 Welcome, everybody. My name is Kate Orff, and I'm the Director of the Urban Design Program here at Columbia. I have the pleasure of introducing Elizabeth Timmy and Helen Larn of LA Mass, a nonprofit urban design organization based in Los Angeles that helps lower income and underserved communities shape their future through policy and architecture. They see urban design as a civic duty. They envision a world where city growth is equitable and self-directed, where the best local solutions are brought to a city-wide scale. LA Mass's work goes beyond beautification, focusing on low-cost, high-community value projects that bring council members together with citizens and small business owners to make neighborhoods safer, more functional, and to create places where inhabitants can kind of come together and feel proud of their environs. They were recipients of the Curbed Groundbreakers Award in 2017 and an Emerging Voices Award from the Architecture League in 2018. And they are pragmatic idealists who are working towards a Los Angeles that is inclusive, progressive, and equitable. So a little bit more about them individually. Elizabeth is a third generation architect born in Houston. You might sense that from her accent and raised in Los Angeles. And she saw a need for design approach to be integrated early on in public projects and in civic planning. Helen is an LA native raised in Frogtown by a working class first generation Chinese family. And she's passionate about strategies that minimize displacement and pressures that come with gentrification. So together, they and the group at LA Mass ensure that projects are artfully conceived, that they critically engage systemic challenges, and that they are deeply grounded in local need. So on behalf of the entire urban design faculty, particularly our fall semester faculty team, we are so thrilled to welcome Elizabeth and Helen to GSAP and we're excited to learn more about your thoughtful and engaged work. Welcome. Thank you so much for that generous introduction. I wish we can bring you around everywhere we go in Los Angeles. For you, someone we think of as incredibly, like sets the bar for thoughtfulness, to call us thoughtful is an honor. So LA Mass in a nutshell is an urban design nonprofit organization. And we are really passionate about using our expertise to help communities shape their own growth. And our work is possible because we have an amazing team of people who are passionate about our mission statement and who reflect the diversity of Los Angeles. They come from different backgrounds in terms of community engagement, public policy, urban planning, architecture, design, construction. Lots of stuff. This is them. We miss them. And our work and our approach and our projects are a reflection of our personal sensibilities and that I am an architect. I'm trained as an architect. And Helen has a background in policy and planning. And so this overlap between both of our expertise says is, sorry, I just saw a former mentor. And I was very excited, is a reflection of where we think that we can establish and create impact. And the impact that we want to create is focused on lower income, underserved communities that traditionally have been disenfranchised. This photo is of the L.A. River. Yes, L.A. has a river. It is lined with conch creek. And this part of here. Not here. This is the natural section. Except for this portion, which is based right outside of where our office is in Frogtown, where I also had the honor of growing up. And as was mentioned, we have this kind of two-part mission and vision. For us, the idea that we do these kind of pilot projects to serve as case studies or models for growth that are local, the second part of that is that we take a lot of informality in Los Angeles. And we use that as a way to, or we elevate that informality. And we say this is a scalable solution that's citywide, or should be citywide. And we love to call ourselves intermediaries between political will, political capital, and community needs and values. Traditionally in Los Angeles, there's a very top-down concept of planning. And L.A. was a city that was planned, executed, and implemented by and behalf and for dead white men. Sorry, I tilted my head down with emphasis there. But the majority of Los Angeles residents are living in a city that wasn't planned for them or with them. And our zoning code the last time it was updated was in the 40s. So that means that our city and how we grow and what we can do and what's feasible is governed by lots of rules. And that has a lot of, the impact of that is that there's a lot of residual space in the city. So there are these vestiges of kind of planning processes. And that's like 70, 500 miles of sidewalk that's not used or defined. And in terms of private property, we have over half a million single family properties which kind of reflect the mindset of Los Angeles of being very car-centric and dominated by the single family neighborhood. And our approach, our projects, our process is really because we see all of these neighborhoods and communities throughout the city as equal. And we think that equality is something where you don't give everyone the same thing. Rather, you give people resources and tools to be on the same playing field. And, but that is a challenge because just in the sidewalks alone, the street and the sidewalk, there are lots of agencies that govern that right of way as you can see from this slide. That results in a lot of bureaucracy which unfortunately is what we work through because we often get hired by city agencies. We work with government partners. Our projects are not outright gorilla. No, we're pretty sincere and intense about doing everything through a process that is, it may not be scalable, but it's something anyone could do. And the context in which we work is that Los Angeles has a weak mayor, strong city council system. This is our mayor of Los Angeles who- Helen's former boss. My former boss. She's not gonna say anything mean about him. And he has to work with 15 council members, which is the highest paid city council district in the nation. And each of these individual council members have over two dozen staff members. So working in the city means you gotta have, not only have the mayors support, but you also have to get your local council member to be supportive. One of, so what is like, what is the salary of one of these council members? Just shy of $200,000. And then didn't you say you met a mayor from a different city that made less than that? Some mayors get like $20,000 in smaller cities. So just the scale of that is just so different. But it means that there is a lot of governance in Los Angeles for good or bad. So the way that we feel we can have impact in this landscape that's highly bureaucratic and overly planned and a bit anemic and cultural space is we have three areas of work that we are focusing on because we feel we can have the ability to reshape use and to create a formal process for informality. So the first area of work is our work in alternative housing. And that's specifically because in California, over a fifth of our nation's homeless population is in California. LA is one of the most unaffordable places to live relative to wages. And this is the photo of Frogtown, which when I was growing up was a working class immigrant family where people were like my parents were able to afford to buy a home. Today, many of these properties will be bought for $600,000, $700,000 flip and sold for a million dollars. And this is just a stone's throw from downtown from Dodger Stadium. And in this neighborhood, which is adjacent to LA River, this is where our office is based. And this is the climate in which we started working five years ago when a neighborhood like this that was working class started to transition. And we were asked at that time to do a 10 month long engagement process with the community. So that the community could have a voice in what was going to be developed and invested in as the neighborhood gentrified. Inevitably so. So we called this Ferturo the Frogtown to reflect the majority of the stakeholders who spoke Spanish. Look at how arrogant we are. We put a little like highlighted place. And what we saw was that we wanted to shape zoning policy in this area, but we also wanted to try something different with community engagement. To engage people who would never go to a meeting, didn't understand what zoning was, didn't understand the process. And we wanted to meet people, meet community members where they were. But we also wanted to break down the processes. We didn't want to assume people knew what the entitlement process was, what zoning is, what Q conditions are. So we unpacked what were kind of the possibilities, the process, and then asked community members. All right, can you go back really quick. So we had, this is Mott Smith. We had a developer facilitate this process because we wanted it to be grounded in what was possible. And the result of this was a different type of report, a report that actually didn't actually try to create consensus, but reflected the diversity of opinions, of the values, the fears, the aspirations for community members who know that change is gonna happen. So if a developer were to pick this up, they would get a sense of these are the priorities of community members. This is the history. This is the fear because of