Sustainability and the LA Neighborhood Councils

While attending this year’s annual Congress of Neighborhood Councils, I was introduced to the Neighborhood Council Sustainability Alliance (NCSA) who advance “sustainability and resilience across Los Angeles through advocacy, sharing of best practices, and community action.”

Prior to attending the Congress I was curious about which of the 99 Los Angeles Neighborhood Councils had committees with a focus on sustainability / environmental concerns. Starting with the websites listed on the Department of Neighborhood Empowerment’s council listing, I recorded the committees listed on each neighborhood council’s website. I was struck at the diversity of committees across the city (equestrian, historic preservation, wellbeing, arts, and emergency preparedness to name a few) but was focused on identifying those neighborhood councils that had a committee with some variant of “green”, “environment”, “sustainability” or “resilience”. While resilience generally has a different focus, I included that term as it suggests the neighborhood has concerns about the climate and the impact it will have on our lives. In all, I found that about 25 of the neighborhood councils had standing committees that seemed to have some level of activity.

I decided to map the 99 councils highlighting those with a sustainability committee to see where they were and whether there were any patterns. Sure enough, I see two clusters of NCs with sustainability committees: in the harbor area and in the valley.

Beyond the harbor and the valley, there are a few additional neighborhoods with sustainability committees: Echo Park, Silver Lake, Del Ray and Palms to name a few.

Having heard that there were 50 neighborhood councils represented on the NCSA I wanted to get a sense for whether those followed the same pattern and where the roughly 25 neighborhood councils were that did not appear to have a standing sustainability committee but were represented on the Alliance.

One can see that the pattern for the NCSA membership is a superset of those with a sustainability committee with an additional number of neighborhoods in the valley and then a few more to the East.