Anna Apostolos knows sidewalks. Since 2000, she’s orchestrated the repair of tens of thousands of square feet of sidewalk for hundreds of Angelenos.
Her official title is “capital projects specialist” for the Los Angeles Neighborhood Initiative (LANI), which partners with local council districts to repair sidewalks using discretionary funding. Unofficially, Apostolos has become a sidewalk whisperer in a city where fixing the sidewalk can seem impossible.
“[It’s] one of the most fulfilling things that I have done, even though it seems like a small thing. People are so grateful,” she told Next City for this article.
In April, the city of L.A. approved nearly $5.3 million to improve pedestrian facilities near venues for the 2028 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Of that, $4 million will go to LANI and the nonprofit Los Angeles Conservation Corps, which offers paid on-the-job training to local youth ages 18 to 26, to speed up sidewalk repairs.
For many L.A. residents — especially people with disabilities — broken, uplifted sidewalks are a huge barrier to everyday activities. In 2015, the city settled an ADA lawsuit brought by disabled residents, agreeing to spend $1.4 billion over 30 years on accessibility improvements.
Over 10 years later, the program has barely made a dent, with some Angelenos waiting a decade for their access requests to be completed.
The city’s new initiative, spearheaded by Mayor Karen Bass, leverages existing partnerships with nonprofits to change that.
A cheat code for fixing sidewalks in your neighborhood
For over a decade, LANI has helped homeowners fix the buckled, unpassable sidewalks that the city has failed to address.
“Some people, they couldn’t even get homeowners’ insurance anymore because of the uplifted sidewalks,” Apostolos said.
LANI was founded in 1994 by then-Mayor Richard Riordan to improve neighborhoods lacking trees, shade and functioning sidewalks using federal transportation dollars. In 2000, newly formed neighborhood councils enlisted LANI to fix the sidewalks that the city neglected. Then, in 2014, Councilmember Bernard Parks started working with LANI to repair sidewalks in his South L.A. district using discretionary funds.
Going through the official channels to get sidewalks fixed, he told news outlets at the time, was expensive and unreliable.
“We found that it’s far more successful than waiting for city employees and city staff because it seems to break down somewhere in that process,” he told NBC Los Angeles.
The work eventually expanded to other council districts as well to include about half of L.A.’s 15 districts.
LANI works with council districts to put together an estimate for sidewalk repairs at different sites before putting a package out for bid. The nonprofit pulls all the necessary permits and contracts for the actual repair work, which is subject to the state’s prevailing wage requirements.
Trees are one of the trickiest factors in sidewalk repair. Although they are often the cause of uplifted sidewalks, the city very rarely removes a tree. Instead, the preference is to prune the roots on one side to maintain the tree’s stability.
“You dig this hole and then you put a root guard against the sidewalk, so that way the roots have to go down further to get water,” said Aleigh Lewis, director of programs at LANI.
For the upcoming 2028 Games, LANI is looking at not only the sidewalks surrounding event and watch party venues, but also the path from transit stops all the way to the venue itself.
According to Councilmember Monica Rodriguez, broken sidewalks are a “chronic issue” in the city, including in her San Fernando Valley district. In 2024, she launched the Youth Sidewalk Repair Program in collaboration with the Los Angeles Conservation Corps (LACC) to offer hands-on job training to youth ages 18 to 26.
“I wanted to make sure that the young people came from my district and that they got to repair the sidewalks in their own community,” she said.
So far, 30 youth have completed the program, with 30 more set to complete training as the program expands to the rest of the city.
Each crew has five corps members to keep the instructor-to-student ratio small. The program consists of one to two weeks of classroom instruction, followed by two to three months of on-the-job training. Trainees are paid $18.50 per hour.
Alex Lopez, senior program director for LACC, estimates that four or five participants have gone on to pursue a union job in the trades after finishing the program. Many choose to stay in the Corps, joining the main conservation track and continuing their job training.
The most fun part of building sidewalks? Operating heavy machinery, Lopez said. Trainees get to use jackhammers, skid steers, mini excavators, and concrete cutters.
The least fun part? Finishing the concrete, especially in the heat of the San Fernando Valley.
“They have to get on their hands and knees and use those different types of finishing tools before it dries up,” explained Lopez.
LA Conservation CorpsThe costs of concrete
One major reason a city might partner with nonprofits to fix sidewalks: cutting costs.
According to LANI, repairs cost an average of $63.90 per square foot, including overhead like pulling permits and a contingency fee. Construction costs alone have risen dramatically since the pandemic, going from about $18 per square foot to $45 today.
And while advocates have raised alarms about the cost of building out curb ramps — $50,000 per ramp — it’s not clear how much sidewalk repair is costing the city. The Bureau of Engineering, which oversees the program, declined to answer a question about costs.
For LACC, costs run about $227 per square foot for basic sidewalk repair, including all overhead.
In 2021, an audit of the sidewalk program by the city controller found that construction costs were $38 per square foot or $51 with soft costs included. The report notes that the city’s strategy at the time was inefficient and expensive. In one example, crews fully repaired a sidewalk from property line to property line but failed to address major accessibility issues in an adjacent parcel.
LANI has more discretion over how it repairs sidewalks, addressing major obstacles rather than fixing every issue that might make a sidewalk non-ADA compliant.
It’s a “balancing act,” said Apostolos. “We want to fix this, but where do you stop? There’s a crack here, but it’s not uplifted. Do we stop and not do that area?”
Prioritizing major issues means the nonprofit can fix more sites. The Bureau of Engineering did not respond to a question about whether the sidewalk program is still fixing all non-compliant sidewalk issues in a sidewalk parcel.
Los Angeles might be spending millions every year, but it doesn’t have a dedicated source of funding for sidewalks. After the city took over fixing sidewalks in the case of tree root damage in the 1970s, it has unsuccessfully tried multiple times to turn responsibility back over to property owners. Despite these failed attempts, the city’s new Capital Infrastructure Program includes a recommendation from the Bureau of Street Services to force property owners to pay for sidewalk repairs.
How should the city prioritize repairs?
While the city is investing millions in pedestrian infrastructure around LA28 venues, disabled Angelenos are still waiting for traversable sidewalks where they live and work — sometimes for more than a decade.
Cynde Soto, a disability advocate and wheelchair user, said she understands that the sidewalks around Olympic and Paralympic venues desperately need to be fixed. Last year, she took public transportation to the LA Memorial Coliseum, a major venue for LA28, to watch Mayor Bass sign a proclamation on improving accessibility for the Games.
“I had to go out into the street… sidewalks are narrow and they’re broken.”
But she also believes ordinary Angelenos are being left behind. Soto has long pushed for repairs to sidewalks downtown, where she works.
“What about people who have been waiting years for their own neighborhoods?” she asks. This program “is for the elite of our society, and I just don’t think that’s fair.”
This story was produced with support from the Solutions Journalism Network’s How Government Responds Innovation Fund.
This story was produced by Next City, a nonprofit newsroom covering solutions for equitable cities, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
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