imminent domain of Dodger Stadium 50 years ago. And as a side note in Tabula Plana, which is in your library, I wrote about the fallacies that we went through because we said we were neutral and we created some divisions that didn't necessarily exist. But something that came out of that from us, for us that was really powerful, is that everyone wanted affordable housing or they wanted a mechanism for people to be able to stay in their neighborhood. They wanted renters and people who were vulnerable to be able to choose to continue to live in Frogtown. However, when this developer who facilitated the process explained to them that there was no clear way for anything other than census diversity to be maintained, everyone across the board said we don't want that. So when given the option for affordable housing as we know it, people said no, that's not the thing that we need. However, people also said to us, how can we hear this thing about backyard homes? How can we develop them in our backyard? So we realized affordable housing as it is is not a sellable thing. We want to propose an alternative. And that's because affordable housing is usually reliant on tax credits. They're usually 50 plus units. They take a long time to build and because of HUD regulations, you're supposed to provide equal opportunity for people to apply to these units. So in this context, there was a lot of back and forth in terms of policy litigation and what could be built on a single family lot in your backyard. So we started working on a pilot project with the mayor of Los Angeles and a local council member to test what would it look like if we can build in someone's backyard and demonstrate that we can double the density perhaps in a single family neighborhood, but still have it be affordable, contextual and be something accessible to the average homeowner. This neighborhood, so after a long homeowner vetting process, we found a homeowner who could afford to build in their backyard who was financially solvent and had a parcel that we could build in. However, we failed to acknowledge or see the problems with building in a historic preservation overlay zone, which was a problem. And in a hillside hillside, which was very tough. And the context is that the green unit is actually the backyard home that is currently under construction. And we wanna say that backyard homes is a typology that's been around in Los Angeles for a very long time. There's probably 50,000 unpermitted backyard homes. Many of this is potentially neighbors to this property owner. So we saw this as his project as being a kind of network within this already informal use that was happening, but we also provocatively made a point to build the biggest backyard home that we could. So this is a full second home in someone's backyard. Also, because of the HPOZ or the historic preservation overlay zone, there was a lot that we couldn't do architecturally. One of the tenants of the HPOZ zone was that the backyard home had to be subservient to the first. We'll tell anyone in our office that and they would just get really angry. So, and then the homeowner themselves were very artistic and creative and they wanted a series of components that they could add to the house and kind of have their own identity in the project. So with that challenge, we had to get approval by the local historic board, which we did and realized- But these things are illegal. And realized that with state law that had passed, that wasn't allowed. So us going through this rigorous approval process from local board meant that future homeowners in Los Angeles don't have to do the same thing. This is a rendering of what this backyard home looks like. So we were really interested in taking the same enthusiasm, which we'll show you later around our public projects and using that here in a kind of, I've been saying it's like a Simpson style of Americana, where we're playing with the idea of the craftsman home and the kind of iconography and the popness of it. So last year we broke ground and it was really exciting because we had to bring together a whole bunch of partners to make it possible from the head of the planning department to Habitat for Humanity as a general contractor. These are the homeowners over here right there with their daughter. We also worked with a non-profit bank called the Community Development Financial Institute to make a construction loan possible because that's currently not feasible for the average homeowner. Of course Helen's standing next to the banker. And all of this work that we did went into something that was in the first image we showed you, which I'm not sure if you would have necessarily visually kind of called out. So for me, from this side of the partnership, that was kind of a failure. Not in that the architecture wasn't ambitious enough. It was that at the end of the day, this project wasn't guaranteed to be affordable. And that was what we were really passionate about, making sure that we learned from this pilot project so that we can help create affordable backyard homes. And it's possible because in California we help kind of champion both local and state policy to make our policy progressive, taking away all the barriers that made it not possible for backyard homes to be permitted. This is the local Senator, California State Senators that sponsored the bill and the local council member. And at that time, affordable backyard homes wasn't a thing yet. Yeah, so people kept saying, what about Airbnb's? What about the idea that you're spending all this work to get something permitted in these gentrifying neighborhoods? How do you know that what you're spending your time on isn't going to just kind of usher in a population that doesn't deserve to be there or supported? So what we did was we spent a year doing research talking to real homeowners throughout Los Angeles who might want to create a backyard home in which they rent it affordably. So we created a one stop shop program where we are the project managers, as well as the architects to help the average homeowner contribute to our housing crisis. So this kind of graphic explains how it works. Homeowner who may be cash poor and asset rich because they bought their property a while back could get help because who wants to hire an architect, figure out how to get permits, deal with the general contractor, figure out how to finance it. We put together a resource to make that all happen. We're also going to design for them. And in a lot of cases, we wanted to be working with people who were asset rich and cash poor. So these were people in these different neighborhoods that wanted to be able to help with the housing crisis, but they couldn't qualify to pull out a loan. And we really wanted also, as Helen was giving me the segue to talk about, was we really wanted these dwelling units to reflect the values of the neighborhood. We didn't want them to look like trailers and we didn't want them to look like something out of dwell. It was really important that they showed a design excellence that reflected the fact that the people inside of them were precious and important. And if you know anyone in Los Angeles who's a homeowner who owns a single family a lot, we are accepting applications for this program until December 15th. And the reason that the program works is because there are lots of residents that you managed to get a Section 8 voucher, which is a public subsidy where you don't pay more than a third of your rent if your income qualified and government pays the rest. And you can take it anywhere as long as the landlord accepts that voucher. So you can, if you can only afford to pay $500 for rent, but then the rent is $1,500, then 40% of these are being returned. So that means because there's not enough Section 8 voucher housing stock, what ends up happening is that these people who wait for years to get that voucher lose it because they have to use it within a year, right? And then they're at vulnerability for being homeless. And what we're offering is, we know it's bureaucratic, we know there's stigma, but we can make it easy and fun. So the conversation that people often come to us and they wanna have is, how do you turn people who are NIMBYs into YIMBYs? NIMBYs are people who say, yeah, that sounds great, but not in my backyard. So with Frogtown, with that engagement process, it was really clear to us that if you don't unpack people's values, you don't understand what they need and you come to them and you tell them, oh, you need this, or this is gonna help you, this should be in your community, they're gonna say no. And so the benefit of having that Frogtown conversation is that we started to unpack all the biases relative to affordable housing, which all of us in this room are highly educated and so we know the outcome and the worth of that. But if you go into your hometown and you go into your home community and you say we're gonna put this in your neighborhood and you can't tell someone why it's good for them or someone they know, they're gonna say no to you. And so this was a mechanism for us to change that conversation at a fundamental level. So we're halfway through time and we're through our first phase of work, so we're gonna go twice as fast and talk not as much for our last two areas of work. So our next area of work is actually support. We can just skip through all of this. We're gonna talk about our