Walk through Los Angeles, from Highland Park to Brentwood, and you’ll hear Spanish everywhere, in markets, at restaurants, on the street. Nearly a third of LA County residents speak Spanish at home. Many speak little or no English. Spanish is part of what makes LA, LA It has been since the city was founded as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Ángeles del Río de Porciúncula.
Yet when the region’s most consequential decisions get made — where a new train line runs, which neighborhood a tunnel is built under, who benefits from a major infrastructure project — Spanish-speaking residents are largely absent from the room.
This is the result of a design flaw.
Public agencies in California are required to conduct community outreach, and most take that obligation seriously. The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority, or Metro, translates documents into Spanish, hosts bilingual workshops and funds community liaisons. On paper, the effort is real, and it is more than most. Many cities and transit agencies rely on a website translation button and call it outreach. Metro, at least, is trying.
But translation is not communication. When a project notice lands in someone’s mailbox, or more likely on a webpage they will never visit, announcing a “scoping meeting on the alternatives analysis,” it fails everyone. It especially fails the person whose first language is Spanish and who has never heard the term “Locally Preferred Alternative” in any language.
The problem isn’t Spanish. The problem is that planning documents are barely comprehensible in English. Translated word for word, they become something parseable only by a bilingual transportation engineer, not by the people the projects are supposed to serve. The jargon-coded language of planning is already a closed door to almost all English speakers. For Spanish speakers, there is a deadbolt on it.
Language barriers are only part of the story. The other part is infrastructure, not the physical kind, but the civic kind.
When English-speaking homeowners feel threatened by a project, the response is swift and organized. Websites appear. Social media groups form. Email lists circulate talking points. People who know how to write comment letters, or can afford to hire someone who does, show up to board meetings in numbers. They understand the process: when to comment, who to call, which vote actually matters.
This machinery is so familiar to many people that they rarely question it. But it is a form of civic infrastructure built over decades, and it is largely unavailable to Spanish-speaking communities.
The consequences are measurable. On the C Line extension to Torrance, a group of English-speaking homeowners in Lawndale organized to oppose a proposed route through their neighborhood. They had a website, a Facebook page, op-eds in local papers and comment letters from retired engineers and attorneys. Their neighborhood also had a large Spanish-speaking population. Residents in that neighborhood left almost no trace in the public record in Spanish, few comment letters in Spanish, no board testimony, no organized presence at hearings.
The Metro Board ultimately voted to reroute the line at significant additional cost, away from a corridor the agency had acquired for rail use decades earlier. That decision was made in a process in which Spanish input was largely absent.
Consider a project explicitly designed with equity in mind. The Southeast Gateway project, a 14.5-mile rail extension in southeastern LA County, is framed as a major investment in equity, serving communities where a majority of residents are Latino and many live below the poverty line. Metro documents show extensive outreach: tens of thousands of notices distributed, community meetings, bilingual materials, targeted engagement with limited-English-proficiency residents.
But the public record tells a different story. In the environmental review documents, it is difficult to determine how many comments were submitted in Spanish, if any. Under the California Environmental Quality Act, agencies must document outreach. They are not required to document whether the efforts worked. When one community shows up on the record, and another barely appears, the outcome is not neutral.
Metro is building a transit system that will shape the region for a century. Some of the people who depend on that system most are among the least represented in the decisions that define it.
The fix is building the civic infrastructure that makes participation possible in the first place: trusted messengers who can explain why a board vote matters to someone’s commute, their rent, their neighborhood; community organizations that walk people through the process in plain language and in Spanish; and ways to participate that do not require showing up to a weekday meeting in a government building.
What is needed more than translation alone? A process that invites participation.
Chris Corrao is a Los Angeles–based urban planning professional specializing in public communication and community engagement.
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