Writing

I have been hearing a lot about parking lately. As the saying goes, you don’t know what you’ve got ‘til it’s gone. When you can’t find a place to park your car it can make you late, cost more money than expected, or disrupt your plans. It’s annoying at best, and dangerous at worst.

I keep a pretty close eye on Pasadena’s Design Commission agendas for reasons other than parking, but when a new report mentions ‘limited parking‘ within the first few sentences, it gets my attention fast. So when I started reading about 2000 East Colorado Boulevard, a six-story, 100-percent affordable housing project proposing 144 residential units and just 64 parking spaces, I was taken aback. Under new state law, Pasadena could not require the developer to provide a single parking space. The developer chose to provide 64; under the city’s pre-density-bonus parking ratios, the project would have required 189. You can’t ignore 64, but zero would be worse.

Seeing yet another project with reduced parking raises a significant question that Pasadena’s leadership needs to answer: What is actually happening to our transportation habits and behaviors as we build more housing with less parking? Are these state driven policies having the desired effect, or are we just creating more circling, more congestion, more pressure on neighborhood streets, and more competition for the spaces that remain?

Residents are confronting these concerns project by project, but no one in the city appears to be putting the pieces together. I have recently witnessed residents flag this issue multiple times: at a Pasadena housing committee meeting on large housing projects along Colorado Boulevard, during a discussion of a proposed seven-story apartment project on Catalina Avenue, and at the Design Commission’s consideration of the 55-and-older development at 540 South Lake Avenue.

We understand the theories driving reduced parking requirements: Parking is expensive to build (especially underground), and policies limiting available parking are intended to encourage (or coerce) people to walk, bike, and use public transportation to help address climate issues. However, these objectives are arguable if we don’t actually get people into public transit or riding their bikes. So how do we know these policies are even working?

Pasadena’s leadership must start asking whether these policies are producing their intended results; otherwise, we are just building our way toward a parking crisis. Wouldn’t it be appropriate to study parking demand before projects are approved and then measure what actually happens after these buildings are occupied, despite state mandates?

Pasadena requires transportation analysis for development projects, and many projects are also subject to Transportation Demand Management measures. But those reviews do not answer the question of parking demand. We should research how many vehicles a project is likely to generate, whether the proposed parking supply meets that demand, and what happens to surrounding neighborhoods when it doesn’t. These are questions we should be asking before a project breaks ground. Then, once a new building is occupied, we should have a way to compare projected use to real use.

I wonder: has Pasadena conducted any broader retrospective analysis of completed projects that measure actual car ownership, transit use, and parking demand? Apparently not, as Planning and Transportation have only recently started planning a workshop with the Planning Commission that would examine these things. The planned discussion may not reach the Planning Commission until winter 2027.

As these massive developments are being approved, the need for better information on parking demand is only becoming more important, and the city’s apparent lack of urgency is concerning. To be fair, these recent state laws have reduced Pasadena’s ability to impose parking requirements on many new housing developments like the ones being proposed, but less control does not mean the city should stop asking what the consequences have been to date or what they will be in the future.

My hope is Pasadena will quickly decide to look more closely at what happens on the streets surrounding these projects—comparing projections to real use, and use that data when considering applications for future developments or political discussions with our state representatives.

Residents like me should not have to become traffic experts or parking planners—or raise money to hire them—to identify impacts we see on the ground. A strong city that values its residents would anticipate, measure, and address before complaints start rolling in.

We can theoretically plan for fewer cars, but that doesn’t mean people will actually stop using them. I do hope Pasadena’s analysis ultimately shows that people living in our transit-oriented developments are choosing to forgo cars, take transit more frequently, and walk and bike more. But if studying the issue identifies unintended consequences, let’s work to acknowledge them before the problem becomes so entrenched that our choices disappear.

My hope is the city won’t simply shrug and accept more congestion, parking problems, and a diminished quality of life for its residents as the unavoidable price of growth. Join me in encouraging the city to measure what is happening before it’s too late.

Good public policy should not be afraid to be measured.

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Lately, I have had the sense that Pasadena is at a crossroads.

Pasadena is being asked to accommodate more housing, more density and larger buildings — often for understandable reasons. At the same time, the city must protect the very qualities that make people love Pasadena: its scale, its neighborhoods, its historic buildings, its mature trees, its mountain views and the small businesses that give different parts of the city their identity.

