It was 6:30 a.m. on a misty March morning in Venice Beach, and Lysa Cooper was walking her dogs on Superba Avenue when her elderly pooch, Sugar Ray Robinson, had a heart attack.
Cooper scooped him into her arms and ran for help, but she didn’t make it far. A tree root had lifted a panel of the sidewalk into the air.
“It caused a huge gap in the cement,” Cooper recalls. “It caught my foot, and I went flying.”
Cooper dropped Sugar Ray before she fell but she shattered her arm, and knitting it back together after the 2019 accident required two surgeries. (Sugar Ray Robinson survived the heart attack but passed away months later.)
She couldn’t move for six weeks after she fell. On crutches, Cooper realized how difficult it would be to get around her neighborhood in a wheelchair.
She later sued the city and won a $300,000 payout. And she’s not alone. Between 2019 and 2023, sidewalk injury lawsuits cost the city roughly $65 million.
Cooper thinks this is kind of crazy.
“Fix them already,” she says. “Why are you going to court over and over and over about the same f—ing hole?”
But LA City Councilmember Bob Blumenfield, chair of the council’s budget and finance committee, says it can’t be done — at least right now.
A recent city estimate found that “to fix all the sidewalks over the course of 10 years would be more than $2 billion,” he tells KCRW. “Just way more than we could potentially even dream about as a city.”
This fiscal year, the city spent its entire budget for liability settlements in just a few months. And — catch-22 alert — that means it may cut spending on infrastructure, like fixing sidewalks, even more.
Blumenfield says that in most California cities, property owners are liable for the condition of the sidewalks adjacent to their land. He thinks LA’s mistake was to start repairing sidewalks in the first place back in the 1970s, instead of leaving it to property owners.
“Under the theory of no good deed goes unpunished, the more we fixed and did, the more it became an expectation,” he says. “Once it's an expectation and a pattern in practice, then it becomes a liability.”
Then, in 1978, California voters passed Proposition 13, which lowered property taxes and shrank city budgets.
That meant “the city didn't have the money to pay for sidewalks, so the sidewalks have just decayed for 50 years,” says Donald Shoup, an urban planning professor at UCLA.
Tree roots lift the sidewalk past its breaking point on Kingsley Drive in Thai Town. Photo by Jack Ross.
Shoup says if the government won’t tax property owners more for sidewalk repairs, it should make them fix sidewalks themselves, like they used to.
He has an idea for how: He wants banks to loan people money for repairs, and to let owners pay the loans back when their properties are sold.
“The median price of a single-family home in Los Angeles is $1.1 million,” Shoup says. “So when they sell the house, they're flush with cash, and they should be able to pay for their sidewalk repairs.”
Some urban planners are skeptical this would work. The idea hinges on politicians being brave enough to make property owners spend a lot of money. Plus, lower-income property owners may not have the cash, which means repairs might not be made as often in poorer neighborhoods.
And some urban planners say the problem in LA runs deeper — that the city has been missing something really important when it comes to sidewalks: A plan.
Specifically, a Capital Infrastructure Plan (CIP), which would be a big guide for how all the different offices in a city will work together on infrastructure. A CIP designates projects, allocates money, and can cover five or ten years at a time.
“I've been talking to people in D.C. and in Sacramento and other cities, and whenever I tell anyone the City of LA has no capital infrastructure plan, often people laugh,” says Jessica Meaney, executive director of the nonprofit Investing in Place. “They're just shocked.”
Meaney says Los Angeles needs a CIP to coordinate sidewalk repairs — and also for vital sidewalk improvements that property owners cannot make, like cutting wheelchair ramps, removing the tree roots that are upending sidewalks, and widening sidewalks so they’re accessible to disabled people.
Nobody working for the city would say the sidewalks are in good condition.
In fact, in 2016, the City of LA settled a lawsuit with disability rights activists and agreed to spend $1.4 billion on sidewalk repairs and improvements.
But they’ve made little progress. And last year the city said that wait-times for those fixes “can exceed 10 years.”
Mayor Karen Bass recently took steps to make a CIP, ordering staff to develop a multiyear investment plan, and department heads to coordinate their work in a steering committee.
But that won’t bring changes right away. And in the meantime, the trees are growing, the sidewalks are contorting, and people are falling.
Lysa Cooper shows me another stretch of jagged sidewalk in Venice that looks to her like “a skateboard ramp gone horribly wrong.”
“I tell all my little friends with their skateboards, come and do this street,” she says. “They have helmets on. They're prepared to fall.”
