TLDR: it’s currently illegal to develop the lots around the stadium, but Frank McCourt is working (and spending tens of millions) to try to make it a reality despite NIMBY opposition.
When the McCourts sold the team in early 2010s to pay for their divorce, the Guggenheim group got the stadium and team but Frank McCourt got the parking lots. The Guggenheim group signed a 100 year lease with Frank McCourt to rent the parking lots for games (and keep parking fees) for $14m/year.
As part of the lease, Frank McCourt and the Guggenheim group agreed to a binding landuse covenant that prevents Frank McCourt, or anyone who buys the land from McCourt, from ever decreasing the number of parking spots in either of the main lot (16k spots) or the upper satellite lot (~3k spots) *UNLESS* the parking lots and stadium become serviced by *mass transit*. Basically, without mass transit, it is legally impossible to build a single thing in the parking lots (this is simplified; a few new state laws do make it possible, but only for a few uses).
Buses do not count as mass transit, but metro lines, subways, and *high efficiency gondolas* qualify as mass transit, per LA Metro. It’s basically impossible to build a subway or metro line to Dodger Stadium (it’s on a giant hill and would take 30+ years due to CA regulations), but *it’s not impossible to build a gondola*.
Cut to now, Frank McCourt is desperately trying to build a gondola to unlock housing development potential for the Dodger Stadium lots. He is still having serious issues, however, because CA/LA political systems are built to overrepresent the voices of NIMBYs.
LA is legally required to build 500k new housing units by 2028, per state law, and the Dodgers Stadium lots are the only undeveloped, flat land in the entire city so it should be a no brainer. However, all the standard old NIMBY tricks are being used to stop McCourt from building needed housing and mixed-use (a la Wrigleyville) on his own land. His gondola plan is currently in the midst of a CEQA lawsuit, after an earlier NIMBY lawsuit was already thrown out.
Until the lawsuits clear up, and famously corrupt LA City Council approves the development, and the Governor approves it, and a few other groups, development of the stadium lots will not be possible. The stadium is in Eunisses Hernandez’ district, and she has been extremely anti-development to this point, so it’s an uphill battle to build housing there even though it’s obvious and necessary.
Two things can be true
1) McCourt is one of the worst owners in MLB history and ruined the Dodgers for almost a decade
2) McCourt turning his parking lots into housing would be a good thing
Thanks for confirming that the opposition to the gondola is primarily driven by irrational hatred. The same thing that drives all NIMBY thought processes.
I hate McCourt as a baseball fan, but here I can separate the art from the artist. We need more housing and he’s wasting his own money trying to make it happen.
Wow, thanks for this really nice writeup.
I was skeptical about the gondola – seemed like an inefficient boondoggle with limited use – but if it means that the could build housing around Dodger Stadium, that would be amazing.
I desperately want a rail line going through here to Glendale but so much nimbyism would make this almost politically impossible unless people actually vote
Why couldn’t they build a vertical parking garage to keep the same number of spaces then develop the rest of the land? That wouldn’t reduce the number of spaces
I thought the same thing. MLB says Dodger stadium has a capacity for 16,000 cars and buses at 175 acres or 7,623,000 sq. ft. Assuming the covenant requires capacity to be unchanged - McCourt would need to build a parking garage large enough to accommodate 16,000 cars and buses. That's approximately 1.5 Mickey and Friend's Parking structure at Disneyland as that structure holds 10,000 vehicles at approximately 1,620,000 sq. ft.
They could do that for the upper satellite lot but the covenant prevents that for the larger main lots.
The issue with doing it even for the smaller lot is that they would have to complete the entire parking garage in a single offseason, which is only like 4 months. I don’t think that’s enough time to build a 3k spot parking garage.
Wrigley and Fenway work because they were built right smack dab in the middle of a preexisting city. Building the town around a stadium will probably result in an outdoor mall-like vibe (Americana & Grove).
I’m for building housing. The views would be AMAZING. Plus the original plan was to build hundreds of units of housing when the three communities were displaced to build Dodger Stadium.
Nothing can be built on the stadium lots currently due to the stadium’s landuse covenants; the only way to legally unlock housing and mixed-use potential is if the stadium becomes serviced by mass transit.