work supporting small mom and pop business owners and what it means to have a storefront that reflects the values of the amazing business owners and entrepreneurs in Los Angeles. So we were invited by Council District 15 or Councilman Joe Buscaino to... I don't care about that, the person. Well, you always say this. Okay, you go ahead. We worked in Watts. Watts, you guys know for the Watts Towers, the riots. And this is a neighborhood that has historically been promised so many things and nothing comes through. So we had to be very sensitive to be working there as a bunch of, I would say, white Asian and Latino staff members. Because Asian in this community is considered white. So this stretch of Watts is just three blocks from the Watts Towers. It has lots of historic businesses that you couldn't really tell exactly what they were selling in terms of products and services, but yet they weren't able to leverage the economic interests and the tourism from the Watts Towers. Well, this is something you never like that I say, but I'm gonna always say it, is that the council office told us they sold just like a smattering of stuff. And that wasn't true. Like we started talking to all of these businesses and they all had their own thing that they were incredibly proud of, but the permitting process for signage is so legalized in LA and so policed. And it was within a free, within proximity of a freeway, which we all know has all of this kind of signage, restrictions and policies, but then guess what, don't match me. I'm gonna go on my rant. They, we put freeways in lower income communities. And so all of these businesses didn't really know how to go through the process of getting signage. So what we did was we worked with those businesses, supported them in the bureaucratic process, designed for them something that was reflective of their products and services and also created a quarter identity that made it clear that this was a hub of businesses just down the street from the Watts Towers. And in many cases, the signage that we were doing was cheaper to make than the permitting process itself. And we, so we created a redundant signage back behind all of this plywood so that if there wasn't neglect or there wasn't the ability to keep up with it, they would still have a kind of ghosted layer of signage for their business. We also partnered with the LA Trade Tech to hire sign painters that were students. We hired local youth in Watts who lives in public housing and it was a way for us to build partnerships with people who were already working and living in the area. However, one of the drawbacks that we saw was that in the end, our design services weren't enough and we left a lot of those businesses in the same state that they were in which is that they didn't have formal processes, they didn't have permits, they didn't have a business plan, they didn't have inventory and we had learned so much about them through the design process that it was heartbreaking to leave them in that state. And that wasn't our scope of work but we realized that if we were gonna do a project like that again, it wasn't enough and we were actually doing a disservice to the businesses to help them in such a limited way. So a year later, we were invited to work in another neighborhood called Wilmington. Wilmington is the most polluted neighborhood in Los Angeles, eight oil refineries, the most bike lanes to nowhere. You could see this is why it's relevant that it was council member Joe Buscaino. So we went back to this council member that had hired us in the first place to do lighting and trash cans and then we did that whole project. We went back and said we didn't do enough. Can you please invest in us to do more? And he did do that. He invested in us to be able to find out what's going on in the neighborhood, what are their needs. So what we did was we engaged in a 10 month process with local youth, with local businesses to find out what is the vision, the wants, the needs, the assets for community members along this commercial corridor. We held lots of cultural and community events because it was hard to attract people to come to a place where there wasn't much activity. So we had to program it by installing lots of tactical urbanism interventions. And we came up with a proposal for the small business support that needed to happen in tandem with kind of business improvements that would affect and impact the street. And what we hate to do as planners and designers is to create a plan that sits on a shelf. So what we're really proud of is that this strategic plan actually had strategies that were grounded and reflected from what people could do, want to do, and it wasn't just incumbent on the government or a community group or a business. There were so many strategies that were easy to do that we laid out and we were proud to be able to implement one of them. And so this is Rosalinda. She is doing an intake survey and we worked with over a dozen small businesses to provide small business support in addition to working with a handful of businesses to do storefront makeovers. And what we realized was unique about our approach was that most of these business owners, they were running their business. They didn't have time to leave to go to a workshop or event. So we met them where they were. We figured out what they didn't have and how we could help them. And what we learned was many of these businesses didn't have leases, which, and they didn't know why it was important. That meant that they were at risk of having their business taken from them. So what we did was we partnered with the Legal Aid Foundation, put together a workshop and kind of moralized all the tips and strategies in a multilingual brochure. And we also did the traditional storefront improvement project which turned Santa Luna into a kind of expression of the artistry and finesse that this business owner takes with approach to their food. And Maya, we transformed their business in partnership with a local graffiti artist into something that kind of reflected their proud heritage and their approach to local cuisine. And after finishing this project, we realized that design plus more is what is valuable and meaningful and that it was a process that we were proud of that we wished could be replicated throughout the city. And for us, I think we placed this at the end because it takes these other areas of work for us to approach the public realm with this idea of doing something that's kind of affordable and fast and navigates all this dense bureaucracy is something we can only do because of those two areas of work. So this is what you see in Los Angeles, which is lots of freeway underpasses, lots of chain link fences, neglected space, kind of trash and graffiti. There's lots of narrowed pedestrian corridors, there's lots of interruptions to the pedestrian right-of-way and we developed a temporary intervention project that kind of targeted all of these ways the pedestrian was being encroached or threatened. We were lucky to get a grant from a national foundation called Transit Center and we were able to work in our backyard. This was the nearest train station, metro stop to our office in Frogtown. What we did was we started off talking to people who were already there, people who had no choice but to walk and take public transit. They're what you call transit dependent and understand their experience walking along the stretch of Avenue 26 in Northeast LA. In addition to transit users, we wanted to understand from people who lived around the neighborhood, kind of what were their concerns, what would make them walk in their neighborhood. We held a community walk where we kind of documented all those interruptions and transgressions of the pedestrian right-of-way. And we noted moments where there was little to no pedestrian infrastructure. So just imagine a gas station on every single corner as well as a bus stop, four freeway on and off ramps that didn't have kind of a clear crosswalk. And we captured all that in a kind of a report that understood not just the existing assets but what were the values and concerns of people who had no choice but to be on Avenue 26 and the community members who could be doing more on this stretch. And what was really essential and important to us and which Helen got at was this transit dependent population that was already there. A lot of times we present our studio projects or we're taught as students that you're creating a destination. And we had a few interns in the office that kept saying what about inspiring ridership. And we're pretty ambivalent about that. We were really sincere about the fact that there was ridership and there were people who had very hard lives that we wanted our project to support. So with a year, $150,000 budget, a whole bunch of bureaucracy, this was the project that we created to test an idea. And so why Helen mentioned that there's a lot of bureaucracy as it was that partnership or that negotiation of the freeway off ramps and on ramps with Caltrans in addition to LA City and the sidewalk in addition to this signage right here on your left which is a private building. So there was a lot of different territories that none of the pedestrians or anyone even in this room would denote as different but had many different processes in which we had to go about being able to execute and permit them. The train station is