Streetsblog Los Angeles

I’ve written about how transit could be improved  and sidewalk vending legalized to increase access to healthy food. Before food can get from stores and food trucks and carts to shoppers, it first has to be transported from farms, through distribution chains, to retail sources. This third installment in a short series on transportation and food access considers how we can improve food distribution channels to expand the availability of good, healthy food in the Los Angeles region.

Orange empire

Los Angeles grew up around three discoveries of what the local soil was good for. First, the ground harbored petroleum. Second, and probably more significantly, it was good for growing citrus at a time when a confluence of plant breeding and the completion of transcontinental railroad links with refrigerated cars made it possible to grow fruit here and ship the produce eastwards.  Third – linked to the second by way of picturesque citrus crate labels that advertized a pleasant life in the sun –  the land was good for subdividing.

As a result, the L.A. region boomed first as an agricultural zone and then as a population center.  In 1910 there were 8000 farms in Los Angeles County and the county was the most economically productive ag county in the state, probably number one in the country as well, with 1.7 million orange trees and more than 7000 ‘backyard’ cows not on farms but kept for milk like someone might have a chicken nowadays.

The population of Los Angeles County rose by 1197 percent between 1900-1930, the golden years of local agriculture, followed by a second demographic jump in the 40s and 50s and a third in the 90s. Groves and fields were converted to houses, businesses, asphalt.  Today, there are approximately 90 farms left in L.A. County, now ranked the 28th leading agricultural county in the state. Read more…

Having written about food & transit last week , I want to share some thoughts (and a poll) on street food.  Street and mobile food are important determinants of the food environment in Los Angeles.  They are also critical elements of more vibrant streets. But they have enemies and most of the policy activity in the city and region in recent years has been to restrict rather than support street food. I think street advocates should consider whether and how to push in the opposite direction, for legal and healthy street food.

The rules

Street and mobile food are common in the Los Angeles region, especially in low-income, immigrant neighborhoods. Meals, snacks, drinks and groceries are sold from trucks and  push carts; from  strollers and grocery carts jury-rigged for vending; from grills, tables and tarps temporarily placed along streets and sidewalks; and by vendors carrying food on foot.

Despite its reputation as a hotbed of street food, Los Angeles, is, in fact, the only one of the ten biggest cities in the United States without legal sidewalk vending of food.  Los Angeles Municipal Code Section 42(b) prohibits sale of any products, including food, on sidewalks. “No person, except as otherwise permitted by this section, shall on any sidewalk or street offer for sale, solicit the sale of, announce by any means the availability of, or have in his or her possession, control or custody, whether upon his or her person or upon some other animate or inanimate object, any goods, wares or merchandise which the public may purchase at any time.”

Section 42 (m) of the Municipal Code allows for the “Establishment and Regulation of Special Sidewalk Vending Districts.” Complicated regulations, including a requirement that 20 percent of surrounding landowners and residents sign the application in favor of a new district and assignment of vendors to specified, fixed locations make it difficult to  establish and maintain vending districts. Only one vending zone, in McArthur Park, was ever created, and it failed.

Food trucks operating in the streets are legal under California Vehicle Code section 22455 but often subject to shifting restrictions on parking. Food trucks and sidewalk vendors are also subject to state and county health codes. Read more…

Yesterday afternoon, the Bus Rider’s Union and thirteen allied organizations released “Transit Civil Rights & Economic Survival in Los Angeles: A Case for Federal Intervention in LA Metro,” a report detailing how service cuts and fare hikes have devastated working class families in the past four years.  Since the expiration of a court ordered consent decree which mandated levels of service, Metro slashed 12% of its bus service hours while approving a series of fare increases.

“The tragedy of the MTA policies over the last four years is that they roll back almost all of the transit improvements – namely more buses, more bus lines, and lower fares – that MTA implemented under federal court order in response to the BRU’s civil rights lawsuit and 10-year federal consent decree,” states Barbara Lott-Holand, the co-chair of the Bus Riders Union and a transit rider herself for the last 35 years.

Metro and the BRU are awaiting the results of a Civil Rights Audit conducted by the Federal Transit Administration at the request of the Bus Riders earlier this year.  Only transit agencies in Atlanta and Los Angeles underwent this review in the past year.

A lot of the facts and figures found in the report won’t be new to regular readers of Streetsblog and others familiar with recent Metro policy, but it’s still striking to see some of the figures laid out, showing the cumulative impact of the service cuts and fare hikes that have been a major part of Metro’s bus planning since 2007.  The BRU also rejects Metro’s argument that the cuts are about increasing efficiency noting that Metro’s buses carry more passengers per mile than any bus fleet in America except New York City’s.

