HOLLYWOOD — The streets that climb toward Beachwood Canyon were built narrow, for a quieter era and fewer cars, and on a good weekend afternoon they now fill with the vehicles of people who have driven up to photograph the Hollywood sign from the closest legal spot. For the residents who live on those streets, finding a place to park in front of their own homes has become a small daily contest.
Some of them want the city to end it with a permit.
At a community meeting this week, a neighborhood group laid out the case for a residential parking permit district — a system that would reserve curb space on designated blocks for residents who buy an annual sticker, and ticket most everyone else after posted hours. Supporters described circling their blocks after work, watching tourists idle in loading zones, and giving up spots to commuters who park free all day and take a rideshare down the hill.
“I have carried groceries a quarter mile uphill because a rental car was sitting where I’ve parked for twenty years,” said Marguerite Ostrander, who has lived on one of the affected streets since the 1990s and helped gather signatures. “I’m not trying to keep visitors off the mountain. I’m trying to get to my own door.”
The permits are neither automatic nor free. Under the city’s process, a district requires a petition from a threshold of households, a parking study, and a council vote, and residents pay a yearly fee for each sticker and for guest passes. That last detail has split the neighborhood as much as the traffic has.
“So I’ll pay the city for permission to park where I already park, and pay again when my daughter visits,” said Hollis Trapp, who rents an apartment on a block that would fall inside the proposed district. “The homeowners can absorb that. On my lease, it’s another bill. The problem is real. This fix isn’t free to me.”
Others worried the permits would simply push the tourist overflow onto the next street down, moving the contest rather than settling it — a pattern the city has seen before when one block restricts and its neighbor does not.
A city transportation staffer at the meeting explained the mechanics without endorsing the outcome, noting that the district would advance only if enough households signed on and the study supported it. She said the department took no position on whether a given neighborhood should have permits, only on whether it had met the criteria to ask.
Councilmember Alicia Rendón, whose district includes the canyon, sent a representative who said the councilmember was listening and had not committed either way. The message drew a few tired looks from residents who have watched sign traffic grow for years while proposed remedies came and went.
The group plans to keep gathering signatures through the fall. Whether they clear the threshold, and whether the neighbors who would rather not pay outnumber the ones who would, is the arithmetic the next few weeks will settle.