owned by the county and when you exit the train station, it's unclear which direction you're going where the nearest bus lines are. And the bus lines even changed during the time that we were executing the project. So that's why there's a blank space before 251 because we had to actually mark that out and they had actually taken away a resource which was a bus line while we were working. So we had to do things like, I think maybe it's in the next slide. We had to hide train signage because Caltrans was saying, but what if Uber wants to use our underpasses to advertise, you can't advertise Metro because it's a different agency. So we had to be ambiguous about showing directionality. So that's why we did fence weave that had arrows as a super graphic because the agencies themselves didn't want us to do signage to different resources. And our recreation and parks department had this passive green space and there was no activity there and what we did was we provided a place for people to sit and to stop and to have shade right across the street from the train station. It was the first time our recreation and park department allowed for an entity like us to do something for three months. And we worked with a local mural artist to do these murals and we designed them again to have this embedded kind of iconography of train versus bus. And we discreetly, the arrows were not allowed in the murals for Caltrans so we discreetly created this graphic so that when we permitted them through the kind of bureaucrats at Caltrans they wouldn't pick up what we were doing. And this photo isn't staged. There's three bikes here and that's because you fear if you're alive if you're actually on the street because cars are speeding by. So a big part of the patterning that was happening at the sidewalk was the idea of clarifying different lanes of traffic because there were people on bikes also running into women with strollers. So this is a slide that reflects the bureaucracy that we had to go through to get. For a three month long project. And the idea was no one thought it was possible for us to do anything with LA Metro and with the county and the state and we decided why don't we just have something that's very simple in short term because short term pilots are a way to get bureaucrats to say okay, I don't really know what you're doing but three months isn't too much of a risk so do it. So what we did was we went through this approval process. It's the same process. I worked with all these different agencies and submitted all these different documents. And the goal is not to just permit this project once but to say you love the project that we did. We should make this the normal process for any community group and so now we're working with the city to help streamline a process that would make it easier for other community groups to do the same thing. However, coming off of this, there's currently it's very vogue to talk about tactical urbanism and temporary things. And we felt we did a disservice to the community by doing something that was temporary. Even though it was what we meant to do in the very beginning, it was hard to have those murals painted over the park space be removed. It wasn't good enough. So we had an opportunity with a slightly bigger budget, $370,000 to work in Koreatown, the largest Korean community outside of Korea. And we worked along a stretch, a mile stretch called Western Avenue that spanned multiple jurisdictions of council districts and kind of neighborhoods. And because the council office designation ran through the center, at one point the project was called this side of Western because only one council district had paid us to work. But of course we didn't name it that and we were able to convince the other council member to give us money so we can do work on both sides of the street. Yes. The landscape is quite impoverished. The pedestrian right of way has little to no pedestrian supporter amenities. It has one of the highest pedestrian riderships in the city or bus ridership in the city. However, it has the least parks and least access to greenery. There's little to no traffic calming measures which the city of Los Angeles has been taking. It's a great street, but there's not a lot of engineering that's been put into making it a great street. It's a pass-through street for people who are getting from place to place, but for people who live and work nearby, it's the place where they shop and we want to support that environment. So for a four month process, we knocked on every door and talked to the small business owners who were a diversity of mom and pop businesses, new businesses, found out what were their challenges, what they hoped for. How many business owners? There's over a hundred business owners on this stretch and that was kind of formalized in a kind of a community report. Again, we hate it when community reports sit on a shelf so we want to make sure they're valuable and what this report did that was slightly different was really kind of captured the assets that were in the neighborhood and the vision of the business owners that we talked to. We took those interviews that we had with the business owners and paired them. If you go next. Next. With urban planning analysis. So there was a real effort to kind of create a snapshot that was a bit ephemeral as well as analytical. And I think what was important besides kind of knocking on every door and meeting business owners where they were was that the way that we got feedback wasn't, can you put a post it here or put a sticker there but it was having conversations, getting to know people, having them share what their real dreams and challenges were and getting feedback that was unsanitized. As we had kind of mentioned, oh, I'll talk about it next, next slide. Oftentimes we do design in a vacuum and we held a series of community open houses at the sites that we were gonna be doing interventions. Next. And we did interviews and recordings with local business people but also pedestrians. And we did the semi-standard thing of mapping resources but we were at the site on the street doing it which I think is different and important to note. We were able to, from those conversations because we were actually on the street, get pretty accurate documentation of what people strongly wanted to see more of. And you'll see that 19% of people really wanted trees and another 13 wanted park space. Our budget of, the budget that we had didn't allow for creating a new park. And in the conversation that we have in the non-profit world a lot is that you can't affect change without talking to the people that you're wanting to help. And so a big part of what we were doing was going to where we were gonna work and having the conversations there. And a lot of ways in which, and Helen mentioned this earlier, was frustrating for her doing engagement in a former councilman's office was you would be in schools or empty auditoriums talking about things. So we proposed these designs. And next slide. Talked about what were the key programmatic needs. Next slide. Which was really that they wanted a better pedestrian experience and they wanted landscaping. But we did these conversations inside along with being on the Sidewick we also did them inside the small business which is somewhat of a radical place to be holding community feedback. This is a local cafe. And so over, it seems really quaint and sweet that there's a handful of people that are looking at a board but it's very important the context of the conversation. And we came up with a strategy for really taking, as Jonathan Gold put it, along the stretch of Koreatown there's a restaurant for every day of the year. And it was the idea that our project wasn't gonna be solving a problem because Koreatown wasn't a problem. Our project was going to be supporting the dynamic use that was already there and marrying it with the pedestrian world that wasn't being supported. And acknowledging that there was small businesses that've been there for a long time that add to the local culture and flavor and how can we have the public realm be able to reflect that reality. So in that kind of environment, we were thinking about how do we leverage all the existing government resources to install as many things that reflect what the community wanted. So we were able to get more bike racks, get new trash cans, put in some mid-block crossings. The standard stuff. But also, we were creative in thinking about how can we use a few moments where there's a lot of need and an opportunity to do something different for the public realm. And within that, we went through, you can see A and R permit. We went through a very dense series of permitting. This one took four months. And we built steel. Everything was steel, everything was very resilient and permanent and bomb-proof. And a big key part of this project was to treat these big box stores or these strip malls that were inherently vehicularly oriented and designed, as I mentioned, by old dead white men and turn them into informal courtyards or living rooms for pedestrian activity. And what is unique about this shade structure you see is that in Los Angeles, most shade structures are installed by a marketing company, JC DeCoe. And here we were doing it for the community, kind of not having it as an advertising space. And that was really unique, given that so many people walk and take