The report goes on to argue that the cuts and hikes have a disproportionate impact on struggling minority communities noting the higher rates of unemployment and poverty facing many bus riders.  90% of all bus riders are from minority communities and over 70% of all transit riders are minorities in Los Angeles.  In Los Angeles county alone, African Americans are facing a 19% unemployment rate while Latinos face 14% unemployment. Read more…

Martha Sera likes walking.  A former high school track star, Sera regularly goes for mile-long walks with her husband, father and children, ages two and five.  That Sera has found a way to walk for a living is just a bonus.

Sera is one of a handful of organizers for the City of El Monte Walking Club, an innovative attempt by the city to increase the physical activity of its residents.  Participants in the club show up at an assigned location, either a public park or school, stretch and go for a walk.  Upon completion of the mile walk, they receive a ticket that can be turned in for a prize.  Five tickets earns a pedometer; 15 tickets, a t-shirt.

“You should try and take 10,000 steps a day to have a healthy lifestyle,” Sera notes.  According to her pedometer, Sera takes 1,400 steps per mile.

When I met Sera, she was sitting under a tree with a sign-in sheet for the first of two walking club meetings last Saturday morning at 8:30 at Arceo Park.  After a brief introduction, the two of us took off on a walk around the park, looking for more club members than the handful who had shown up.  An hour later, we were at Columbia Middle School, less than a half mile away for the second meeting.

Every community that’s taken part in the PLACE program, a 2008 public health grant program sponsored by L.A. County to improve communities’ overall health through better transportation planning,  benefits from unintended consequences.  Creating a walking club for adults wasn’t part of the initial PLACE grant from the City of El Monte, but the hundreds of adults and their children who have taken to walking to improve their health because of the program is an unintended, but happy, consequence of their new transportation vision.

The idea for the club is simple.  El Monte residents have a higher-than-average rate of obesity and asthma, and the easiest solution to these related issues is to increase their activity.  More than two-thirds (66.8%) of adults in El Monte were either obese or overweight in 2007, more than that of adults in LA County (58.1%) and the state as a whole (61.3%.)  Nearly half (47.7%) of El Monte’s children are either obese or overweight.  On top of that, 9.8% of adults in El Monte were diagnosed with asthma compared to 6.5% of adults in Los Angeles County. In that same year, 4.1% of adults and children in both the El Monte Health District and LA County as a whole had been diagnosed with chronic respiratory conditions.

While attendance at the park was sparse this particular weekend, Sera had more success at Columbia Middle School.  More than 60 participants, many of them parents with their children, attended one of the three “meetings” over the course of the week.  Saturdays tend to be more lightly attended, so we had two parent-child combos, both of whom first heard about the program through the school.  At the park, walkers could walk around the park or on the Arceo Walk route (more on that later) that stretches east from the Park to Santa Anita Boulevard and back.  At Columbia, they walk on a track. Read more…

You get what you pay for.  Or at least that is what the soda industry thought when it hired a University of Alabama “scientist” to do its bidding, questioning the incontrovertible link between soda and obesity.  I thought being a scientist meant abiding by an ethical code to interpret research data objectively and free of bias.

Apparently I was wrong.

Just watching the excellent Consumer Watchdog segment aired September 1st on ABC News confirmed for me what I had always suspected about researchers who take money from the soda industry and use the patina of their university affiliation to veil their paycheck-inspired research findings.  The University of Alabama must be very proud to have David Allison, AKA Joe Cola, on its faculty.

What’s refreshing in a Madison Avenue soda ad sort of way about this mainstream media piece is it is just that.  A mainstream media piece on a news broadcast not known for its heavy lifting.  And what’s more ABC News is where most Americans get their news.  Scratch that.  Most Americans get their news from Jon Stewart and The Daily Show, but ABC is an actual news broadcast rather than a late night comedy hour.  What moved the network to run the piece.  Who knows?  Perhaps the boys and girls at ABC News were watching Mad Men and had a sudden pang of guilt about the industry spokesman statements they too often take as gospel. Read more…

(Tanya Snyder at Capitol Hill Streetsblog covered the report from a national standpoint, her article is here.)

It’s the stuff of nightmares.  As people grow older, they face the fear that as their body ages, they will have fewer and fewer options to help them get from one place to another.  Denied this basic right, they eventually find themselves isolated in their homes, with few options to interact with other people on a daily basis.  According to a new report from Transportation for America, by 2015 over 15.5 million people over the age of 65, including 17% of senior Angelenos, will face this dilemma.

Have You Noticed How Far You Have To Go To Get To A Supermarket? from anne@freewaves.org on Vimeo.

