Getting Here from There
Bill Christopher
Steven Leigh Morris’ recent article in the LA Weekly titled “City Hall ‘Density Hawks’ are Changing LA’s DNA”, seems to have touched off a lively debate over development density in Los Angeles, a topic usually reserved for darkened living rooms and local meeting places in remote corners of the city. Steve Lopez in the LA Times has taken notice.
 Mr. Morris’ article highlights the interactions between County Supervisor ZevYaroslavky, City Planning Director Gail Goldberg and Principal Planner Jane Blumenfeld over Density Bonuses mandated by the state under SB1818. From my personal observations of the planning process over the past thirty years, the record, and its implications, need a little clarification. Gail Goldberg is right about her statement that the value of property in this city is based on its potential, not its current status, and that this has to change if the City is to build on its promise of becoming a world class urban destination. Unfortunately, the City has operated since at least 1946, when the basic zoning patterns we see on the ground today were codified, as if “zoning” is a commodity, not a guide to the future.
The underlying problem is that the City’s actual “DNA”, defined by those development patterns established relatively early in the City’s growth curve, envisions a teeming metropolis of 10 million residents. Commercial arterial streets throughout the City and the Valley were zoned to allow buildings of unlimited height containing floor space equal to three times the area of the lot. Large swaths of residential land were zoned to allow multi-family housing up to 100 units per acre. Downtown, Century City, Westwood Village, the Hollywood Core, Warner Center and other major centers were targeted to house even denser development.
Since Los Angeles in the 40's and 50's had plenty of vacant land to develop, the basic pre-war template of one-story single family houses interspersed with pockets of two story “dingbat” apartments (typically wood framed courtyard structures at about 30 units per acre) continued unabated. It should be noted that in the Mid-Wilshire area, denser, four and six story multi-family “unreinforced masonry” buildings provided a more urban feel. With the visible exception of the Wilshire Corridor, however, commercial development in the city typically followed a one and two story strip model, with parking either out front or off the alley behind. The major planning decisions of the time involved the routing of the futuristic new freeways and the partial elimination of the old Red Car right-of-ways.
In the 60's, that perception started to change radically as the City essentially built itself out. A process of in-fill and re-development took hold as developers began to re-evaluate the underutilized zoning capacity, and examples of the newer, more dense Los Angeles began to emerge, rapidly replacing segments of the old order. As the City was evolving, Cal Hamilton arrived on the scene from Pittsburgh as the new Planning Director. In the aftermath of the 1965 Watts riots, Cal understood that the City needed an overarching vision for the future. The solution became known as the “Center’s Concept”, a 2D map of the City featuring a series of larger and smaller red dots indicating where in the City, future growth was to be directed. After the Center’s Concept came thirty-five individual “Community Plans” blanketing the city from San Pedro to Chatsworth. The Plans, meant to implement the vision of the Center’s Concept, were the means by which the planners laid out a blueprint for a City of 4.2 million inhabitants by the year 2010, concentrated in a series of high density
“centers” linked by a yet to be developed mass transit system. (Census estimates in 2007/2008 place the City’s current population at just about 3.9 million residents.)
The dirty little secret of the 70's was, that as the thirty-five Community Plans (as elements of the City’s state mandated “General Plan”) were being adopted by the City Council, the underlying zoning maps were not changed to match. So we had the dis-jointed situation where the actual legal zoning was set up for a city of 10 million, while the advisory “plans” would limit the City eventually to 4.2 million people. Since, at the time in the 70's, the City had fewer than 3 million residents, 4.2 million inhabitants still seemed to many like a recipe for Bladerunner, which, in 1982, provided the imagery for the Los Angeles of the future.
Upon arriving here from Chicago, I fell into a tradition of community activism that has long and deep roots in Los Angeles. In the early 50's, the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations was formed to give a broader voice to the unique issues faced by the people living in the hillside and canyon developments of the Santa Monica Mountains. In the 60's, they were joined by the Westside Civic Federation stretching across the 5th Council District and beyond on the Westside, along with a similar group that evolved in the Harbor area. As they came together, these groups formed the nucleus of the “slow growth movement” in reaction to the intensification of development pressures in the City. Their emergence fostered what I call the “Living Room Wars”, where developers and homeowners, in living room settings all across the city, regularly clashed over the appropriate scale of development in or adjacent to low scale single family neighborhoods. Much of the debate was centered on the impact of radical new (early 70's) environmental laws that, for the first time, gave the surrounding community a limited amount of leverage over abutting commercial development plans.