public transit. And this one of the two hubs was also an adjacency to a taco truck. And we have friends and allies that are a part of the street vending campaign in Los Angeles and we feel passionately that pedestrian infrastructure should also support the informality of street vending in addition to kind of blurring the line between public and private. And so you see things like painting that goes over the curb of the private sidewalk or follies or little amenities that break the boundary between yours and ours. There's lots of kids that are in this area so we love that the design actually encouraged and we're kind of friendly as well as senior friendly. And there was an attempt to, you see there's these kind of palm trees and the screen that's installed on the side of the Tom and Toms. It was the idea that everything is at the service of the pedestrian environment. And these kind of neglected residual spaces were actually small moments of human space and little kind of still lives of an alternate world. And so in a somewhat sarcastic sense, we were doing fake plants and fake trees and fake living room to kind of highlight that the need for trees and park was so great that we couldn't necessarily service it. And we redesigned the palm tree which is this landscape element in Los Angeles that is purely in 100% at the service of a vehicle to be something that redefined and created a pedestrian envelope. And we took that and created a base to it so that it became a part of this kit. Next. That was forming a living room. We took over as much infrastructure that was existing as possible. This is the existing bus shelter. I like to think that ours was a little bit cooler than then the out front JC to Cohen. And we were able to create this space where someone's waiting for a bus and rather than looking at an ad, they actually get to kind of feel like they're in a living room and to understand that the project that's down the street has context and community orientation. And so we took all of this ad space over to kind of play with the idea of verdants and plants and things that you would think of as kind of sweet moments for community art and kind of reestablish this band that was supposed to, that I think does more so feel like a living room. And we had a lot of conversations about color and components and we created this design approach that really wasn't supposed to riff off of what was there as much as it was supposed to kind of add to the diversity, the visual diversity of Kreatown. And so when we were done with all these installations which is over almost a dozen strategies ranging from two hubs to 170 trees planted, we didn't invite people to ribbon cutting because who would come? Who would come to see like a new shade structure? So what we ended up doing was that we created a community festival that reflects the cultural values and diversities. We made it fun, we made it multilingual, we made it inclusive, we made it family friendly and we made it free. And it was really cool to see people not see the difference between the installation and the event and that's me in the background awkwardly talking to one of the councilmen. We, you know, it was cool to see if you go back again. People, we installed these crosswalks at the incursions to the pedestrian right of way at the strip mall. And so it was cool to see that being helpful. We program up the parking lot just adjacent to what the shade structure that you saw earlier with lots of Korean dancing, hip hop. It was a Saturday morning that went on for three hours and people would have stayed there longer if we let them. Often in Los Angeles, you drive through places of cultural density and the built environment doesn't reflect the diversity of the people who are living in these buildings. And so it was really fantastic to take something like a parking lot and turn it into a courtyard and have an event that reinforced that. And we wanted people to also understand the amazing business this hour nearby. So we had a scavenger hunt. We invited local kind of organizations to be able to share their work. So it really ended up being not just like a community festival but a really a community gathering event for everyone. So as we wrap up our presentation, some things to note, given that you are all future urban designers and architects and planners and historic preservationists in this space that the lessons we've gleaned from our five years of working at LA Moss, working in communities. One is that plans aren't the point. There are them. We're both really ambivalent about paper projects or the idea that your ideas are valuable if they're not implementable. And we hate asking community members for the feedback if the feedback is going towards something that will never get implemented. It seems so transactional and sincere. So we try to avoid that when we can and take on projects where we can take ownership from ideas implementation. And as many of the architects out there know, there's been a big kind of fetishizing of tools. And for us, we are a bit ambivalent about how we do the projects. We definitely care deeply about taking back space that is pedestrian, but we really don't care how we do it. And the last point is everything must scale. A lot of the projects we do are in individual neighborhoods that each have their own story, their own process. But what we like to think is that as we're doing these projects with each individual community, we are slowly pushing the boundaries of what's possible. We're elevating the threshold of what government should do, what communities deserve, and how can we create a process that really formalizes the informality that happens across Los Angeles. But we're doing these projects at a level that we feel is pretty excellent. So we're taking something as a sucky, business improvement district that is a series of sucky pedestrian parts and designing something like Western, which we feel to be pretty remarkable in reinventing a kind of scalable standard that people should be meeting when they invest in the public right away. And I would end that it's possible for us to do that because we have a nonprofit status that makes us mission oriented, which means that we can get grants and foundations invest in our work because they believe in our values and we do more than what we're actually paid to do. So many of these projects are fee for service, but the budget is never enough to allow us to do that level of engagement we want, invest in the level of design, invest in the materials. So our approach as being a nonprofit enables us to do projects like this. Thank you so much. I mean, your energy is like so tangible and I can understand how you're so effective in communicating with people on the incredibly diverse backgrounds. You know, I really love that you touched on these, my two questions, which were the concept of nonprofit, right? And as it relates to urban design, and I wanted to just dig a little bit deeper into this kind of concept of the nonprofit because you know, this notion of what I really read in your work is also, it's not just impact, it feels like empowering. It feels like you're kind of making these pathways for people to understand what is almost an impenetrable change process within an urban environment and kind of giving them these breadcrumb steps to be able to kind of participate in that. So it's really, really exciting to see. And I guess I just wanted you to talk a little bit more about this sort of pathway or what led you to kind of reconceive urban design as something that needed nonprofit now and relative to your past experience. Because I think many think would conceptualize urban design as being like big architecture or architecture that spans multiple sites or parcels and therefore you're sort of doing this open space or whatever in between. But you're thinking about it totally differently. And it's not scaling in the sense of it's big within a site, it's scaling through harnessing the policies that you know so well from being in the city to make this change. So I guess I was just thinking like in your own experience whether it was in school or in, can you just talk a little bit more about what was a sort of thought process that got you from where you were in architecture school to this kind of notion of urban design and nonprofit advocacy. You're gonna make it. Yes, you can start. That'd be great. Well I, we both had been working at an international slash national level before we met. And we both before that had been very local in Los Angeles doing very specific projects and frustrated with bureaucracy. So we came to the table and met each other under these auspices of we had gone outside of Los Angeles and seen the ability to do other things but then come back to our hometown and not seen a clear pathway or a clear way to enact that kind of difference in scale and perspective. And I would add that it's actually too often in many cities and communities that community engagement is not authentic, it's transactional, community voices aren't heard. And that's one. Second is that government has like kind of an interest and a passion but their execution is limited and design was never at the conversation for and with community. So under that reality that all these worlds work differently we saw the potential to really merge that together and make sure that design was within four community that community