Downtown Long Beach is a dynamic live, work, play environment, and over the last ten years since the adoption of the Downtown Plan, it has yielded more than 5,000 approved housing units, a new civic center, pedestrian, retail and other improvements; and has been the planning tool behind the majority of the city’s development in the past decade. View the 2022 Year in Review Downtown Plan Update.

PROJECT AREA

The Downtown Plan encompasses the downtown area roughly bounded by the LA River to the west, Alamitos Avenue to the east, Anaheim Street to the north and Ocean Boulevard to the south.

PROJECT GOALS

For this update, the City has seven primary goals, these include:

1. Promote investment and housing growth, with a focus on affordable housing and preventing displacement.
2. Modernize regulations to comply with the State's design standard requirements.
3. Streamline California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) compliance.
4. Align the Downtown Plan with recent policy changes in the Land Use Element (LUE), Housing Element and other city planning efforts.
5. Adopt a Specific Plan consistent with State law, standards and best practices.
6. Provide regulations suitable for the smaller or irregular land use sites within Downtown.
7. Create development regulations that are specific to Downtown, comprehensive, easy to administer and understandable by the public.

Planning staff is currently in the preliminary stages of reviewing the existing plan, analyzing issues and opportunities, considering the historical context and existing conditions, evaluating the Downtown Plan’s impact over the past 10 years, and devising strategies for most effectively updating the plan for the next decade or decades of growth, complying with state law and improving the implementation of the plan for the future.