In the late 70's, development tensions were rising and the City was embarking on re-developing its mass transit network. The light rail Blue Line and the Red line subway would join North Hollywood to Long Beach through downtown along a relatively arcane route. The Green Line was added because it was there. The mass transit vision of the early 80's was not about relieving traffic congestion, but instead was focused on increasing transit capacity into Downtown. Mayor Bradley’s vision for the City, from the mid-70's on, was to build a downtown skyline that would become the economic heart of the region. He entrusted the task to the late Jim Wood, a young labor leader, whom he appointed to lead the Community Redevelopment Agency (CRA). With the City’s business and labor interests lined up behind the program, the LA Skyline we see today came into being roughly between 1970 and 1989.
In the Mid 80's, Dan Garcia was Mayor Bradley’s point person on Planning and Land Use matters, while serving as President of the five member City Planning Commission. The Commission has jurisdiction over all zone changes, Community Plan amendments and subdivision tract map actions. Most of the Living Room Wars played out in front of Garcia’s Commission, providing the context for the emergence of the “Detroit Street Coalition”, and others like it in other parts of the City such as the “Friends of Westwood”.
Dan Garcia, from his vantage point on the Commission, had a unique insight into the planning problems facing the City at a crucial time. He brought together about 25 representatives of the major interest groups in the City to see if there were any potential mutually agreeable solutions. The panel, which I served on, proposed a series of recommendations that, unfortunately, didn’t gain much traction. One of the elements in that report, issued in 1986, that did garner some attention was a plea to establish “Community Councils” around the City to facilitate
community input into the planning process, which would later evolve into “Neighborhood Councils”.
There were three significant victories for the “slow growth movement” in the late 80's. First came the City’s Zoning Consistency Program, which was the result of successful litigation brought by the Hillside Federation to force the City to comply with the state legislation known as AB283. AB283 required Los Angeles (and only Los Angeles) to actually bring its zoning into line with its Community Plans. The massive planning program resulting from that action brought about the rezoning of about 25% of the City’s land area between 1986 and 1991.
The second victory came in the “Friends of Westwood” court decision in 1988 which held that the City could no longer exempt small to medium (and even some larger) projects from environmental review if they required multiple “administrative” permits. Mandatory “Site Plan Review” procedures were adopted by the City as result.
The last piece was, of course, Proposition U put forward by Zev Yaroslavsky and Marvin Braude. Prop U rolled back the density limitations on the vast majority of properties in the City from three times the lot area to one and a half times the lot area. For perspective purposes, most modest “suburban” communities are built out in the range of one third to one half of the available lot area, so while reducing the typical scale of Los Angeles by 50% to one and half times the lot area appeared draconian (and felt draconian to most landowners), it still left more than twice the development capacity within the City than you would typically find in outlying areas. Planning in Los Angeles was no longer being done by the City’s professional staff, but by the judges of Superior Court and the voters at the ballot box.
Initially, Proposition U applied to every zone classification in the City. Since Prop U was an Ordinance and not a Charter change, the counter attack began when the City Council almost immediately rolled back the density limitation on residentially zoned property to three to one.
Hence, the push for added density in the City’s residential developments isn’t new. It dates back at least to the mid-80's when the affordable housing advocates were successful in winning a statewide mandate for a 25% density bonus that applied to any project in the state willing to set aside 20% of its units for low or moderate income families or if the project set aside 10% of its units for very low income families. There followed a long drawn out battle over whether this added density trumped other aspects of the code such as height and bulk regulations. In the end, the courts seemed to side with the City Attorney, ruling that the bonus density did not have to fit within the envelope prescribed by the Zoning Code.
To give a further example of the disjointed nature of planning in that City at that time, when I arrived on the Planning Commission in 1988, I asked Bob Sutton, then the guru of planning and zoning mechanics in the City, for a copy of the City’s overall future land use map. But the City didn’t have one. No one had bothered to stitch together the 35 separate “Community Plans” into an integrated whole. When the map was finally produced, it revealed not a city of “Centers”, but a very linear city stretching endlessly along a commercial arterial grid set at roughly one mile intervals.