engagement was meaningful and that government could do more. So I also wanted to reference this stun many, many studying slides and your graphics and communication skills are totally unparalleled. But one that really- I always feel like we're not intellectual enough about our presentations. I'm obviously the person that's doing it. And I always wish we had more white space and I'm like we're so slutty and how bright our colors are. And I'm like the slides are so colorful and graphic. I'm so cool. I know, I get it. But there was that one that was looking down at a streetscape, the tree, the drain. And it had basically this mosaic of every single city agency that was kind of part of that conversation. And I can personally relate to that once. We did a similar, we did a cross-section of the Gowanus Canal which was slightly different than the banality of the bulkhead edge and the sidewalk and the little hook lamp and the et cetera. And literally kind of had a nesting of 10 different agencies. So I can totally relate to that notion of, which I think came through so strong which is that in your case you're looking at a physical project or urban design to then influence up to a policy scale. And then I thought it was really interesting how you then have these almost like feedback loops, right? Because in the end, the result of your project is the palm tree. But it's also this almost like how to map or something. Is that a fair characteristic? Yeah, the public space. I think when you get out of school, you're so shocked that you have this discrete site and you've been told to bleed edges and to solve problems and to think things in a way that's spatial and the spatial education is so great that you get because you think about things part and parcel. But then to be given a site that is just an edge and to be not able to talk about the sidewalk or anything else is really shocking. And due to liability, public agencies so police that edge and it's so impoverished. And I think our partnership, a lot of our partnership is about exposing the bureaucracy laden in that edge and the way that it inhibits people to take ownership over their community and have a kind of community that reflects their identity. And I would say that we talk about bureaucracy a lot but bureaucracy is a reflection of bureaucrats, many of whom really do care. They know that the process kind of stinks. So what for us really matters is that we find those champions. We understand where their limitations are and what they have to deal with in terms of risk and process. And we respect and honor that and then we push a little bit. We bring in the politics in there and we do that for every single project and what we do is we share that openly with lots of other community groups. We don't want to be the only organization in Los Angeles doing this work. We want to pave the way and say, here's how we did it. We can help you do it and please, Angelina knows, do more. Do it again. Great, so I have one last question I want to open it up but or maybe like a comment or question about this concept of informality because that's the other thing that really comes through. You think about the typical American city or the downtown of Anywhere'sville and it is such a highly regulated environment that it kind of creates this almost like replication of sameness, right? The 10 foot sidewalk, the five foot setback, the 24 parking spaces, the, you know, and I think, you know, one thing that seems so vibrant in the work is that it is celebrating, literally, you know, as for the storefront project, just like hyper individuality and uniqueness. So I guess I was just wondering if you could talk about informality or your relationship with other cities or, you know, how, you know, in a city like LA that that becomes able to be manifest in such a dramatic way because I think what we're struggling with so much is that this, you know, this environment of policy be getting designed and not designed kind of feeding up into a policy context is somehow creating this kind of, you know, landscape which is almost banal, right? And it doesn't have that kind of sense of individuality which I think, you know, is characteristic of maybe a more informal economy. Even the ADU project, this Accelerate Dress Dwelling Unit project, you know, that is for much of the world how the world like builds value into their home. It's usually the single family home. So even that sense was a, I think this kind of remarkable example of, you know, building informality into a community. And so are you looking at other examples or can you kind of talk about the idea of informality a little bit for you? I think that people often think, did you invent this idea? And the reality is that all of these solutions have existed and unfortunately policy doesn't make it possible and it's not formal. So what we're doing is actually highlighting what's already been working and actually providing a more formalized process for it. And we can pick the endless different informal realities in Los Angeles from street vending to housing to homelessness to public space and guerrilla-style street furniture. And where we landed, I think, is where we think that there's just like a higher need a higher need for kind of housing that's affordable, that's safe and healthy and well-designed kind of businesses that are vibrant and can compete and like public realm that reflects kind of what is great about Los Angeles. And I think that's, for us, the informality is that there's informality everywhere and where can we actually apply our skills to formalize what is already working and we're not inventing any of this. When we started, it was really hard to get designers in the office that would use color and it still is. Just grain, just grain. Yeah, I mean it was like, it was like pulling teeth to get someone to pick shades of a color that wasn't gray. And it was really hard to intimate that minimalism wasn't gonna work and that there needed to be a kind of enthusiasm that the project reflected because there had been so much disinvestment. I think at this point, we are a bit kind of rethinking the way that we approach design because we would want it to be more inclusive. And we're kind of entering a new phase where we want the work to be a little bit more diverse in its language. But up until now, it's been a fight to try to do projects that were not parametric and not discreet. And so for us, that was another way that we were kind of being rebellious was to do something that was pretty bold. And I would say that our design language that we're known for is being colorful and playful and whimsical. And I think in some ways, at least the first three or four years of our work, it was because the budgets we were given were so limited that it was a lot of paint and plywood and extra paint. But we also think of LA as like a city of surface, right? And so it was a highly appropriate medium to work in and very interesting to have to use steel because we associate that with a lot of bad investment along public space. And so we were trying to really rethink that material and how it could be reused in a way that was kind of wildly different. Okay, so I'd like to open it up for a couple of questions from the audience. Can I have some questions for Elizabeth and Helen? And I think we have a microphone. Do we have a microphone somewhere? Okay, Chris. Oh, sorry, go. Okay. So diplomatic. I know. Teacher versus student, what are we gonna do? There we go. Okay, hello. Thank you guys, appreciate you coming in. So you showed the chart of the process and all the loopholes you have to jump through and it was a very seemingly simple project that you had, but it had a ton of different steps. Is there any thought about how to redesign that process or are you giving the bureaucrats any sort of food for thought on how to simplify these things? Yeah, the funny part, the irony is that people assume that it should be easy to do projects like that because it was so simple. So when we showed them that map, every agency was like, oh dear, I hope we were better than the state and the county was like, I hope we were better than the city. So no one actually wanted to be that bureaucratic department. So for us, we were lucky that the compelling part of our project was that we completed it in a year and it was up for three months and people loved it and they were sad to see it go. So that meant we had this excitement and support across government agencies and in community groups to do more and so we currently have a grant to figure out how to formalize the process to make it easier for other community groups and I think hopefully in a year later, we're able to say now the system is easier and there's actually many other community groups that are doing projects that are similar that doesn't require us to do it. So is it fair, can we be more granular, even if it's not an accurate way to describe what you've been leading, which is that we're creating like a kind of one-stop permitting shop for pedestrian improvements and that we're going through that process with councilmen to make it really easy to know where to go to get this stuff done. And the city agencies are like, well, while you're tackling this, can you do more because our street furniture system doesn't really work and really it really not meant to subject people to this process that requires an engineer. So we're