers and City planners.
For Mar Vista Voice, that may have been the most important takeaway. The Westside is not one political constituency with one opinion about housing, and community engagement does not have to be dominated by the people who already know how to navigate City Hall. Saturday night put people with genuinely different priorities in the same room and gave them a chance to talk directly to one another and to the people shaping City policy. We hope to create a lot more spaces like that. Stay tuned!
