Long Beach Likely to Choose Development over Restoring Nature Along the LA River
How one city’s broken promise of LA River green space threatens climate resilience, perpetuates environmental justice, and jeopardizes our shared future
August 7, 2025
Ben Harris, Senior Staff Attorney, Regulatory Affairs & Legal Policy
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Despite years of public opposition and environmental concerns, Long Beach may approve a self-storage project on land once slated for a riverfront park. The site sits in a community already burdened by pollution and lack of green space. LA Waterkeeper and the Riverpark Coalition are pushing back, and will be at the August 12 City Council hearing urging the City to reject the project. This vote could decide the future of the LA River in Long Beach, and whether our region will truly commit to its vision of a more equitable, climate-resilient future.
Photo Credit: MattGush
The Los Angeles River could be — and should be — one of the Los Angeles region’s most powerful tools for climate adaptation. Instead, it remains a symbol of past planning failures — and an example of how those mistakes continue to shape the future of cities along the river like Long Beach.
Despite serious environmental concerns and years of public and community opposition, on June 5, 2025, the Long Beach Planning Commission voted to approve the development of a four-story RV and self-storage facility at the privately-owned 3701 Pacific Place site, adjacent to the LA River. If the City Council finalizes the decision at its upcoming meeting on August 12, it would mark a clear step back from the City’s long-standing commitment to create green space along the LA River for the benefit of communities lacking suitable park access. From a broader regional perspective, the decision to approve this project would represent another lost opportunity to revitalize the LA River after over a century of poor land use decisions.
The LA River: A Climate Corridor Under Threat
For much of its history, the LA River was a seasonal, winding waterway that flooded naturally across a wide plain. As Los Angeles grew, developers built too close to the river’s edge, paving over wetlands in the river’s natural floodplain and increasing runoff. Major floods in the 1930s led the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to encase the river in concrete, turning it into a flood control channel that eliminated natural habitat in most of the river’s 51-mile course.
This decision was framed as a necessary engineering fix. In reality, it was a land use strategy that prioritized development over human and environmental health and long-term resilience. Channelization made it possible to keep building right up to the river’s edge along the rest of the river channel — a decision that created new environmental and flooding risks while permanently damaging the river’s future ecological and community value. Now, the LA River watershed features some of our region’s most pollution-burdened communities blighted by industrial facilities, suffering from extreme heat, and lacking suitable open space. The river itself is a vessel for highly polluted stormwater runoff, with limited access and recreation opportunities. As a result, communities are disconnected from the river, and many Angelenos might not even recognize it as a river.
LA Waterkeeper still sees the promise that the LA River offers, as one of the last remaining frontlines for building a more sustainable, livable Southern California. Restoring the LA River to a more natural state, to the maximum degree without increasing flood risk, would unlock a pathway to achieve our regional goals for climate resilience, water security, and healthy waterways. But right now, a patchwork of local land use decisions threatens to undermine that future — replacing restoration opportunities with short-term development that puts communities and the environment at greater risk.
Photo Credit: CalEnviroScreen4.0
Western Long Beach Inequity
Long Beach is a prime example of the harms caused by perpetuating a century of neglecting LA River communities. The City of Long Beach is the seventh largest in California, but data presents a dramatically different story between western and eastern communities in the city.
Western Long Beach sits at the crossroads of some of California’s deepest environmental injustices. Crisscrossed by three major freeways and boxed in by port infrastructure and industrial facilities, the area bears the brunt of the region’s shipping economy — and all the diesel pollution that comes with it. According to the California Air Resources Board, this part of the city suffers from some of the highest levels of air pollution in the state. Western Long Beach communities lack suitable access to parks that could help reduce these health impacts from persistent air pollution. By contrast, eastern Long Beach boasts much higher median incomes, much better pollution burden scores, and far greater access to parks and green space.
In 2007, the City of Long Beach identified the “Wrigley Heights – North” site, containing a County-owned parcel and a privately-owned 14-acre site at 3701 Pacific Place, as a chance to start addressing these injustices in western Long Beach. The City’s RiverLink Plan called for transforming the site into a public park and maintaining open space for the benefit of nearby communities. That vision was later reinforced by the state’s Lower LA River Revitalization Plan and LA County’s LA River Master Plan. Together, these efforts imagined a future where communities in western Long Beach could finally gain access to green space, cleaner air, and restored riverfront land.