excited to actually be invited to do more by the city because they recognize that they want more projects like that. There was like a name for it. It's called adopt a spot. A little spot, yeah. Adopt a spot is what one of the different council offices came up with as like a snappy. It started off with adopt a sidewalk and then we're like adopt a spot. We'll see how it evolves. Let us know if you want to put you on the mailing list so you can find out what happens in a year. Right, right, right. Okay, I think we had one over here. Thanks so much. The presentation was super inspiring and for an office that's trying to do something at all similar in any capacity whatsoever. In the small city, we find all of our community conversations. The community members have a lot of fatigue and there's a lot of mistrust of people who come to them. And so even the word engagement is troubled and we're trying to bridge that gap and establish trust at all times and measures. And it was really interesting because one of your slides was talking about something and it was really early on but I saw this little kind of note that if you miss this, come to our regular open office hours. And the slide disappeared in 10 seconds so I couldn't even grab like oh, when was that? How often does that happen? But I was hoping you could maybe talk about your office model for a second. Yeah, I think because we have an office that is diverse and represents the diversity within the city. We often end up having Monday morning meetings where we talk about all the different things that everyone's engaged in. And then also because our office is split into this kind of engagement policy arm and design and fabrication and implementation arm, well both of us implement. There's a kind of open office model where we're doing different initiatives and you know that you can kind of find more about like renters rights or you can come and like fill out a certain like an application for an affordable housing unit. Like we use our office as an informal community base when we're in the process of outreach. And it's really because Helen's done an amazing job building that engagement team that we're able to do that. And your question about how do you engage in a way that's not transactional? How do you come into a neighborhood when people are like who are you? You don't belong here. You don't live here. You have no history here. And what we do is in some ways we specialize in plopping down in different neighborhoods where we're not based because we have these values towards community engagement that is not, I wanna come in and solve your problem. I know what your problem is and I have a solution. We spend so much time listening. We build partnerships with people who have been there for a long time. And that's key to all the projects we do. And we wish we had more slides because each of the projects has a complexity of rich partnerships that means that it's not transactional that we're trying to get them to do something. We are doing something that is mutually beneficial. We understand those values and we build those partnerships meaningfully. So we have a community advisory board that we create that has all of those local nonprofits at the get go at a table together talking about things. It's not the kind of open house workshop is appropriate for a type of feedback, but it's not the only model towards having a conversation. So having that kind of core constituency group where people who have been working on things are talking to each other is also been productive because you can unpack things because they're all peers and they don't often get invited to talk to each other about something. And I would say a final note is that community ownership is non-negotiable. For us, the success of a project is that when we leave, it's not a LA Moss project, but it's a project that this local community group is owning and maintaining and kind of carrying forward. So that's something that the project that we had to remove in three months was not successful in the sense of it having a community partner because we weren't allowed to have that and it was hard to find that. But the project on Western and Koreatown does have a local community partner that will be maintaining everything for five years and engaging with the small business owners. So for us, because we get to also kind of engage and design and implement a project, what we do for those projects is we make sure we have local community partners that are with us from the beginning, with us until the end, and keep it going when we're gone. And one other thing is that Helen's background is she was the field deputy for the councilman that she was working with. And her ethics around going to a business owner, showing them documents, not asking them to stop their business, not asking them to leave, but meeting them where they are and asking for feedback there was a total, like she blew my mind open about how you have a conversation. We're so used to asking, like, oh, we're really polite and really thoughtful because we're asking for the community group to have a review inside our school. Like no one, like that is not, you are gonna get someone that can come and show up that you might not really necessarily wanna hear what they have to say. You wanna hear the person who can't leave where they're at. So it was really, Helen, completely changed my concept of how you have a conversation that you need to have to do a good design project. Amazing. Oh, that's so kind. Thank you. Another question? There's one down here. Oh, Alex, right. Thank you so much. So I was working as an urban designer in Los Angeles before coming to GSAP. And the challenge that I always faced in LA is, as you mentioned, governance. So there's just different municipalities everywhere you go. Is it the council member? Is it the mayor? Who are you working with? What city? And simultaneously as a designer, we're always thinking about scalability. And so I'm just kind of curious what your thoughts are on governance and relation to scalability and how you kind of get ahead of that. And how do you get past governance to allow you to scale up in a city like Los Angeles, where it's often challenging to kind of replicate and scale because of these different municipalities across the board. I would say that what's fascinating about our relationship is that Elizabeth is a visionary with amazing, often times crazy ideas. And I think you always have to be bold. Because when you're bold, and then after it gets all value engineered and the bureaucracy strips it down, what you have left is something more than what ends up being everywhere in Los Angeles. So I think that element is important because at the end, once we pass through all that bureaucracy, we have something that people are like, oh, why don't we have more of that? But the process, I think, to make sure that you have that support so that it's replicable, so that Santa Monica will do it because Burbank did it because Los Angeles did it is that what we try to do is we maintain good relationships not just with our elected officials, but also with the people who are working government who are in the various agencies because they all kind of talk to one another. They go to conferences and if LA does something really awesome, Santa Monica will want to do it. So I think what we do is we lead by doing good work and we maintain good relationships and we make sure that our visions are bold and they don't get stripped down too much as you go through the inevitable process of kind of the budget and what government is willing to do. The two of us are really curious about why certain things suck. So we go to these meetings and I don't hang out with architects or I don't hang out with planners. We hang out with bureaucrats and people who are in the city who really care and they're our age and they went to architecture school and they're working for the city now and so we're engaged in having conversations about what people are trying to, initiatives inside these offices that they're interested in having pilots for and so it's this kind of, we're acting as an intermediary and a negotiator because these council offices and these bureaucratic offices, they want to be investing and supporting the community but they also aren't in a position either to leave where they are at and have the conversation and so it's both of us kind of negotiating between the community and the municipality where we're kind of understanding where there's a potential to do something. And I would say that as you design every project think about how it's unique to that site, that community but then also be able to unpack what is it that makes it unique if you were to apply it somewhere else and I think oftentimes one-off projects stay one-off because it doesn't actually isn't able to translate beyond a site, beyond a community. So because we're wonks, we're like, well let's change the system and let's change the permitting program. Yeah. The same time. Great. One here and then in the back. Yeah. Sorry. I think we've explored it over the years and I don't think we have a great project that is a great example of how we can do that. It's a trade-off between kind of a developer who may want the highest return on investment and the fact that we are an organization with ethics and values that are aligned with a community member. So brutal. This is Helen's