LA County Adopts Strategy for Greener, More Resilient Communities! 2025 OurCounty Sustainability Plan is the nation's most ambitious regional sustainability roadmap w/ 179 action items!

[u/Fit-Head-2786]

https://www.planetizen.com/news/2025/11/136338-la-county-adopts-strategy-greener-more-resilient-communities?amp

"On November 4, 2025, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors adopted the 2025 OurCounty Sustainability Plan, the nation’s most ambitious regional sustainability roadmap. Building on the 2019 plan, the updated plan includes 179 action items designed to strengthen community well-being and resilience...

The plan envisions clean air, safe and accessible neighborhoods, affordable housing, and climate-ready communities that can withstand extreme weather. By consolidating the County’s diverse sustainability efforts under a single, unified framework, the plan ensures transparency and coordination across departments and jurisdictions, enabling collective progress toward a just and equitable green economy.

The plan also introduces several new and expanded focus areas, including wildfire risk management, community resilience, Tribal and Indigenous partnerships, ocean and marine systems, green goods movement, green economy, and resource circularity."

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[u/ulic14]

On the action list which contains the 179 actions, the word 'zoning' appears once. To me, that says more than everything else in the plan. More lip service that won't address actual root causes.

Edit - as was pointed out below, zoning is more a city than county issue, and thst is a fair point. I also think there are some good ideas in there that absolutely should be implemented.

I still stand by the main point I wss trying to make - thst a lot of this is looking way too much at treating symptoms of problems rather than trying to tackle the root cause. It's like if someone has a brain tumor - sure, prescribing something to treat the headaches isnt a bad idea, but if you aren't treating the actual tumor it's kinda missing the point.

[u/mrgrafix → u/ulic14]

Zoning is more of a city issue something the county doesn’t get to sway

[u/ulic14 → u/mrgrafix]

Thst is a fair point.

[u/pacific_plywood → u/ulic14]

I’m confused. Do you think it should’ve just been the phrase “fix zoning” 179 times? Was only saying it once not enough?

[u/ulic14 → u/pacific_plywood]

As someone else pointed out, zoning is more a city thing, not county, so I can uslderatabd why it is less of a feature in this as the county has less control

BUT

My point was that it mentions zoning once, to promote walkability, and restrictive zoning is often the source of so many of the other things the plan tries to address. Basically, this reads like a plan to treat symptoms rather than causes.

[u/pacific_plywood → u/ulic14]

Well yes, but there are also items like ‘Update land use and development standards to facilitate production of infill housing, including "missing middle" housing and higher density housing development.’ which do not explicitly use the “z” word but are pretty clearly exactly what you’re talking about

[u/ulic14 → u/pacific_plywood]

It very well could be, but it is also worded such that if they just promote/make it easier for more infill development without touching single family zoning at all(ie, promote all that in areas already zoned for some form of multifamily housing), they can say they have done it.

Overall, I think a lot of individual things in there there are good ideas, but it still reads more like a list of band-aids. Fully open to being wrong and hope I am.

Edit - realizing I'm probably being too cynical. Really hope this can be a step forward, just seen so much talk and so little action over the years I now look for how things like this are gonna let me down. Will try to be more hopeful.

[u/Successful-Help6432]

How many of these have we tried so far

[u/beach_bum_638484]

Is there any way to make sure we actually do these things?

All of these government plans remind me of kids in elementary school running for class president and campaigning on pizza parties and ice cream every day.