Now, that future is in danger of being paved over.
The City originally approved a self-storage project at the Pacific Place site in 2021 without requiring a full Environmental Impact Report (EIR). Los Angeles Waterkeeper and our partners at the Riverpark Coalition challenged that decision in court — and won. A judge ordered the City to complete a proper environmental review before moving forward, including by preparing a full EIR to account for significant environmental impacts from the project. Yet even after that, the City’s Planning Commission advanced a substantially similar self-storage project again — this time relying on a flawed EIR that once again failed to fully assess climate impacts, water quality and impacts, major land use inconsistencies, and feasible alternatives.
More than 60 community members submitted public comments opposing the project at the Planning Commission, and the Riverpark Coalition has launched a petition — now signed by hundreds — calling on the City to reject the development and preserve the site for green space as has been long promised to the community.
Photo Credit: Dylan Hatfield
Wrong Project, Wrong Place
Even if there were a need for more self-storage in the Long Beach area, the Pacific Place site is simply not the right place for it.
SecureSpace, the company behind the proposed self-storage development, already operates two similar facilities just a few freeway exits away in Long Beach and Signal Hill. The developer’s own market analysis — submitted as part of the environmental review process — shows that demand for more self-storage is actually stronger in areas more than five miles from the Pacific Place site. There are also likely other suitable locations for this type of use, including existing buildings or warehouses for sale or lease that could be repurposed.
What’s more, the Planning Commission was given misleading legal advice in voting to approve the environmental review for the project. Staff claimed that rejecting the project’s environmental review might amount to a “regulatory taking” under the Fifth Amendment. That simply isn’t true. The project requires discretionary approvals and zoning changes, and the landowner would still have other viable economic uses for the site if this one were denied.
Commission staff also failed to fully consider public funding options to pursue community green space at the Pacific Place site. Through the newly passed Proposition 4 and other state programs, hundreds of millions of dollars are available to support floodplain reclamation and park development. That funding could help the City acquire the site, clean up contamination from previous industrial uses, and establish something that actually benefits the community.
Photo Credit: MattGush
Death by a Thousand Cuts
Open space near the river is already rare in Long Beach, but is steadily being lost to permanent development. Just across the river from Pacific Place, the City recently approved another major development project on land that could have also become park space. As climate change brings more intense and frequent storms, every new building added to the river’s edge becomes another structure at risk of flooding. Instead of restoring floodplains to absorb water and cool surrounding neighborhoods, local governments are doubling down by adding more infrastructure that will require even more protection in a future of worsening floods.
And the impacts of these decisions go far beyond Long Beach. While Pacific Place could serve as vital green space for nearby communities, it also sits at a key point along the LA River trail system — a potential connector for bike paths, equestrian routes, and greenways stretching across the watershed. With the right investment, it could help link communities up and down the river and strengthen a region-wide climate corridor.
Other cities have already made efforts to push this vision for a more connected, sustainable LA River corridor forward. South Gate has recently completed its Urban Orchard park project on a post-industrial site. Maywood has developed and expanded Riverfront Park on a former contaminated industrial site. In the City of Los Angeles, Lewis MacAdams Park and the 100 Acre Partnership at Taylor Yard are transforming the river from an industrial corridor into something public, living, and resilient. These rehabilitation projects are not only essential to preparing for the climate challenges ahead, but also long-overdue to deliver critical environmental benefits to the communities that need them most.
If the LA region is serious about climate resilience, that commitment must be reflected in how we treat land along all reaches of the LA River. Residents in western Long Beach already face some of the state’s worst air quality, extreme heat, and almost no access to parks. Losing this critical opportunity to preserve open space at the Pacific Place site means losing one of the last chances to start repairing those inequalities.
And more fundamentally, this decision would once again dismiss the needs — and the rights — of a community that was promised better.
What’s Next
The City of Long Beach won’t serve its residents — or the broader LA River corridor — if it continues to go it alone. Prioritizing unnecessary storage projects over green space runs counter to countywide goals for floodplain restoration, public access, and environmental justice.
Los Angeles Waterkeeper and the Riverpark Coalition will be at the August 12 City Council hearing to urge the City to reject the flawed environmental review and stop this misguided project from moving forward.
We hope you’ll stand with us — because this isn’t just about one vote or one parcel. It’s a fight for the future we want to live in, one that prioritizes the health of the LA River, its communities, and our region’s overall climate resiliency.