Residents also expect their city to work. As Pasadena grows, our streets and infrastructure need to keep pace — including making sure new development does not simply push parking and traffic into surrounding neighborhoods.

That tension was hard to miss Tuesday night.

There was Pie ’n Burger — small, familiar and unmistakably Pasadena — with a proposal for a building more than 60 feet tall and roughly 380 feet long rising directly behind it, a scale so large that owner Michael Osborn told commissioners it would dwarf his iconic diner and make it feel “irrelevant.”

That word stayed with me.

As Pasadena grows, how do we make sure the neighborhoods, places, buildings and businesses that carry our history do not become irrelevant in the process?

The challenge is not to preserve everything exactly as it is. Cities change. They have to. But growth should not erase the visual and cultural context that gives a city its identity.

The proposal at 540 South Lake Avenue is for 71 residential units on six assembled parcels stretching between California Boulevard and Granite Drive. Some people have started calling the site the “octopus” because of the unusual way the separate parcels have been assembled into one development site.

Commissioner Srinivas Rao described the proposed building as “one long monolith.”

He went even further:

“It is the kind of buildings that destroy cities.”

State housing laws, density bonuses and changes to our own specific plans mean Pasadena will continue to grow. The question increasingly isn’t whether Pasadena will change. It is how well we manage that change.

The site sits at an important transition between the South Lake commercial district and surrounding residential neighborhoods. Historic Mentor Court is immediately adjacent, and Madison Heights is currently under consideration for landmark status. This is an area where Pasadena’s commercial, residential and historic character come together — and where the scale of new development matters enormously.

These places are not impediments to Pasadena’s future. They are part of what makes Pasadena worth investing in.

What does this particular corner of Pasadena represent, and how should a project of this scale respond to everything that is already there?

This is not a blank canvas. It is an already-developed corner of Pasadena, with existing businesses, historic resources, established neighborhoods and a complicated collection of parcels being assembled to fit a much larger project. Some buildings will be demolished, but the surrounding context remains. The challenge is not simply fitting 71 units onto the site. It is fitting them into a place that already has an identity.

The question should not simply be whether the building meets the rules or whether its mass can be rearranged. It should also be whether the project, taken as a whole, respects the place it is entering.

The public response reinforces that point. Dozens of people showed up for a preliminary consultation — before there was even a vote to approve or deny anything. That should tell both the City and the developer that people see something here that deserves serious attention.

When residents show up that early in the process, the message should not simply be dismissed as resistance to change. It should be treated as information about the place, the project and the level of concern it is already generating.

Density is a number. City-building is something else entirely.

If we are going to add substantially more density, we have to start by looking at what is already there and asking what is worth protecting. New development should respond to the character of a place, not simply overwhelm it.

Can larger buildings be broken into smaller visual forms? Can height be concentrated where it has less impact on historic neighborhoods? Can new architecture frame our mountains and historic buildings rather than compete with them? Can mature trees become organizing elements of new projects rather than obstacles to be removed? Can we continue to make room for the small, quirky, longtime businesses that give our commercial districts personality?

All of this should be part of the equation. Good design is not simply about the building itself. It is also about how that building relates to its surroundings and the impact it will have on the community around it.

This is not about freezing Pasadena in time. It is about making sure new development adds to the city without diminishing what already makes it special.

There are other issues surrounding the South Lake project that deserve attention as it moves forward — parking, traffic, the meaning and permanence of its 55-plus designation, and the proposed removal of protected trees. Those questions matter, and they should be answered.

But the larger question raised Tuesday night was more fundamental:

How do we accommodate growth without allowing new development to overwhelm the places and character that already define Pasadena?

Our history should not become irrelevant simply because our city is growing. The best new development should make room for Pasadena’s future while respecting the places that gave the city its identity.

Pasadena is going to change. Our responsibility is to make sure that change makes the city better, not simply bigger.

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Last week, while walking through Beverly Hills, I came across a stunning oversized art installation positioned on a sidewalk corner—an enormous vase overflowing with vibrant flowers.

It was bold, joyful, and impossible to miss.

It did not sit behind gates or inside a museum. It stood directly in the path of everyday life, transforming an ordinary corner into something memorable.

I found myself smiling.

And almost immediately, I wondered:

Why couldn’t Pasadena do something like this?