Recession came to Los Angeles, beginning quietly in late 1989 and lasting into 1996, providing something of a time-out in the pro- and anti- development battles. Pressures to build lessened significantly as the demand for
office space fell (and the City actually lost population for a brief period). The major planning initiative to emerge from that era was the “General Plan Framework” which served as a policy overview for the 35 Community Plans. Its main focus was to promote mixed use (residential and commercial) development along the City’s commercial arteries, coupled with a focus on “transit oriented” projects, where additional density might be appropriate. There was only one slight problem with that approach. By definition, any project near a bus line could be considered “transit oriented”. It meant that essentially any site in the city along a major arterial with a bus route qualified as “transit oriented”. That broad net accounted for about 90% of the commercially zoned land in town. (For reference, check out the findings presently being used to support a pending zone change at Willoughby and La Brea in Hollywood on the old KCOP Studios site.)
The full impact of those changes, however, wasn’t immediately felt because of the lingering effects of the recession. As the overall housing market heated up again in 2002 and 2003, the City began to see more of the physical effects of the density bonus laws and other growth inducing code provisions that had been on the books for some time.
Even as the push to add housing in the city was gearing up, the affordable housing advocates still sensed a general lack of enthusiasm on the part of the development community. Developers did the math and found, generally, that it wasn’t worth the hassle to add 25% more units if you still had to set aside 20% of the base as affordable below market units. In response, the housing advocates went back to Sacramento in 2004 and got the density bonus increased to 35%, while the required set aside requirement was adjusted slightly downward on a sliding scale (SB1818).
Today, the real fight over density, as it has for the past thirty or more years, plays out before the City Planning Commission and the Planning and Land Use Management (PLUM) Committee of the City Council. The City Planning Commission now has nine members instead of five, ostensibly to better represent the diversity of the City. Jane Ellison Usher chairs the current Commission which counts former Councilman and urban planner Mike Woo among its members. Council members Ed Reyes, Jose Huizar and Jack Weiss make up the aptly named PLUM Committee.
Significant density increases today come before the Commission and the Committee generally in two forms, changing Commercial zoning to Residential Accessory Services (RAS) zoning and changing Industrial zoning to either Commercial zoning or RAS zoning. The push for the “RAS” zones is a relatively new phenomenon. RAS was recently conceived to overcome one of Prop U’s legacies, where residential development on commercial lots (which has always been permitted in the City) is still restricted to one and one-half times the lot area in scale. That’s not enough floor space to max out the available number of units. The new RAS zone designation was the solution because it comes with an approved density ratio of three to one and no height limit.
Changing industrial land to support housing developments has proven a bit more problematic. There is a very limited supply of truly industrial land within the City of Los Angeles. What there is of it supports the motion picture industry, the garment industry, the port, the airport and remnants of the aerospace industry. Mixed in are distribution warehouses, bio-tech firms and other incubator elements that supply a significant part of the job growth in the City. The dwindling industrial land is so critical to the City’s long term financial future that one of the first things Gail Goldberg did as the new Planning Director was to task Jane Blumenfeld with evaluating all the remaining industrial property citywide and to prepare for its protection. Sounds reasonable right?
Instead, it set off a pitched battle with the City’s affordable housing advocates. Where else would they find land at a price that could support affordable dwellings if not in the (sometimes tainted) industrial zones?
The pattern emerging after that dust-up, has been to talk about preserving the city’s industrial base while approving selected housing developments on old industrial sites. (For reference, see the multi-family project in Councilman Huizar’s district in the heart of the garment district.) It’s a dangerous path that is sure to drive the support base for the garment and entertainment industries right out of town, toward Santa Clarita and the Moreno valleys or even to other states entirely.
The conflict between the need for affordable housing and the desire to protect the existing scale of the city forms the backdrop for the present discussions surrounding the implementation of SB1818. SB1818 created a very interesting supply-side argument that if you increased the potential bonus, modified the set aside requirement along a sliding scale and tossed in other goodies like reduced parking, you would, in fact, generate more affordable units than were being created under the previous system. The argument tended to ignore the side effect that you might see a whole lot more buildings that are up to 35% bigger than originally intended in order to score those few added affordable housing units.
Zev Yaroslavsky, given his long history of immersion in land use and transportation planning is one of the few folks outside of Sacramento to recognize the implications of SB1818 for the future look and feel of city as a whole. The other place the debate appears to be taking hold is within the emerging block of Neighborhood Councils. (The YouTube link in Mr. Morris’s article on line shows Zev testing his material in public for the first time at a Citywide Alliance of Neighborhood Councils meeting that I helped to organize.) Both SB1818 and the companion “Parking Reduction Ordinance” have become focal points for neighborhood council concerned with the direction of planning for the future of Los Angeles. Pressure to bring these issues out of the shadows and into the mainstream political discourse will inevitably come as more physical examples come out of the ground. Perhaps the most important role the Neighborhood Councils can play in shaping the future look and feel of Los Angeles is to engage in the debate over the growing density of the City’s urban form, both from the perspective of where it should be allowed and where it shouldn’t.
