Eyes on the Street: Road Widening in Downtown L.A.

Zombie road widening - that would be illegal for California cities to require today - still plagues downtown L.A.

4:27 PM PDT on March 26, 2025

The city required new high-rise housing to widen this portion of Olympic Boulevard. Photos by Joe Linton

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Construction is winding down for Olympic + Hill, a 54-story 685-apartment residential tower at the corner of, you guessed it, Olympic Boulevard and Hill Street in downtown Los Angeles. 2024 coverage at Urbanize notes that at approximately 593 feet tall, the building will rank among the city's tallest residential buildings.

And it's among the latest victims of L.A. City's ubiquitous harmful road widening.

The 54-story building is so tall that it is difficult to get the building and the street spot-widening in the same photo.

When a private developer builds hundreds of housing units (even in L.A.'s dense urban core, even during a housing crisis) the city makes sure that the surrounding streets are just a little more dangerous. The city requires that many new developments widen adjacent street/s, called spot-widening or street dedication.

Mark-up of photo showing where the city required new development to widen Olympic Boulevard

Olympic + Hill widened Olympic Boulevard by about 12 feet. This block of Olympic had a 60 foot roadway; now it's about 72 feet wide.

The roadway width appears to be in excess of the city's Mobility Plan and street standards, which call for only 70 feet of roadway there. The unsurprising corollary of that is that the sidewalks are sub-standard, short of the two 15-foot sidewalks designated in they city's plan/standards.

At the direction of the city council, the city recently reformed its road widening requirements, eliminating a lot of city-mandated road widening.

(The city's revised procedure does not apply to projects already in the approvals pipeline, which means widenings mandated more than a decade ago will continue. It also doesn't apply the city's own road widening projects, to bridges, parks, libraries, bike/walk paths, etc. It doesn't apply to other public works: Metro projects, Caltrans projects, schools, etc.)

Also a recent state law essentially made it illegal for cities to require road widening for new housing developments.

But this downtown L.A. tower was already under construction when the city's and state's new rules took effect.

Imagine what could be in front of that building, instead of a dozen feet of hot asphalt. A wide sidewalk? Street trees? Rain gardens? A mini-plaza? A sidewalk art installation?