Los Angeles is often described as a concrete jungle, a city shaped by asphalt, parking lots and other harsh landscapes. Now, for the first time, researchers have mapped that concrete in detail and say much of it doesn’t need to be there.
A new analysis shows that about 44 percent of Los Angeles County’s 312,000 acres of pavement may not be essential for roads, sidewalks or parking lots and could be reconsidered.
The report, DepaveLA, is the first parcel-level analysis to map all paved surfaces in LA County and to distinguish streets, sidewalks, private property and other areas. The researchers divided the entire pavement into “core” and “non-core” uses. A street, for example, is core. They then combined that map with data on heat, flooding and trees, creating what they intend to be a new framework for understanding where removing concrete and asphalt could make the biggest difference to people’s health and the climate.
Principal Brad Rumble visits an area where students are restoring natural habitat at Esperanza Elementary. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
Paved surfaces become hotter than planted surfaces, absorbing and radiating the sun’s energy rather than converting it into plant growth, which in turn creates shade. Hotter areas also create more ozone smog. Greener areas are known to bring people psychological relief as well.
The authors are the nonprofit Accelerate Resilience LA, founded by Andy Lipkis, who also founded TreePeople, the tree-planting organization in Los Angeles, and Hyphae Design Laboratory, a nonprofit working to bridge health and the built environment.
What surprised them most, said Hyphae founder Brent Bucknum, was seeing where the pavement was concentrated. Almost 70% of what they considered non-core pavement is on private property.
Rather than a complete removal of the sidewalk, the report highlights small changes that could add up.
The greatest potential they found was in parking lots, especially large, privately owned commercial and industrial lots. Redesigning the 90-degree sloped parking lot could save up to 1,600 acres, making room for trees and stormwater capture without reducing the number of parking spaces.
The parking lots, Bucknum said, are one of the clearest examples of how excess pavement has become accepted, even as it makes daily life worse for residents.
Aerial view of the hardscpe area inside Pershing Square in Los Angeles. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“I’m often amazed — I’ll be driving into a parking lot and there’s honking, bumper to bumper, you’re in this sweltering heat trying to get out of the grocery store,” he said. “And the reality is that we can make it much more beautiful with more thoughtful design.”
Ben Stapleton, executive director of the US Green Building Council California, pointed to parking requirements that have long tied the number of spaces to a building’s size and use.
“The natural solution was to pave things over, because it’s cheaper, it’s less maintenance,” he said. “It’s not very expensive, especially asphalt.”
Residential properties, including apartment complexes, are another place with potential.
If every residential parcel were to clear a 6-by-6-foot tree in their yard, Bucknum said, it would amount to 1,530 acres of pavement removed while, on average, reducing patio space by 3 percent.
Emily Tyrer, director of green infrastructure at TreePeople, said paving is expanding into residential yards.
“What we’re seeing is a lot of residential yards are moving to more paving and less turf,” she said. “Instead of replacing it with shade trees and native plantings and low-water plants, they’re paving.”
In many cases, she said, homeowners are responding to drought messages and rising water costs.
A person walks their dog past native plants and flowers planted along the Merced Avenue Greenway in South El Monte, where they rethink how urban infrastructure can simultaneously serve pedestrians, bicyclists and drivers while providing essential environmental benefits. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
“Paving reduces water use and can lower people’s water bills,” Tyrer said. “But it comes with trade-offs.”
The report also identifies schools as places where there could be less concrete or asphalt. On average, school campuses in LA County are about 40% covered with pavement, leaving students exposed to extreme heat.
At Esperanza Elementary School near downtown Los Angeles, the campus was “just a sea of asphalt,” said Tori Kjer, executive director of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Land Trust, which is overseeing a transformation at the school. The kids ran on a surface that could reach over 120 degrees on hot days.
It will soon have new California native plants and shade trees, stormwater capture features, grassy lawns, natural play features, outdoor classrooms and more.
Many of the school’s families live in small apartments.
“People don’t have any open space,” Kjer said. “They leave their house and are basically just on concrete streets and sidewalks.” Once the asphalt is removed and the trees go in and the rainwater is channeled, it will be a “place for quiet, imaginative play and active play.”
The idea for the Depave report grew out of years of work on tree planting and green infrastructure projects that repeatedly hit the same roadblock.
Landscaping installation is currently underway at Esperanza Elementary in Los Angeles. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
On project after project, pavement emerged as a central issue, according to Bucknum. “We tried to plant trees, but so much of the city is paved over there was nowhere to put them,” he said.
The team realized they needed better data to understand the problem, down to the block and neighborhood scale. Something more sophisticated than what is pavement and what is trees.
“This is a first step,” said Devon Provo, senior manager, program planning and alignment at Accelerate Resilience LA “It’s an opportunity assessment, not a prescriptive plan for what should be 100 percent eliminated.”
Olivier Sommerhalder, principal and global sustainability leader at design and planning firm Gensler, pointed out that businesses that paid the money to open something would need an edge to replace it.
“There are no incentives for property owners to reduce hardscape,” Sommerhalder said. “The City is not incentivizing the removal of parking to mitigate urban heat hotspots.”
Sommerhalder said sustainability is increasingly part of design conversations with clients, particularly as tenants ask about comfort and environmental performance. But without policies or financial incentives, he said, surface parking often remains untouched until redevelopment.
This innovative 1.1-mile greenway in South El Monte not only provides safe and accessible pathways for walking and biking, but also serves as a sustainable approach to stormwater management, habitat restoration and urban heat reduction. (Allen J. Schaben/Los Angeles Times)
As for what an incentive might look like, “we think a really good analogy is the sod replacement program,” Bucknum said, referring to the rebate programs that helped move Southern California away from water-intensive turf. “People didn’t know there were other options until there was education and financial support.”
It’s important to consider what’s under the pavement, said Carlos Moran, executive director of North East Trees, especially in areas with an industrial history.
In some neighborhoods, he said, the paver caps have contaminated soil that cannot be safely disturbed. “We can’t just rip it out.”
But he agreed it was too much pavement. “The hottest blocks in Los Angeles aren’t just missing trees,” he said. “They are overbuilt with asphalt.”
The purpose of the report, Provo said, is to give Angelenos and policymakers a common starting point for conversation.
“This data is relevant to anyone who wants to have a say in reimagining the future of Los Angeles to be cooler, healthier and more vibrant,” Provo said.
“My hope is that it will open the eyes of people who are building projects who may not have ever even thought about pavement in this way,” Stapleton said. “Once you learn something, you don’t unlearn it.”
By reframing pavement as a design choice rather than a default, Stapleton believes the analysis could lead developers and property owners to rethink how much concrete their projects really need and what they could gain by replacing it.
This story originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.