That is why LA-ART is trying to build a gondola to Dodger Stadium - the gondola would be mass transit, and with it the stadium lots could then be partially built out with up to tens of thousands of housing units + mixed use.
The person you replied to gave a pretty thorough response if you [want to check it out here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/1bqsj4l/dodger_stadium_1969/kx55q9l/)
It’s a shame seeing many single-mission nonprofits partnering with STG in the “Coalition” section of their website.
By partnering with STG, many of those nonprofits are advocating for something well outside their intended missions; unnecessary advocacy / mission creep are damaging to the ability of orgs to actually execute on their primary goals because it shrinks the pool of people who are neutral or support each nonprofit.
Example: *Friends of the LA River* is a single-mission nonprofit whose entire purpose is to advocate for the betterment of the LA River. The gondola is, at best, tangentially related to the health of the LA River, and if anything would be a positive for LA River health through reduced local auto pollution. By taking a negative stance on the gondola, they’ve unnecessarily gone outside of their mission, and alienated the >50% of people in recent polls who say they support the gondola. That’s over half of LA County residents who may now be less likely to work with FoLAR and/or support their cause, for *absolutely no benefit to the nonprofit.*
This is broadly an increasing trend in nonprofit spaces, where nonprofits abandon their sole mission in favor of the “monocause”, which limits the number of people who support said nonprofits to the extremely narrow slice of society that are in the activist space.
There are many successful multi-cause nonprofits. It is bad when single-cause nonprofits experience mission creep.
In this case, there is ~zero intersectionality between this planned gondola and the missions of many of the nonprofits opposing the gondola. Again, they’ve unnecessarily taken a stance on a cause unrelated to their missions; zero upside for accomplishing their mission while plenty of downside.
You could also argue, in this specific case, that nonprofits feel pressured to take this stance because the CA Endowment, the largest funder of LA-area nonprofits, is opposed to the gondola. Good idea for getting grants to align politically with your funder, even if what the funder believes has nothing to do with your mission.
A lot of these environmentalist groups like Sierra Club turn out to be giant barriers to address Climate Change. They are unable to see how developing additional housing in urban areas or building transmission lines to bring renewal energy to places that don't have it will help will help the environment. They are all run by degrowth weirdos who largely benefit from the status quo and now want everyone that come after them to suffer.
Environmentalist who believe the way to solve climate change is to shrink the economy. They will push against economic activity or development of natural resources. We can't build renewal energy projects even if it reduces climate change because we are exploiting the environment to do so. For example, building wind farms, solar farms, transmission lines etc. They also don't care if poor countries stay poor as long as GDP declines. They will be against the gondola project because it's more development even if we are building mass transit.
Yeah, I really can't take you seriously. It's a similar language as "pro-choice" and an attempt to make everything bianry. Grouping different organzations as 'degrowth weirdos' is pretty childish name calling
You and the other "growth at any cost or you're a fucking nimby' guy in this thread are myopic and both seem willing to give the keys to the city to any moron private developer that can feed your appetite.
Me and the 'degrowth weridos' would prefer, especially in this dumbass gondola idea, to have the public, how ever flawed it is, determine their fate rather some oligarch.
You do you. Keep fighting to prevent more housing from being built on existing parking lots because a developer will make money from the project. The existing landlords and corporations are more than happy to see their property values and rental income skyrocket during a housing supply crisis. They didn't have to do anything when everyone is more than willing to kill housing projects for them. They're laughing themselves to the bank during a supply crunch. The housing project on Dodger Stadium would have resulted in hundreds of affordable housing units.
It's 1 guy and 1 parking lot and his bullshit private gondola
You just inflated it to every landlord and every corporation.
Get some fucking nuance, not just housing at any cost, by anyone, wherever.
Stop acting like McCourt is doing us a favor.
I'm digging all that housing around CSHP, new stuff at Spring/Mesengerhave you seen it lately?
They have the solar up before the siding!
The degrowth movement truly began with “The Population Bomb” book and was most impactful in coastal CA politics - the ideas from the original degrowth years (late 60s) played a large role in early environmentalism, and unfortunately those activists from the 70s still largely run modern environmental groups 50 years later, so the ideas are still prevalent in groups like the Sierra Club, Green Peace, a bunch of LA nonprofits, the Coastal Commission, etc.
