The City of Los Angeles recently announced plans to “renovate” the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the world-famous 1.3-mile section of Hollywood Boulevard centered on the Chinese Theater. Pretty much every tourist who first visits Los Angeles walks along Hollywood Boulevard trying to figure out who Charles Bickford was (hint: great character actor with two stars, one for movies and one for TV, but largely forgotten except for folks like me who love classic films and Turner Classic Movies). And all stop in the Chinese Theater Courtyard to measure their shoes against John Wayne’s boot prints (surprise: he wore a size 6 boot!).
I first explored the Walk of Fame when I moved to LA in the mid-70s. Back then, it was a dirty but exhilarating cacophony of tourists, hookers, druggies, failed actors, Hare Krishna, and insane traffic, with it’s parade of cruisers on weekend nights. My pals and I would go there at night to catch a movie, have chocolate sundaes at the long-gone CC Browns Ice Cream, and enjoy the scene before going west for music at the Roxy and Whiskey on the Sunset Strip. In the mid-80s I owned a house in the Hollywood Hills right above Hollywood Boulevard and would take my kids to see movies like Tremors and Honey I Shrunk the Kids at the Chinese, Pacific, and Egyptian Theaters. After moving to Seattle in the ’90s, I’d often stay at the Rosevelt or W Hotels on Hollywood Boulevard when I came back on business trips. As chaotic as it was, it was fun and I never felt unsafe. But, as Bob Dylan put it, Things Have Changed:
“The Hollywood Walk of Fame has become overrun with homelessness and violent crime, leaving tourists and locals feeling unsafe. The iconic LA landmark, once the epitome of glitz and glamour, is disappointing visitors with its dirty sidewalks and repulsing locals who have experienced violent attacks.”
The City of LA solution is to “rejuvenate the iconic strip’s sparkle with a much-needed renovation including wider sidewalks and more trees.” This is a classic government response to an Urban Doom Loop that rarely works. Think about it: wider sidewalks provide more room for more homeless and more trees are likely to make folks feel less safe as there will be more places for bad guys, real or imagined, to hide. Still, cities find this kind of hardscape improvement irresistible as it gives the appearance of doing something (“the Do Something Disease”), while providing photo ops for politicians at ground-breaking and ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Examples are legion.
- The basic “improve the hardscape” concept is a classic progressive ideal (as in early-20th-Century progressive, not today’s progressives): people are essentially good so it must be the environment they’re forced to live in that creates problems. This led to a cascade of federal laws and programs, starting with the New Deal era Housing Authority Act of 1937 to build public housing, the Housing Act of 1949 that brought us wholesale slum clearance and urban renewal (more properly termed “urban removal”), the Housing and Community Development Act of 1964 that created HUD, the Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 that established Section 8 housing, the Urban Development Action Grant (UDAG) program started in 1977, the 1987 McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act that setup the Continuum of Care (CoC) system, and so on.
- When I was Economic Development / Grants Coordinator for the City of Lynwood, CA in the late ’70s, the “white flight” following the 1965 Civil Unrest in adjacent Watts left the City with almost no retail and lots of vacant buildings like closed Montgomery Wards and Sears stores. Even with large redevelopment subsidies, I was mostly unsuccessful in attracting new retail, but I wrote many grants for hardscape improvements, including bike lanes; renovating the City’s indoor Olympic-sized pool, a closed relic of the glory days of the 50s and unused because the City lacked the funding to hire lifeguards; and new restrooms to replace the closed ones in the City parks. The last was my favorite; we had a big ribbon-cutting on a Friday, and by Monday, the new restrooms were so badly vandalized that the restrooms had to be closed again. Just before I left for a new job, we got a new City Manager who thought the solution was to adopt retail boulevard design guidelines based on the then-popular Marin County weathered wood storefronts, but he was fired before implementing this bit of hardscape lunacy.
- From 1981 to 1991, I was Redevelopment Manager for the nearby City of Inglewood, which also had lost most retail due to white flight. Before I arrived, the City had created storefront design easements along downtown streets and paid for the installation of blue awnings for no apparent reason other than that the City Manager liked them. When I assumed the position, I found blocks of vacant storefronts, second-hand stores, storefront churches, etc., with dilapidated and torn blue awnings! Among the many hopeless projects I was given were finding a new retailer to take over a vacant department store that the City had previously bought in hopes of keeping the tenant operating; propping up the City’s last two car dealers, Cadillac and Porsche, before they fled; and trying to convince Circuit City to open up a store on free city land (I was told by their national real estate manager that Inglewood “didn’t have the right demographics”). I ended up working on many useless streetscape projects and loan/grant programs for imaginary retail users. I did manage to negotiate a deal for the second Price Club (forerunner of Costco) in the LA area on land we condemned and sold for almost nothing, but had to relocate hundreds of low-income African American families and demolish their housing in the process (in the spirit of urban renewal, “one must break a few eggs to make an omelet”).
Since 1993, S + A has written many funded economic development, community development, and redevelopment grants, mostly for cities. Taking us back to the top of this post, about 25 years ago we wrote a funded $4M HUD grant for the City of LA to build the parking structure under the then-proposed Hollywood Highland Shopping Center adjacent to the Chinese Theater and Walk of Fame. The Shopping Center was a much-ballyhooed project, as it sits above a B-Line Metro Station, and was one of the first large-scale transit oriented development (TOD) in LA. The planners and politicians, however, failed to take into account who actually takes subways in LA— mostly moderate- and low-income workers, since the city remains almost entirely car-dependent. Few affluent folks are going to take the Metro to a random shopping center, as it’s much easier, faster, and safer to drive. Then along came rampant homelessness, organized shoplifting, and street violence, with COVID being the final straw. The Hollywood and Highland Shopping Center was vacant for three years until a private equity outfit bought it and spent $100M to renovate it (only in LA could a 20-year-old, massively-subsidized shopping center need renovation).
Perhaps the now-reopened and renamed Ovation Hollywood will be bolstered by the Walk of Fame renovation, but I doubt it— homelessness and crime continue to grow and Metro ridership is still only 80% of what it was in 2019. And the Los Angeles Times recently reported: “With crime up and ridership down, Metro struggles to move homeless people off trains”. Would you spend over an hour taking the Metro from Santa Monica via DTLA to get to Ovation Hollywood for some shopping and a movie? Quite an urban adventure, especially at night, and not for the faint of heart.
The good news for you grant-seekers and us grant-writers is that there will soon be a flood of new federal, state, local, and foundation grant programs to tackle Urban Doom Loops in LA and other cities, large and small. Put on sunscreen and wax your board, as it will be a grant Surfin’ Safari right after the 2024 election, no matter who wins.