The Echo Park stretch of Sunset Boulevard is now thoroughly gentrified and peppered with restaurants, bars, and other desirable destinations—but what it doesn't have is, of course, enough parking to make everyone happy. (Yeah, yeah, kind of an impossible task.) Residential streets nearby are feeling the crunch as street parking becomes ever more frustrating to find, so City Councilmember Mitch O'Farrell is now pushing for a new permit parking zone on some of the streets near Sunset and Alvarado, says the Eastsider LA. Locals-only street parking: the last step in total neighborhood yuppification?

It's kind of miraculous that this didn't happen sooner in Echo Park's transformation into a nightlife hotspot and general cool place to be, considering how windy and narrow so many of the area's streets are. It seems that Echo Park has just one other area where permits are required—on a skinny, meandering section of Laveta Terrace that's north of Sunset. The rules there create a one-hour parking limit during the day (8 am to 6 pm) and ban parking overnight (6 pm to 8 am) for non-permit holders.

O'Farrell's proposed preferential parking district would be in effect on segments of a few streets northwest of Sunset and Alvarado—parts of Mohawk, Elsinore, and Waterloo—which could mean that similar rules might be in effect there soon. In order to create the new preferential parking district, a petition has to be signed by residents and the City Council has to approve it.

Neighbors have to lobby for the city to give them a permit parking district and they're common in wealthier neighborhoods like the Hills, Fairfax, and Silver Lake (where you would think residents would be more likely to have their own parking spaces). Detractors argue the streets are a public space and that residents don't have any more right to them than visitors to the neighborhood.

· New permit-parking district in the works for Echo Park [ELA]