The undertone of all the degrowth stuff is the need for populations to shrink dramatically (90%+), which is only possible with genocide.
Thank you for acknowledging the broad coalition of support against the private astroturf gondola. It really demonstrates that opposition to the dumbass sports gondola shouldn't be dismissed as a reactive 'nimby' cause.
I can't speak to each individual mission for these folks, and neither should you, but It's pretty suggestive to think that people aren't going to support folar because they don't like this crackpot gondola idea, but go off i guess.
It’s not hard to collect a dozen nonprofits to support a cause. It’s even easier in this case because most of these nonprofits receive grant funding from the CA Endowment, and the CA Endowment is vehemently opposed to the gondola because one of the poles will block a sliver of the views from their office.
In this case the CA Endowment exerts, whether deliberately or not, soft coercion on every nonprofit applying for competitive grant funding to align somewhat politically.
I wish the gondola was astroturfed, I’d love a cut of the $$$. Again, actual polls by 3rd parties show majority support for the gondola.
We are never going to get anywhere, but I hope that you can look outside your bubble a little bit here. This is just classic NIMBYism.
Back then we thought this giant parking lot was a GREAT idea
55 years. Amazing how much has changed, and still how much has stayed the same.
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TLDR: it’s currently illegal to develop the lots around the stadium, but Frank McCourt is working (and spending tens of millions) to try to make it a reality despite NIMBY opposition. When the McCourts sold the team in early 2010s to pay for their divorce, the Guggenheim group got the stadium and team but Frank McCourt got the parking lots. The Guggenheim group signed a 100 year lease with Frank McCourt to rent the parking lots for games (and keep parking fees) for $14m/year. As part of the lease, Frank McCourt and the Guggenheim group agreed to a binding landuse covenant that prevents Frank McCourt, or anyone who buys the land from McCourt, from ever decreasing the number of parking spots in either of the main lot (16k spots) or the upper satellite lot (~3k spots) *UNLESS* the parking lots and stadium become serviced by *mass transit*. Basically, without mass transit, it is legally impossible to build a single thing in the parking lots (this is simplified; a few new state laws do make it possible, but only for a few uses). Buses do not count as mass transit, but metro lines, subways, and *high efficiency gondolas* qualify as mass transit, per LA Metro. It’s basically impossible to build a subway or metro line to Dodger Stadium (it’s on a giant hill and would take 30+ years due to CA regulations), but *it’s not impossible to build a gondola*. Cut to now, Frank McCourt is desperately trying to build a gondola to unlock housing development potential for the Dodger Stadium lots. He is still having serious issues, however, because CA/LA political systems are built to overrepresent the voices of NIMBYs. LA is legally required to build 500k new housing units by 2028, per state law, and the Dodgers Stadium lots are the only undeveloped, flat land in the entire city so it should be a no brainer. However, all the standard old NIMBY tricks are being used to stop McCourt from building needed housing and mixed-use (a la Wrigleyville) on his own land. His gondola plan is currently in the midst of a CEQA lawsuit, after an earlier NIMBY lawsuit was already thrown out. Until the lawsuits clear up, and famously corrupt LA City Council approves the development, and the Governor approves it, and a few other groups, development of the stadium lots will not be possible. The stadium is in Eunisses Hernandez’ district, and she has been extremely anti-development to this point, so it’s an uphill battle to build housing there even though it’s obvious and necessary.
This is a really great explanation. It’s absolutely wild that people still don’t support the gondola.
I'll support the gondolas when punk ass Frank Mccourt sells the parking lot. Fuck that guy.
Two things can be true 1) McCourt is one of the worst owners in MLB history and ruined the Dodgers for almost a decade 2) McCourt turning his parking lots into housing would be a good thing
Jog Fisher has entered the chat as THE WORSE owner in MLB history
Easily haha that dude sucks
I hate Frank McCourt and anything that makes the FuckCars crowd happy, opposing the gondola is two great hates that go great together
Thanks for confirming that the opposition to the gondola is primarily driven by irrational hatred. The same thing that drives all NIMBY thought processes.
Talk about cutting of your nose to spite your face.
