Central City United Coalition (CCU) calls for immediate action to pass the DTLA 2040 Community Plan

The story of Downtown Los Angeles is a “tale of two cities” – one where millionaire developers work hand in hand with City Hall to build luxury towers and turn insatiable profits, and another where local community members struggle to stay housed, secure a livable wage, meet basic everyday needs, and protect and sustain their neighborhoods.  Central City United (CCU) Coalition is a multi-racial, cross-neighborhood coalition representing low income stakeholders from Skid Row, Chinatown, and Little Tokyo who have been fighting for their right to self-determination for generations.  For years our communities have advocated for a DTLA 2040 community plan that seeks to right the wrongs of the past and codify in land use policies and programs a progressive vision for Downtown that centers its most vulnerable communities. Despite the multiple crises our City faces, we call on the Chair of the Planning and Land Use Management Committee (PLUM) of the Council, Marqueece Harris Dawson, to agendize the DTLA 2040 plan, center the needs of our Black, Brown and Asian communities, and attempt to rebuild trust with our City government.

Our communities have been subject to decades of displacement, redlining, gentrification and criminalization through racist land use and economic policies.  Last month, a leaked recording of Downtown councilmembers Kevin de Leon and Gil Cedillo, (along with Council President Nury Martinez, and LA County Labor Federation President Ron Herrera - both of whom have since resigned) exposed them conspiring to undermine generations of cross-racial power building, reduce the voting power of renters, and subvert the redistricting process.  The conversation was punctuated by overtly discriminatory language mocking Black, LGBTQ, Indigenous, Asian, and Armenian communities. The recording is abhorrent and we join our allies in condemning all the participants.  However, the contempt and disregard evident in the recording is, in some ways, not surprising to those of us living in the ‘other’ City.  For years now a series of scandals fueled by corruption, lack of accountability, and power grabbing have resulted in a vacuum of political leadership in the heart of Los Angeles. This is not the first time our elected officials have let us down.

In response, we call on the rest of our City Council to center the needs and voices of Black, Brown, Asian, Indigenous, worker, immigrant, LGBTQ, low-income, renter, and houseless Angelenos. While Kevin De Leon and Gil Cedillo’s districts overlapped with the majority of the DTLA 2040 plan area, this policy framework was never about them. DTLA 2040 is a historic opportunity to confront the deep harms of past racist planning practices and reorient planning around equity, inclusion, and racial justice. That’s why we didn’t wait for council offices to tell us what the plan should say or do. Instead, we worked with the true experts, the true community builders: the residents, entrepreneurs and neighborhood leaders of Skid Row, Chinatown and Little Tokyo. Kevin de Leon and Gil Cedillo didn’t draft our People’s Plan vision for DTLA and they don’t embody the values that drive our vision. We continue to work on the issues that are so much more important than the egos of failed leaders:  preventing homelessness, stabilizing our frontline families, protecting mom-and-pop immigrant owned small businesses from the recession, and increasing the supply of much needed deeply affordable housing.  CCU and our community allies have been working for years to update the DTLA 2040 community plan which will define the growth and development of all of our Downtown neighborhoods.   

Recognizing the importance of this process and the need to bring together our collective community power, the South East Asian Community Alliance, Little Tokyo Service Center, and the Los Angeles Community Action Network came together with experts from Public Counsel to create CCU in 2018.  Our goal is to uplift the needs and priorities of community members and small businesses in Chinatown, Little Tokyo, and Skid Row. Holding the trauma of previous harmful plans and policies, we took the work into our own hands and created a People’s Plan driven by the expertise and centering the priorities of low-income DTLA residents. We then worked diligently with the Planning Department to embed these priorities into city policy.  We are proud to say that our decades of organizing and community planning, along with our extensive engagement in this process, have resulted in a true community plan – one that will build more affordable housing, establish a community benefits program, and create a racial equity analysis for future land use and zoning.

DTLA 2040, which is currently awaiting a hearing in the PLUM committee of the Los Angeles City Council, is a tangible step towards reconciliation of these injustices and rebuilding of that trust. It will codify land use policies and programs which reflect a progressive vision for Downtown.   It is a vision which has been developed in close collaboration with the Downtown’s most vulnerable communities.  While the current draft includes many important policies and standards that are directly responsive to low-income community needs, the Plan can, and must, go even further. Those improvements to the plan can only happen by going forward to a public hearing. We call our City Council to be courageous and principled enough to ensure that the solutions advanced by those of us who have been most impacted by racist, classist, and other discriminatory policies, are the solutions they enact with urgency in the heart of our City.