South LA

Just this past Wednesday, I wrote about how a pothole of epic proportions had bounced a small child out of his carrier and nearly been his undoing.

There are potholes and then there are POTHOLES.

The MyFigueroa team will be presenting all their images and renderings at the Andrew Norman Hall Orthopaedic Hospital at 5:30 pm on April 9th. Get the event details at the MyFigueroa website. Of course, we'll be Live Streaming at Streetsblog TV. Bookmark our event page now.

"Nobody uses it," Liz told me. "There's dookies in there!"

Every so often, emails show up in my inbox from somewhere within city planning, telling me I need to participate in some survey to help the city decide how to spend its money. Or attend a meeting to discuss how well the department is spending money on particular programs. I’ll admit that I get excited … Continued

I cannot pretend to be an expert on fracking. Not even close. Yet, I can't help the feeling that drilling thousands of feet into the earth, pumping millions of gallons of chemical-laden water -- with many of the chemicals being known carcinogens -- multiple times over several days into the ground in earthquake fault zones can't be great for the environment. Even if that makes me a silly person.

Two new ghost bikes went up in South L.A. and Compton yesterday. One was to commemorate the death last month of Sylvester Henderson, 26, who was hit by the train while crossing the Blue Line tracks at the intersection of Grandee and Century Blvd.

"This chart sums up why South LA consistently gets left behind when funds are divided," reads the post on the Empowerment Congress West Area Neighborhood Development Council's facebook page (referring to the image above).

TONIGHT Sitting in a room full of California journalists and their editors last week as part of my training for a journalism fellowship, I was incredibly surprised to learn that few of them knew that fracking was going on in L.A.'s back yard. The lack of awareness has been of great concern to many of the local environmental organizations because it makes it harder for them to gather support to counter powerful lobbies in favor of the practice. It is one of the reasons representatives from a number of the organizations have gathered this weekend for a California Fracking Summit; they hope to cobble out a common position against regulations proposed by the Department of Oil And Gas (DOGGR) and decide upon strategies that will facilitate their fight. While the summit itself is closed to the public, the festivities of the evening are not.