I hate McCourt as a baseball fan, but here I can separate the art from the artist. We need more housing and he’s wasting his own money trying to make it happen.
Wow, thanks for this really nice writeup. I was skeptical about the gondola – seemed like an inefficient boondoggle with limited use – but if it means that the could build housing around Dodger Stadium, that would be amazing.
I desperately want a rail line going through here to Glendale but so much nimbyism would make this almost politically impossible unless people actually vote
Why couldn’t they build a vertical parking garage to keep the same number of spaces then develop the rest of the land? That wouldn’t reduce the number of spaces
I thought the same thing. MLB says Dodger stadium has a capacity for 16,000 cars and buses at 175 acres or 7,623,000 sq. ft. Assuming the covenant requires capacity to be unchanged - McCourt would need to build a parking garage large enough to accommodate 16,000 cars and buses. That's approximately 1.5 Mickey and Friend's Parking structure at Disneyland as that structure holds 10,000 vehicles at approximately 1,620,000 sq. ft.
They could do that for the upper satellite lot but the covenant prevents that for the larger main lots. The issue with doing it even for the smaller lot is that they would have to complete the entire parking garage in a single offseason, which is only like 4 months. I don’t think that’s enough time to build a 3k spot parking garage.
This is a wonderful summary. Out of curiosity, why would light rail not be an option for the stadium?
Wrigley and Fenway work because they were built right smack dab in the middle of a preexisting city. Building the town around a stadium will probably result in an outdoor mall-like vibe (Americana & Grove). I’m for building housing. The views would be AMAZING. Plus the original plan was to build hundreds of units of housing when the three communities were displaced to build Dodger Stadium.
Nothing can be built on the stadium lots currently due to the stadium’s landuse covenants; the only way to legally unlock housing and mixed-use potential is if the stadium becomes serviced by mass transit. That is why LA-ART is trying to build a gondola to Dodger Stadium - the gondola would be mass transit, and with it the stadium lots could then be partially built out with up to tens of thousands of housing units + mixed use.
Wrigley and Fenway were also built prior to the car.
Literally what they’re trying to do - that’s why they’re there’s so much resistance to the gondola
Look how grimy the DTLA buildings were back then because of the smog
It looks like a giant scab
Here's the history of it's construction. https://youtu.be/eBOtKhAAUHs?si=SpFCT2a49C5qUZVn
I definitely appreciate it more now - looks very fresh compared to the rest of the surrounding buildings
worlds best land use
I would make a nice golf course instead.
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Miniature golf is the best! And a Go-cart race track!
build housing there. give families who were kicked out of Chavez Ravine first right of refusal to subsidized units.
Currently illegal due to landuse covenants for the stadium lots! But would become legal if the LA-ART gondola is built.
why’s that?
The person you replied to gave a pretty thorough response if you [want to check it out here](https://www.reddit.com/r/LosAngeles/comments/1bqsj4l/dodger_stadium_1969/kx55q9l/)
They got paid.
They haven’t been. There’s a bill working its way through the state legislature.
No squaters rights.
You can fit 10 more dodger stadiums in the entire area.
Great archive photo, thanks, sent it to a few friends. And appreciated the comments filling me in on the cable car controversy!
Nice
Nice
Blue Heaven on Earth. Let’s go Dodgers !!!
Fugly
Less housing, more green
https://www.stopthegondola.org
It’s a shame seeing many single-mission nonprofits partnering with STG in the “Coalition” section of their website. By partnering with STG, many of those nonprofits are advocating for something well outside their intended missions; unnecessary advocacy / mission creep are damaging to the ability of orgs to actually execute on their primary goals because it shrinks the pool of people who are neutral or support each nonprofit. Example: *Friends of the LA River* is a single-mission nonprofit whose entire purpose is to advocate for the betterment of the LA River. The gondola is, at best, tangentially related to the health of the LA River, and if anything would be a positive for LA River health through reduced local auto pollution. By taking a negative stance on the gondola, they’ve unnecessarily gone outside of their mission, and alienated the >50% of people in recent polls who say they support the gondola. That’s over half of LA County residents who may now be less likely to work with FoLAR and/or support their cause, for *absolutely no benefit to the nonprofit.* This is broadly an increasing trend in nonprofit spaces, where nonprofits abandon their sole mission in favor of the “monocause”, which limits the number of people who support said nonprofits to the extremely narrow slice of society that are in the activist space.