If you’ve ridden a Metro bus in Greater Los Angeles, you’ve seen them.  Those weird tv’s which either seem to be stuck at a blasting volume or completely muted, playing a mix of mind numbing trivia, local public interest news, or advertisements.  Purchasing some time on TransitTV is a pretty cost effective way to get out a message, when you consider that 2 million people ride Metro buses every day.  But most Metro riders find the televisions to be a waste of space at best, noise pollution at worst.

Thanks to a new art video series, “Out the Window” is seeking to change that.  Instead of streaming the odd mix of paid programming, Transit TV will devote some time to streaming video art.

From June 13 through the 17th, the films will run once an hour, but on the 18th and 19th, the films will run for 45 out of every 60 minutes.  All of the showings on Transit TV are being donated by the company.

The videos were produced by a team of 75 local high school students working with artists and teachers at Echo Park Film Center and with Public Matters at East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy and Pilipino Workers Center; coordinated by Freewaves with the conceptual and technical direction of UCLA REMAP.

Heidi Zeller, with Freewaves, explains how the video series is actually an interactive art experience. “Out the Window adds a little something different to the bus riding experience in LA. Some of the videos share poetic visions of the city while others offer insightful critiques. All of them end with questions that viewers can respond to via text. We want to get a citywide dialogue going! What are the possibilities for LA? To participate in this conversation just ride the bus armed with a cell phone. Answers will be posted on our blog.”

The above video is part of a series called “Have You Noticed” which has posted three videos to Vimeo already.  Students from the East Los Angeles Renaissance Academy created the series with Public Matters around healthy food access issues in their community?  As you can see, the videos aren’t heavy on conversation, but focus the viewers attention on the screens with some reading of printed text and a donated by compelling soundtrack. Read more…

What’s a food desert?  When I hear the term I think of old Road Runner cartoons or a barren landscape of rocks and sun with a Joshua tree or cactus off in the distance.  It’s not the landscape many Angelenos are currently seeing of green hills, lush full trees and wildflowers blooming after a winter that finally freed the state of its drought designation.

But a food desert is also not my image of the sun beating down on the arid land in Twenty Nine Palms or Mojave.  In reality it is a common sight here in Los Angeles County.  Often a neighborhood and sometimes an entire city, a food desert is a place where you can’t easily find healthy foods because there is little to be had.  The good stuff’s not there for a variety of reasons including an absence of stores that carry quality fresh fruit and vegetables at a fair price.

If you want to find the food deserts in L.A. just follow the trash in any of the County’s junk food districts.  You can find the desert next to or even inside many South LA convenience stores or at the To Go window at a fast food restaurant in a Baldwin Park or San Fernando mini mall.  The soda bottles, candy wrappers, Styrofoam containers and empty chip bags are the telltale signs of the food desert.  Like the tumbleweed, shell casings and tin cans of the real desert, junk food containers betray the food wasteland.  And they are one big reason why more and more Angelenos young and old alike are struggling today with obesity and diabetes.

(It would be tempting to say that food deserts are brought to you and caused by the people who brought you “The Real Thing.”  And in many ways they are, because soda is often the cash cow in fast food establishments.  But Coke, Pepsi and Sunkist don’t just want to sell their products in lieu of food in the food desert.  They of course want to sell their junk everywhere.) Read more…

Streetsblog readers are likely at least somewhat familiar with many of the  connections between health and transportation; conference speakers explored those connections, with an emphasis on their impacts on underserved communities of color. This equity/transportation/health dialog was then tied into calls for action on local, state and federal campaigns.

After an introduction from CPEHN’s Ruben Cantu, speakers got underway with a presentation from TransForm‘s Stuart Cohen. TransForm is the kind of San Francisco Bay Area group that Los Angeles’ livability advocates should be jealous of - and should emulate. TransForm advocates for transit, walking, biking – focusing from local to regional to statewide. Cohen outlined trasportation/health connections, including somewhat familiar statistics: rising rates of obesity nationwide, declining rates of walking and biking to school. And some not as familiar: inadequate transit as a healthcare access issue (folks miss their clinic appointments when it’s difficult to walk or take transit to get there – more info here.)

Cohen expressed optimism over current initiatives from the Great Communities Collaborative to SB375 (CA’s greenhouse gas legislation), but stressed that strong coalitions, centered on health and equity, will be critical to success. Cohen also stressed that respected health professionals can be key in selling livability: when an environmentalist testifies about greenhouse gases, it’s generally not as effective as when a physician or nurse testifies about childhood obesity.

Next was a “panel of fierce women” (Ohland’s description) featuring Los Angeles based efforts toward transportation, equity and health – all of which have been covered at L.A. Streetsblog. Panelists included: Read more…