The Mar Vista Greenway Ballona Creek Community Greening Plan is the first step in a greener, more resilient and inclusive creek path and public housing campus in West Los Angeles. Partnering with the Mar Vista Gardens community and the Boys and Girls Club, KDI led an inclusive, participatory planning and design process to envision new green infrastructure improvements in the neighborhood and along the nearby Ballona Creek path.
Context
The Ballona Creek Bike Path runs adjacent to Mar Vista Gardens but is inaccessible to Mar Vista Gardens residents.
Located at the confluence of the Ballona Creek and the Sepulveda Channel, Mar Vista Gardens is the only public housing project on the Westside of Los Angeles.
Mar Vista Gardens’ nearly 1,800 residents are a stone's throw away from the Ballona Creek Bike Path, a seven mile recreation trail connecting residents and visitors to some of the region’s most prized open spaces, including the Baldwin Hills Scenic Overlook and the beach. Despite the community’s proximity, many MVG residents face numerous physical, socioeconomic, and environmental barriers to accessing open space amenities ostensibly in their own backyard.
Process
Mar Vista Gardens residents attend a community meeting.
KDI worked with residents, local stakeholders, and partners to develop concept designs for priority areas on the public housing campus and in the surrounding community and connect youth to career and recreational opportunities.
Our robust engagement processes included community workshops, mobile engagements along the Ballona Creek Trail and Bike Path, meetings with a Community Advisory Committee, a community survey, and more. Throughout this process, residents prioritized more pedestrian space along the path, improved entrances to the Creek, nature play areas on the MVG campus, a wellness garden along the creek, signage and wayfinding highlighting the existing community, more green spaces for passive recreation, and improved safety. Mar Vista Gardens residents emphasized the importance of greening interventions that would not contribute to the displacement of longtime community members in a process known as green gentrification.
In collaboration with the Boys and Girls Club, KDI offered recreational and career opportunities to Mar Vista Gardens youth. Our experiential learning sessions exposed young people to different career paths in planning, design, and the environment. Fun recreational trips, like a bike ride to the beach, connected the youth to the abundant green spaces in their community.
Solution
Residents prioritized changes at four sites, including the housing campus, trail and bike path, streets, and a local park.
Grounded in our robust community engagement process, we developed the Mar Vista Gardens Community Greening Plan.
The Community Greening Plan recommends updating four key neighborhood areas by improving lighting, increasing seating options and signage, adding new plantings and amenities, and making pedestrian enhancements. One major area for improvement is the northern field area on Mar Vista Gardens' campus. The concept design includes stormwater management interventions like underground stormwater infiltration, biofiltration, native landscaping, and permeable paving.
Impact
Our mobile engagements met community members where they were at, like this one along the Ballona Creek Trail and Bike Path.
With additional funding secured from the Baldwin Hills Conservancy, the Plan is moving toward implementation.
In the project's second phase, we are developing the on-campus designs further and continuing to build community capacity. Once built, the robust, green public spaces network will support community needs and improve the area's environmental quality. In 2024, the Community Greening Plan won an Award of Excellence for Neighborhood Planning from APA Los Angeles.