version of being brutal to your response. So I think... No, but I think that not, it's not as though all developers are evil and all developers only care about the bottom line. So if there is a developer who understands what our mission is... Well, we're partnering with a developer to create the affordable backyard homes. Oh, interesting. That's a non-profit because he also has a mission. So I think as long as the mission and value is aligned, then it's possible. So if you know any socially conscious developers out there in Los Angeles or elsewhere, let us know. Great, there's one in the center in the back here. Hi, really inspiring. I started a firm five years ago in Harlem and kind of dealing with other similar issues around gentrification and just community building. So really inspiring conversation and thank you for coming. Just curious, given your growth over the last five years, has your firm's practice been kind of almost more reactionary to the problems you see in your immediate context? And is it growing kind of larger LA context and do you see yourself growing out of LA to other locations and could you transport your model to other places? Or what's the next five years? And is it more reactionary and being nimble to what kind of presents itself or were you wanting to put yourself into the conversation? So we have been opportunistic with the small business work and the public realm work, but we were proactive surrounding the housing. And I think in the next five years, we're very proud and honored to be a nonprofit that is somewhat established. We're not looking at our bank account at the end of the year and going, can we make payroll this year? This year in the last two years. So we're at a place now that we don't have to say yes to every single project and we can actually be intentional about the projects we want to take on. And we're going through a strategic planning process because right now we're still Elizabeth as a co-founder, I joined a few months afterwards, but it's still an organization that where kind of our interest and our values is what dictates the work that we do. So we don't really know. We just know that we want to continue doing work that we think is meaningful. We were asked to participate in exhibit Columbus and to come up with. Yeah, I was going to ask, is it maybe the question was also a little bit about geography or if. If we would go out. And we did a backyard dwelling for Santa Barbara. And we just found out that we're a part of a winning team for our project in Texas. Stay tuned. So I think that we are looking at there being different components of our work and how they work in other places. And we don't have an answer for you about what that's going to look like. And if that's even a good idea. Yeah, both of us love LA. We like to be in LA. But and part of what makes our work successful is sometimes our relationships and the way that we understand Los Angeles. So if we were to go somewhere else, we would have to figure out how we maintain that. I'm always like, but look at Frank, Gary. Look at Tom, Maine. She's like, what about those jerks? But they were like deeply LA for 15 years. And then they used that as this attitude. How do we look at cities that are kind of shrinking or kind of have a disinvested core and like how do we take this concept that's deeply intrinsically urban in an architectural context? And I don't know if that's something we would do because again, we're both Angelenos that care about our city and we're both beholden to the values that have to be present in our projects. At the end of the day, we're not gonna be ambivalent about the people that are a part of them. I mean, it strikes me too that the work is deeply inflected by LA, but you're also dealing with literally like the building blocks of cities, streets, housing, it's really getting to this kind of core fabric. So I think one can really imagine that kind of attitude. But it would be like the best thing ever if people were like, like LA Moss. Yes. We are doing this thing in Philadelphia. Like that would be, that would just like, that would be how you put us out of business and we'd be fine. And like the two of us could definitely do something else happily. That's great. That we had a question over here maybe. Maybe one, time for one or two more. Thank you. So I, one thing I really appreciated about how you structured their presentation is you went through and showed us essentially what you learned from one project and how you implemented it in the next. And it made me really curious to ask, how did you get started? What was the first? It was that frog tone for Turo. There was a project before that that I almost didn't make it through because what we did was the worst kind of planning. Community engagement, that was a check off the box and a gigantic plan called the LA Riverfront, Northeast LA Riverfront Collaborative Economic Development Plan. Why are you even bringing that up? Cause that was the first and that was where we learned. That was where we learned we don't wanna take a big federal community engagement process where we can't really control the community engagement. I never wanna copy edit a 500 page document ever again and offer or format it and have it sit in a shelf because at the end of the day there was no political will. There was no presentation. But you know, Helen sincerely, Helen went through this thing and she sincerely said and you want this and you could pair it with these resources in this funding. And I remember people, we got hired for like three projects in Pocoima after that because they won't, no one had ever done that before. No one had ever made a document that explicitly pinpointed an area of funding that could go towards an idea. That's retarded. Sorry, that's really inappropriate that I said that. That's ridiculous. That's unacceptable. This is part of your design plus concept too, right? It's like not just the idea. What's the point? It's like the implementation pathway or the funding mechanism. So that was the beginning. It put us on the radar. It allowed me to work in my backyard along the LA River and enable us to do other projects like for the other frog town, which led to our backyard homes. So that was the beginning. The beginning isn't always easy or fun or something you want to talk about in public. Great, any more questions for one up there? So you can talk about that project because you didn't choose to take it on because I was the founder at that time. It's unfair. Thank you. Your energy is infectious. I just was wondering you were talking about the significance of how you don't just ask for community feedback. It's really a fundamental part of how you go about the project. Do you have a story of a conversation that you had that you didn't just learn something but it totally changed your approach? It was devastating to work in Watts. It was so hard to see people just surviving and being yelled at and having things stolen from them and these store owners that were just barely, barely, barely making it. It was devastating and it was really meaningful to see those store owners leave their store, walk outside their store and be overcome with emotion because the building reflected themselves and you realized how much people had kind of gone inside themselves and been so kind of terrorized by the city they lived in that they were committed to and putting everything into and how little they felt they had a right to. So Helen taught me a lot about how to have that conversation but our projects and our process of being able to actually give something to someone that was meaningful and real to them taught me the value of a real project even if you don't exactly know what you're doing but the ability to actually execute something and give someone something that reflected who they were because you had that honest conversation with them. Yeah, I would say that the areas where we work in Los Angeles includes people who kind of has been dealing with like decades of structural racism and redlining and just that inequity that is so rooted in structure and we're not solving that, you know, we're not solving that in kind of a big scale way in terms of national organizing and changing policy on that level. So I think what is important is that as we have the privilege to connect with any resident, any store owner that we are genuinely curious and authentic and open and honest and that, you know, we don't pretend that we know anything that we don't, we don't promise anything we can't deliver. Actually my mantra is let's like under promise and over deliver and if you're not going to be able to kind of show up and deliver things then don't waste people's time. Well, on that note, I'm so grateful that you guys made the trip from Los Angeles and Elizabeth and Helen. Well thank you so much. It's super exciting to meet you both and especially we're excited also to invite everybody in the audience to come and celebrate. Urban design is moving into a new space over in fair weather. Is there heating? So yes. I know, yeah. My wool hat on. Is it cozy? I have something colorful under here. And so if everyone in the audience wants to join us you could just take the stairs towards the back of the cafe here and check out our new space. But it's so exciting to have our urban design lecture and be able to celebrate that with you. And thank you so much. Yes, thanks for coming.