Guest Opinion | Erika Foy: Compassion Cannot Replace Planning

At Pasadena’s recent Planning Commission discussion on safe parking, I was struck by how quickly the conversation moved ahead of the information. 

The City is being asked to respond urgently to people living in their vehicles. But the discussion did not establish the basic facts needed to understand the scope of the problem. How many people are actually living in vehicles in Pasadena? How many safe parking spaces are needed? Where is that need concentrated? Which sites are realistic? How are the existing safe parking programs performing? 

These are not minor details. They are the foundation for responsible planning. 

A basic question should have been asked at the outset: why is this coming forward for discussion before the City has presented the information needed to evaluate it? That is not a delay tactic; it is proper planning. 

The City should listen to advocates, but it should not allow advocacy to become the planning record. Public policy cannot be built on urgency alone. Before Pasadena expands safe parking or identifies sites, the City needs its own independent analysis of need, feasibility, location impacts, operations, and long-term public use. 

Compassion is important. But compassion cannot replace planning. 

There is a difference between compassion and allowing emotion to substitute for analysis. Compassion matters. But when urgency is used to move past basic facts, feasibility, and consequences, the City risks making decisions that may not serve the people the programs are intended to help, or the neighborhoods asked to absorb the impacts. 

In city planning, urgency cannot become the only standard. The City still has to ask where programs belong, how they will operate, what impacts they may create, and whether public land is being used in a way that serves the long-term interests of the whole community. 

During the safe parking discussion, a commissioner raised private commercial parking lots as a possible idea, including the Best Buy parking lot. That moment illustrated my concern. Before specific private properties are even discussed as plausible options, the City should have basic information about ownership, willingness to participate, liability, security, insurance, customer access, business operations, and surrounding impacts. Privately owned commercial lots are not simply available public resources, and it is difficult to imagine a major retailer agreeing to turn its customer parking lot into a safe parking site without significant legal, operational, and business concerns. The fact that such a site was mentioned at all showed how far the conversation had moved ahead of the factual and practical analysis. 

Urgency does not eliminate the need for planning. In fact, urgency makes planning more important. If the City moves too quickly without a clear factual record, it risks creating programs that are poorly located, poorly managed, underused, or harmful to the surrounding area. That does not help the people the programs are intended to serve, and it does not help the neighborhoods asked to absorb the impacts. 

This concern is not limited to safe parking. Increasingly, it feels as though major City decisions are being discussed before the impacts are fully understood. Whether the issue is housing, homelessness, development, traffic, public safety, or neighborhood compatibility, Pasadena should not identify preferred outcomes or possible sites before the factual record, operational impacts, combined effects, and long-term planning questions are fully developed. 

The concern is process. The cart is being placed before the horse. If Pasadena is going to make decisions that affect neighborhoods, public land, transit corridors, schools, libraries, medical uses, and surrounding businesses, the City must begin with facts, not assumptions. 

That is why the safe parking discussion matters. 

Rose Palace should not be viewed simply as an available City-owned site for safe parking, a year-round shelter, or any other homeless-serving use. It is part of the Raymond and Fillmore corridor, an area that may change significantly over the next decade with The Affinity project, Huntington Hospital’s investment nearby, future housing along the train line, and the City’s commitment to improve Fillmore Station.

City-owned land is scarce. Once the City commits a public site to one use, it may lose the chance to use that property for parks, open space, a community center, housing, civic uses, or other long-term public needs for decades. 

Rose Palace is also only about a half-mile from Union Station’s Adult Center on Raymond Avenue, an existing interim housing and homeless-services site for individual adults. Before adding safe parking, a year-round shelter, or any other homeless-serving use at Rose Palace, the City should evaluate whether this corridor is already carrying a disproportionate share of these uses. 

When multiple homeless-serving uses are placed along the same corridor, the question is no longer whether each program can be managed in isolation. The City has to look at the combined burden on public safety, sanitation, transit, nearby businesses, schools, libraries, medical uses, and surrounding neighborhoods. 

Safe parking may be helpful. But location still matters. Operations matter. Ownership matters. Public safety and sanitation matter. The long-term use of scarce City-owned land matters. 

Before expanding safe parking or identifying possible sites, Pasadena should have a complete factual record. That should include the current homeless count, the estimated number of people living in vehicles, the number of safe parking spaces actually needed, where that need is concentrated, how existing programs are performing, whether private property owners are willing to participate, and whether proposed public sites represent the highest long-term public use. 

Good planning is not the opposite of compassion. It is what makes a compassionate response workable, fair, and sustainable. 

Pasadena should approach safe parking with both compassion and discipline. No site, including Rose Palace, should move forward until the City has the facts needed to determine whether it belongs there as part of Pasadena’s larger long-term plan. 

Erika Foy is a concerned and active Pasadena resident who resides in the Madison Heights neighborhood.