I began thinking about places in Pasadena that could benefit from that same kind of imagination, and Fillmore Station came to mind.

Imagine a Metro train station that reflected the extraordinary area around it—a station that was beautiful, welcoming, and a joy to pass through. Sadly, that is not what Fillmore Station feels like today.

The station and its surrounding public spaces are visibly in need of attention. Right beside it sits ArtCenter’s South Campus, one of the world’s leading institutions of art and design. The connection seemed obvious.

The answer is not to copy Beverly Hills. It is to ask how Pasadena might express its own identity just as boldly.

And ArtCenter is only one of the remarkable strengths surrounding Fillmore Station.

Huntington Hospital is essentially at the station. Caltech is a short bike ride away. New housing, established neighborhoods, local businesses, medicine, research, education, art, science, and regional transit all converge in this one part of Pasadena.

Yet we rarely talk about those strengths together.

What if we stopped seeing Fillmore simply as a station in need of repair and began imagining what it could become?

What if it were viewed not merely as a transit stop or a collection of development projects, but as a reflection of Pasadena’s creativity, innovation, healing, and intellectual life?

The artwork in Beverly Hills stayed with me not because Pasadena should imitate another city, but because it reminded me what beauty can do.

It can cause people to stop.

It can create memories.

It can give a place its own identity.

And it can make us imagine something better.

There was a time when Pasadena seemed to spend as much energy imagining its future as it did debating its challenges. Today, our public meetings often feel consumed by immediate conflicts and competing priorities. Those conversations are necessary, but I hope they do not crowd out the larger question of what inspires us—and what kind of city we are trying to create together.

A city does not function through isolated decisions.

Housing affects schools and the stability of neighborhoods. Schools influence where families choose to live. Beautiful public spaces support local businesses, and thriving businesses generate the sales tax that funds city services.

Public safety shapes whether people feel comfortable using parks, libraries, transit, and neighborhood commercial districts. Transportation influences housing and economic development. Historic preservation contributes to identity and tourism. Art and culture attract visitors, employers, students, and investment.

Even homelessness cannot be understood apart from mental health, addiction, housing costs, prevention, public safety, economic opportunity, and the capacity of surrounding neighborhoods and service systems.

It is all connected.

Yet too often, these subjects are discussed one agenda item at a time—one housing target, one bike lane, one budget request, one shelter proposal, one development project.

Each discussion may be necessary. But a city is not a collection of separate categories.

It is a living place, and every decision affects the whole.

Perhaps that is why the flowers affected me so deeply. They were not simply beautiful. They were a reminder that one thoughtful idea can change how people experience an entire place.

Somehow, Pasadena needs to return to that kind of thinking. The best ideas do not exist in isolation. They create ripple effects that strengthen neighborhoods, support local businesses, enrich public spaces, and inspire people to see their city differently.

Pasadena did not become extraordinary by accident.

Someone imagined the Tournament of Roses.

Someone imagined Caltech becoming one of the world’s great centers of scientific discovery.

Someone imagined The Huntington as a place where art, literature, history, and gardens could inspire generations they would never meet.

Someone imagined ArtCenter.

Someone imagined the Pasadena Playhouse.

Someone planted the trees that still define so many of Pasadena’s streets today.

Someone designed the homes and buildings that, more than a century later, still give Pasadena so much of its character.

They were not simply managing a city.

They were creating one.

I do not pretend to know exactly how Pasadena returns to that spirit of imagination. I do not have a blueprint or a master plan.

But I do know that great cities are not built by treating every issue as an isolated problem.

They are built when people understand the relationship between education and neighborhoods, art and business, public spaces and economic vitality, transit and opportunity, history and innovation.

The dots are already here—our institutions, our neighborhoods, our businesses, our parks, our artists, our scientists, our doctors and nurses, our educators, our volunteers, and our history.

What is missing is not potential.

It is the vision that connects it all.

Perhaps it is time for Pasadena to start connecting the dots again.

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When you begin a puzzle, you don’t start with the pieces. You start with the picture on the box.

That picture doesn’t tell you where every piece belongs, but it gives each piece meaning. Without it, you’re left trying to solve one small section at a time, hoping everything eventually fits together.

For more than a decade, I’ve attended City Council meetings, Planning Commission hearings, neighborhood meetings, and community planning workshops. Like many residents, I usually arrived focused on a single issue—a development proposal, a traffic concern, homelessness, public safety, housing, or another important topic.

