Rootball is the newsletter of Pando Populus.

Pando unites the people who care most about the future of Los Angeles. Focuses them on the right things. And motivates them. With passion. To implement LA County’s sustainability plan.

Look to the fall for The Pando Sustainability Awards, 2024–2025

With all that’s been going on with the country and the world, and every single day feeling like it carries the weight of a week’s or even month’s worth of news and events, you probably haven’t even been thinking about the fall. Be that as it may, know that you will soon have a new fixture for your autumn calendar going forward: The Pando Sustainability Awards is moving to a fall date. We’ll share all the Save-the-Date specifics with you soon. 

The shift reflects the fact that Pando programs now span the full academic year (previously, Pando Days was largely a first-semester program). With relocating the Awards to an autumn slot, teams will now have the whole of the school year in which to situate their project work. 

The move also accommodates institutional and individual members of the Pando community who were affected by the fires at the beginning of the year. Our community suffered an outsized effect. 

The Pando Awards has quickly become the largest and most significant event honoring the leadership and creativity of young people and their instructors who are working to build a more sustainable and just future. Participants from all school teams attend, along with business, philanthropy and NGO leaders, elected officials, and agency heads. Most significantly, the Awards bring together all the key people that project developers should meet in order to move their best ideas forward. 

Last year, former California State Controller Betty Yee gave a stirring keynote. Fr. Greg Boyle, legendary head of Homeboy Industries, received Pando’s Lifetime Achievement Award.  

Awards of excellence are conferred on Pando projects by a distinguished panel of experts, honoring impact, innovation, and, most importantly, the promise for making a positive and useful difference in the real world moving forward.

We look forward to gathering with you this fall. Stay tuned.

Top view drone shot of the Biophilia Treehouse, Encino, CA. Spring 2025, by Yogan Muller.

You can help Biophilia Treehouse deepen its roots

The UCLA Counterforce Lab team is back at Pando HQ at the Sisters of Social Service compound in Encino, CA making improvements to the Biophilia Treehouse prototype and furthering development. For both the Sisters and Pando, the structure stands as an iconic symbol of radical commitment to the vision of an integrated ecological system extending across the whole of the biosphere. 

The structure was placed on a prominent hill overlooking the lake and campus in 2023. Now, ROOTBALL readers can play an important and direct role to help the Treehouse deepen its roots. 

First presented as a concept at Pando Days 2019-20, the Biophilia Treehouse stands today as a fully realized prototype of the original concept: a living public-art sculpture that welcomes native birds and plants while providing visitors with unique opportunities for education and reflection. The installation in Encino is the first in a series of Treehouses the creators hope to build across LA County, focusing especially on park-poor neighborhoods. When built in sequence, the necklace of structures will form a wildlife corridor that reconnects fractured habitats at the tree-top level. 

Facilitated by Pando’s expansive network, both grant money and land were secured to build the proof of concept. At six feet high, an elevated garden blooms; at twelve feet, a ring of bird nesting boxes rest where, in one of them, is an oak titmouse pair that has returned for the second spring in a row.

An oak titmouse rests on its nesting box, part of the Biophilia Treehouse.

The Biophilia Treehouse prototype will soon become an outdoor classroom where third graders from the Heart of Los Angeles after-school program, along with pupils from the local Lanai Road Elementary School, will help prototype a bespoke curriculum called “Our Neighbors, the Birds” with the assistance of UCLA students.

“I visit the site every time I’m on campus,” says Betsy Hunter, Pando’s community outreach coordinator. “The sculpture is extraordinary and gets me thinking about something more than just the mundane features of everyday life, but about who we are, why we’re here, and what we can do to support the welfare of all creatures.”

With ongoing research and development work to support at the location, the UCLA team is asking for your help, dear reader. 

The following improvements to the immediate area are needed: tree-trunk furniture for outdoor classroom seating ($1,500); steel edging and decomposed granite to fortify the surrounding area against erosion ($1,000); sturdy handrails for the staircase leading to the Treehouse structure at the top of the hill ($1,500); additional plantings ($600); signage ($500), and sensing technology for scientific research.

Please consider a donation – as well as contributing some of your own elbow grease if you live anywhere close to the area! 

To contribute labor, inquire here: info@pandopopulus.com. To make a financial contribution, visit Pando’s Donate page to contribute any amount (make sure to specify “Biophilia Treehouse” in the comment section). 

From the Biophilia Treehouse team, Thanks!

Proposed $2 Billion “4th and Central” Housing and Mixed-Use Project

LA’s housing crisis and what’s being done about it

By Mark VanderSchaaf

If you live anywhere in metropolitan Los Angeles, you know that housing is a big problem in your community. Homes are very difficult to afford, and a tragic result is that homelessness has become rampant in recent years. Politicians are starting to take serious note of the situation and are making it a high priority to have developers build a lot more housing and to increase affordability. Such serious efforts are indeed needed to prevent grave harm to the region’s social sustainability.

To get a sense of how bad the housing crisis is in Los Angeles, it’s helpful to look at some national data. In my years as a city and regional planner in the Minneapolis-St. Paul Area, I especially looked to something called the “Affordability Index of Existing Single-Family Homes for Metropolitan Areas,” a dataset produced by the National Association of Realtors. 

So what does the most recent report tell us about how housing affordability in Los Angeles stacks up to the rest of the country?

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Artwork copyright © Tucker Nichols 

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