Writer Daniel Safarik looks at a dozen projects along La Brea from Wilshire to Fountain -- a total of 1,000 apartments and 165,000 square feet of retail that are beginning to emerge as "forests of concrete columns and rebar." He believes La Brea could be the "linear laboratory where LA figures out what kind of city it wants to be."

Read more on the Faster Times website, an independent collective of journalists and writers looking to create a new model for the newspaper.