But over time, something changed.

I found myself paying less attention to the individual pieces and more attention to the picture that was beginning to emerge.

What kind of Pasadena were all of these decisions creating together?

That question has stayed with me because cities aren’t experienced one agenda item at a time. They’re experienced through neighborhoods that evolve over years and decades. Every decision—whether about housing, transportation, economic development, homelessness services, public facilities, parks, healthcare, historic preservation, or environmental sustainability—becomes part of a much larger story.

Some readers may say, “Isn’t that exactly what the General Plan and our Specific Plans are supposed to do?”

They’re right.

In fact, I participated in the planning process for my own neighborhood years ago. Those conversations felt different. We weren’t reacting to a proposal already before us. We were asking a much broader question: What do we want this neighborhood to become? Residents, businesses, planners, and city leaders worked together to create a shared vision before the individual projects arrived.

Looking back, I realize those planning efforts began with the picture on the box.

Today, I sometimes wonder if we’ve become so busy responding to immediate challenges and evaluating individual proposals that we’ve drifted away from that way of thinking. The picture hasn’t disappeared. Our General Plan, Specific Plans, and community vision still exist. But too often, our conversations begin with the next piece instead of returning to the picture that should guide where it belongs.

The City already evaluates whether proposals are consistent with zoning, the General Plan, and applicable Specific Plans. Those findings are an important part of good planning. But too often, the discussion feels technical rather than meaningful. We demonstrate compliance, but we don’t always communicate the vision.

Residents shouldn’t have to piece that story together on their own.

Every significant proposal should answer one simple question:

How does this decision help build the future we said we wanted for this neighborhood?

Not simply how does it comply with the plan.

How does it advance the plan?

How does it strengthen the neighborhood?

How does it fit with the surrounding housing, businesses, institutions, transportation, parks, public spaces, and other planned investments that together create the character of a place?

Those are the conversations that make planning meaningful. They connect technical analysis to the lived experience of the people who call a neighborhood home.

That isn’t a criticism of any one project or any one decision. Pasadena has faced extraordinary challenges in recent years—housing mandates, homelessness, infrastructure needs, recovery from the Eaton Fire, public safety concerns, budget pressures, and the everyday demands of governing a complex city. Those issues deserve serious attention.

But perhaps they also remind us why planning matters.

Planning isn’t simply about deciding whether a project is appropriate. It is the discipline of making sure today’s decisions strengthen tomorrow’s Pasadena.

Pasadena has no shortage of worthy goals. We care about housing, homelessness, economic development, public safety, parks, infrastructure, historic preservation, environmental sustainability, and thriving neighborhoods. Every one of those priorities matters.

The challenge isn’t choosing between them.

The challenge is ensuring they strengthen one another.

The picture on the box shouldn’t belong to one councilmember, one planner, one neighborhood, or one interest group. It should be a shared vision shaped by the people who live here, work here, invest here, and who will inherit this city long after today’s agenda is forgotten.

Residents are often invited into the conversation after a proposal has largely taken shape. By then, we’re usually discussing a single piece of the puzzle. Imagine instead beginning with the picture itself—engaging residents, businesses, institutions, property owners, and city leaders earlier, and asking not only whether a proposal is appropriate, but how it contributes to the future we have already said we want to create.

I believe Pasadena is capable of this conversation. We are a city with extraordinary neighborhoods, remarkable institutions, engaged residents, talented planners, dedicated public servants, and people who care deeply about our future.

We don’t need to invent a new philosophy.

We simply need to return to one that has served us well.

Before we decide where the next piece belongs, let’s spend a little more time looking at the picture on the box.

The picture on the box isn’t just a vision. It’s a promise—a promise that each decision will be measured not only by whether it can stand on its own, but by whether it helps create the Pasadena we have chosen to build together.

Because if we can agree on the picture, placing the pieces becomes a great deal easier.

That, to me, is what planning is for.

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At Pasadena’s recent Planning Commission discussion on safe parking, I was struck by how quickly the conversation moved ahead of the information.

The City is being asked to respond urgently to people living in their vehicles. But the discussion did not establish the basic facts needed to understand the scope of the problem. How many people are actually living in vehicles in Pasadena? How many safe parking spaces are needed? Where is that need concentrated? Which sites are realistic? How are the existing safe parking programs performing?

