Inglewood is redrawing the city map for the first time in nearly 40 years

Inglewood officials are working on a full rewrite of the city map for the first time in nearly 40 years, laying out how they want the city to grow and change for the next two decades.

Along part of Manchester Boulevard, city planners are setting up an option for developers to rebuild rows of small storefronts with a mix of homes and commercial space. On La Brea Avenue, south of Centinela Avenue, they envision the possibility of dense housing and business blocks as high as six stories.

Jerome Johnson, an Inglewood local, said he’s lived through three decades of change in the city. He recalled watching a “raggedy market” at the corner of La Brea and Centinela make way for the two-story shopping center that’s there today. He said the potential developments around the intersection could be a catch-22.

“There’s a shortage of housing,” Johnson said. “But you don’t want it to turn into New York City.”

It’s all part of the ongoing process for Inglewood’s new general plan, the foundational guide that governs things like what kind of buildings can be built where in the city and how they need to look. A draft land-use plan will go before the Inglewood City Council on Tuesday, then go into the environmental impact review process.

“This is really a historic milestone for the city,” Bernard McCrumby, Inglewood development services director, told The LA Local. 

McCrumby said planners are aiming to open up room for new housing and to revitalize some of the city’s flagging business corridors, without changing the city’s existing residential blocks or sacrificing the grocery stores, barbershops and local restaurants that make neighborhoods tick.

“The stadiums and arenas are here, they’re not going anywhere,” McCrumby said. “Now we can plan around those.”

The last time the city did a full update of its general plan was 1987, when horses were still racing at Hollywood Park and the “Showtime” Lakers were winning championships at the Forum. Edward Vincent Jr., the city’s first Black mayor, had only been in office for four years. 

The city has made intermittent updates to its planning guidelines since then — notably remapping a band of Inglewood along the Metro K line before it opened — but city documents indicate planners spent the past couple years working on a comprehensive rewrite. 

The new update to the general plan could set the city’s direction until 2050.

Planners hope to change some of the city’s commercial corridors into mixed-use zones that allow for housing and businesses alongside each other or even stacked on top of each other.

Those zones could go in place along Century Boulevard and Arbor Vitae Street as well as Manchester, Centinela and La Brea.

The rest of the update, McCrumby said, is aimed at lining the city’s zoning regulations up with state law and the city’s current reality on the ground.

City staff held several community meetings over the last year as they put together the draft and still aren’t done gathering feedback. 

The next year will see at least one more community meeting and a 45-day public review period, according to city documents. McCrumby said that, with the anchor of the land-use map in place, planners will continue to work on the rest of the general plan, targeting final City Council approval of the plan and accompanying environmental impact report next spring.

You can get all the details on the general plan at nextlevelinglewood.com and attend the City Council meeting at 2 p.m. on Tuesday to give a public comment.

We also want to know what you think of the proposed changes. Email isaiah@thelalocal.org with your questions or thoughts.