Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti has made innovation a focus of his first term as the city’s top executive. He has chosen Rick Cole, his deputy mayor for budget and innovation, to lead the search for a new innovation team director.
Central to the team’s mission will be to figure out how to resurrect parts of Los Angeles, while remaining sensitive to the fact that as neighborhoods improve, poor people are often displaced.
Garcetti wants a city that focuses on “a data-driven culture of innovation and excellence” focused on open data and results-based budgeting.
The Planning Report spoke to Cole about the vision for the new “I-Team,” which received $2.5 million in seed money from Bloomberg Philanthropies, and how to revitalize Los Angeles without simply displacing thousands of the urban poor.
“The “i-team” approach starts with a data-driven “deep dive” to truly analyze the problem. It turns out that a new and better understanding of the problem creates an opportunity for new and better solutions to the problem,” he says.
“For example, there is plenty of anecdotal evidence that when low-income neighborhoods become attractive to young professionals they become unaffordable to long-time residents. Increasing housing values can clearly change neighborhood demographics over time. But the latest research that’s been done across the country shows that the reality of neighborhood revitalization is much more nuanced than the popular stereotype. We think it’s crucial to do the analysis to see what’s happening in LA now—in order to take a smarter approach to public policy. The goal is to take advantage of something that’s clearly positive: neighborhoods seeing more private investment—and ensure the current residents and businesses in those neighborhoods enjoy the benefits. So ultimately, the specific metrics we use to measure success will come from a deeper understanding of the challenge—and the opportunity.
You can read the entire Q&A here.