These are not minor details. They are the foundation for responsible planning.

A basic question should have been asked at the outset: why is this coming forward for discussion before the City has presented the information needed to evaluate it? That is not a delay tactic; it is proper planning.

The City should listen to advocates, but it should not allow advocacy to become the planning record. Public policy cannot be built on urgency alone. Before Pasadena expands safe parking or identifies sites, the City needs its own independent analysis of need, feasibility, location impacts, operations, and long-term public use.

Compassion is important. But compassion cannot replace planning.

There is a difference between compassion and allowing emotion to substitute for analysis. Compassion matters. But when urgency is used to move past basic facts, feasibility, and consequences, the City risks making decisions that may not serve the people the programs are intended to help, or the neighborhoods asked to absorb the impacts.

In city planning, urgency cannot become the only standard. The City still has to ask where programs belong, how they will operate, what impacts they may create, and whether public land is being used in a way that serves the long-term interests of the whole community.

During the safe parking discussion, a commissioner raised private commercial parking lots as a possible idea, including the Best Buy parking lot. That moment illustrated my concern. Before specific private properties are even discussed as plausible options, the City should have basic information about ownership, willingness to participate, liability, security, insurance, customer access, business operations, and surrounding impacts. Privately owned commercial lots are not simply available public resources, and it is difficult to imagine a major retailer agreeing to turn its customer parking lot into a safe parking site without significant legal, operational, and business concerns. The fact that such a site was mentioned at all showed how far the conversation had moved ahead of the factual and practical analysis.

Urgency does not eliminate the need for planning. In fact, urgency makes planning more important. If the City moves too quickly without a clear factual record, it risks creating programs that are poorly located, poorly managed, underused, or harmful to the surrounding area. That does not help the people the programs are intended to serve, and it does not help the neighborhoods asked to absorb the impacts.

This concern is not limited to safe parking. Increasingly, it feels as though major City decisions are being discussed before the impacts are fully understood. Whether the issue is housing, homelessness, development, traffic, public safety, or neighborhood compatibility, Pasadena should not identify preferred outcomes or possible sites before the factual record, operational impacts, combined effects, and long-term planning questions are fully developed.

The concern is process. The cart is being placed before the horse. If Pasadena is going to make decisions that affect neighborhoods, public land, transit corridors, schools, libraries, medical uses, and surrounding businesses, the City must begin with facts, not assumptions.

That is why the safe parking discussion matters.

Rose Palace should not be viewed simply as an available City-owned site for safe parking, a year-round shelter, or any other homeless-serving use. It is part of the Raymond and Fillmore corridor, an area that may change significantly over the next decade with The Affinity project, Huntington Hospital’s investment nearby, future housing along the train line, and the City’s commitment to improve Fillmore Station.

City-owned land is scarce. Once the City commits a public site to one use, it may lose the chance to use that property for parks, open space, a community center, housing, civic uses, or other long-term public needs for decades.

Rose Palace is also only about a half-mile from Union Station’s Adult Center on Raymond Avenue, an existing interim housing and homeless-services site for individual adults. Before adding safe parking, a year-round shelter, or any other homeless-serving use at Rose Palace, the City should evaluate whether this corridor is already carrying a disproportionate share of these uses.

When multiple homeless-serving uses are placed along the same corridor, the question is no longer whether each program can be managed in isolation. The City has to look at the combined burden on public safety, sanitation, transit, nearby businesses, schools, libraries, medical uses, and surrounding neighborhoods.

Safe parking may be helpful. But location still matters. Operations matter. Ownership matters. Public safety and sanitation matter. The long-term use of scarce City-owned land matters.

Before expanding safe parking or identifying possible sites, Pasadena should have a complete factual record. That should include the current homeless count, the estimated number of people living in vehicles, the number of safe parking spaces actually needed, where that need is concentrated, how existing programs are performing, whether private property owners are willing to participate, and whether proposed public sites represent the highest long-term public use.

Good planning is not the opposite of compassion. It is what makes a compassionate response workable, fair, and sustainable.

Pasadena should approach safe parking with both compassion and discipline. No site, including Rose Palace, should move forward until the City has the facts needed to determine whether it belongs there as part of Pasadena’s larger long-term plan.

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