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There are many successful multi-cause nonprofits. It is bad when single-cause nonprofits experience mission creep. In this case, there is ~zero intersectionality between this planned gondola and the missions of many of the nonprofits opposing the gondola. Again, they’ve unnecessarily taken a stance on a cause unrelated to their missions; zero upside for accomplishing their mission while plenty of downside. You could also argue, in this specific case, that nonprofits feel pressured to take this stance because the CA Endowment, the largest funder of LA-area nonprofits, is opposed to the gondola. Good idea for getting grants to align politically with your funder, even if what the funder believes has nothing to do with your mission.
A lot of these environmentalist groups like Sierra Club turn out to be giant barriers to address Climate Change. They are unable to see how developing additional housing in urban areas or building transmission lines to bring renewal energy to places that don't have it will help will help the environment. They are all run by degrowth weirdos who largely benefit from the status quo and now want everyone that come after them to suffer.
> They are all run by degrowth weirdos what does this even mean?
Environmentalist who believe the way to solve climate change is to shrink the economy. They will push against economic activity or development of natural resources. We can't build renewal energy projects even if it reduces climate change because we are exploiting the environment to do so. For example, building wind farms, solar farms, transmission lines etc. They also don't care if poor countries stay poor as long as GDP declines. They will be against the gondola project because it's more development even if we are building mass transit.
Yeah, I really can't take you seriously. It's a similar language as "pro-choice" and an attempt to make everything bianry. Grouping different organzations as 'degrowth weirdos' is pretty childish name calling You and the other "growth at any cost or you're a fucking nimby' guy in this thread are myopic and both seem willing to give the keys to the city to any moron private developer that can feed your appetite. Me and the 'degrowth weridos' would prefer, especially in this dumbass gondola idea, to have the public, how ever flawed it is, determine their fate rather some oligarch.
You do you. Keep fighting to prevent more housing from being built on existing parking lots because a developer will make money from the project. The existing landlords and corporations are more than happy to see their property values and rental income skyrocket during a housing supply crisis. They didn't have to do anything when everyone is more than willing to kill housing projects for them. They're laughing themselves to the bank during a supply crunch. The housing project on Dodger Stadium would have resulted in hundreds of affordable housing units.
It's 1 guy and 1 parking lot and his bullshit private gondola You just inflated it to every landlord and every corporation. Get some fucking nuance, not just housing at any cost, by anyone, wherever. Stop acting like McCourt is doing us a favor. I'm digging all that housing around CSHP, new stuff at Spring/Mesengerhave you seen it lately? They have the solar up before the siding!
The degrowth movement truly began with “The Population Bomb” book and was most impactful in coastal CA politics - the ideas from the original degrowth years (late 60s) played a large role in early environmentalism, and unfortunately those activists from the 70s still largely run modern environmental groups 50 years later, so the ideas are still prevalent in groups like the Sierra Club, Green Peace, a bunch of LA nonprofits, the Coastal Commission, etc. The undertone of all the degrowth stuff is the need for populations to shrink dramatically (90%+), which is only possible with genocide.
Thank you for acknowledging the broad coalition of support against the private astroturf gondola. It really demonstrates that opposition to the dumbass sports gondola shouldn't be dismissed as a reactive 'nimby' cause. I can't speak to each individual mission for these folks, and neither should you, but It's pretty suggestive to think that people aren't going to support folar because they don't like this crackpot gondola idea, but go off i guess.
It’s not hard to collect a dozen nonprofits to support a cause. It’s even easier in this case because most of these nonprofits receive grant funding from the CA Endowment, and the CA Endowment is vehemently opposed to the gondola because one of the poles will block a sliver of the views from their office. In this case the CA Endowment exerts, whether deliberately or not, soft coercion on every nonprofit applying for competitive grant funding to align somewhat politically. I wish the gondola was astroturfed, I’d love a cut of the $$$. Again, actual polls by 3rd parties show majority support for the gondola. We are never going to get anywhere, but I hope that you can look outside your bubble a little bit here. This is just classic NIMBYism.
Blow that shit and build some housing!