Identifying and Addressing Incompatible Land Uses in South Los Angeles

Industrial and manufacturing land uses are often important sources of local employment in many communities, but can also present a host of negative issues including unsafe levels of air pollution, noise, physical hazards, and traffic and are also often disproportionately located in low-income communities of color.  Although the California Air Resources Board recommends separating polluting sites from sensitive land uses, zoning provisions and land use plans often allow these industrial sites to locate near homes. Community Health Councils (CHC), a non-profit community-based organization in South Los Angeles, worked with Neighborhood Councils, community residents, and other organizations to identify, and create solutions to, predominant incompatible land uses in South Los Angeles. CHC held a series of workshops on the actively evolving South Los Angeles (SLA) and Southeast Los Angeles (SELA) Community Plans. These workshops increased residents’ land use proficiency and enabled community identification of problematic land uses the Community Plans should address. This bottom-up approach creates a more thorough assessment of incompatible land uses that pose a health risk or nuisances to nearby homes, schools, or community centers than relying on publicly available sources alone due to disjointed agency regulation as well as gaps in the regulatory structure. State laws, for example, often fail to regulate small businesses that may individually pose limited risk but collectively emit significant pollution when clustered together. Bottom-up analysis also enables detection of public health nuisances, including noise and visual pollution, that often concentrate in under-resourced areas. After determining that automotive uses, recycling centers, manufacturing uses, and oil drilling are among the areas’ prevalent incompatible land uses, community members in conjunction with CHC policy analysts generated land use policy recommendations for the Community Plans. In communities overburdened by incompatible land uses, improving land use policy is necessary step for improving the areas’ health and welfare.