Planning for a future Los Angeles has always focused on the imbalance between jobs and housing. From a planner’s perspective, LA has lots of the former and not enough of the latter. Over the past thirty years, Los Angeles, which has added one third of its population over that period, has been chronically short of available housing units, both affordable and otherwise.
Between 1980 and 1990, the City added roughly 520,000 residents, or an average of 52,000 people each year, which represented a staggering growth rate in excess of 1.5% annually (equal to the growth rate of a third world city). As Mr. Morris notes in his article, the driving force was not migration, either in or out, but a relatively high birth rate among people already living here. That has driven a mindset which implies “they” are coming and we can’t stop “them” so we had better prepare for the onslaught. (For reference, in 1991, the City’s Housing Department, in response to an initiative from the federal government, estimated the housing needs of the City at 26,000 units per year based on a 1.5% growth rate. The Housing Department also noted that the City was netting only 12,000 new housing units a year during the “pro-growth” late 80's.)
But that growth rate seems to have slowed radically in the early 1990's as the economy worked its way through
recession. For example, between 1990 and 2000, the city added about 210,000 residents according to US Census figures, representing a growth rate of only 0.56% per year compared to the 1.5% rate for the previous decade.
Between 2000 and 2006, the city added another 155,000 new residents according to Census estimates, which translates to a growth rate of about 0.67% annually. The fact that the recent growth trend in the City hasn’t returned to the rate felt in the 80's is probably a reflection of the limits of the City’s transportation system which is straining to keep up with the growth not only in the City, but in the outlying areas of the region as well.
If we assume the Census figures are correct, the City had approximately 1.34 million dwelling units in inventory in 2000. That’s a ratio of 2.67 residents for each housing unit. (Planners will argue that the average number of people per unit should not exceed 2.5 to avoid overcrowding, fueling the argument that LA is actually 150,000 housing units short of comfortably housing the current population.)
If LA maintains a growth rate of 0.6% per annum (which would get us to 4.2 million inhabitants by 2020) and strives to hold the line on the average number of occupants per unit, the City will need to add about 10,000 new dwellings a year to keep pace. Building & Safety reports that the City has permitted, on average, only 7,925 new dwelling units a year over the past twelve years. I should note that the number of units built over the past five years is well above the average for the past decade. Given the current trend in the housing market, however, the number of units built can be expected to drop significantly over the next two to three years. I should also note that Building & Safety’s numbers are not adjusted to reflect demolition of existing housing which runs anywhere from 1,000 to 3,000 units a year.
The data for the past decade strongly suggests that LA has fallen behind by, on average, well over two thousand dwelling units a year. That arithmetic again fuels the basic rhetoric that overall we’re still short more than 150,000 housing units in the City and losing ground, which in turn keeps the pressure on in favor of ever increasing density. The real implication of that number is that we would need to double or even triple the number of housing units being built each year for the next decade before we would see a change in the market dynamics that drive relatively high rental rates and home prices in Los Angeles. It’s clear that the housing marketplace itself isn’t going provide relief in the form of more affordable housing anytime soon, even if the proposed density increases come to pass.
In that context, I’m still a believer in the trickle down effect of new construction on the overall housing market. Building a new housing unit in LA is not cheap. Given land prices and material costs today, almost any attempt to build affordable housing starts out in the red. In addition to building affordable housing which requires substantial subsidies, we need to recognize the effects of an expanded housing market. Each unit that is added to the supply relieves a bit of the pressure on the overall market place, even if it’s so-called “luxury” housing. Hence, we need to find those locations around the City where we can accommodate growth and build a planning function that actually funnels needed investment to those places.
So, if we’re short 150,000 housing units, where does everybody live? The answer lies in garages, and bootleg units, along with doubling up generations of extended families in existing housing. Estimates of the number of garage/bootleg units generally run between 40,000 and 60,000 over the entire city. There has been a long
running battle between those who would legalize the majority of the bootleg units and those who would enforce them out of existence. At the moment, the enforcers are out-muscling the legalizers. Is that best approach given the housing pressures in the City? It would appear that removing illegal units only increases the pressure for added density in more confined locations and drives up the cost of housing in general.
I believe a more logical approach would be to legalize the units, setting them aside as affordable under the City’s Rent Stabilization structure, and ensuring that they are safe to occupy. There will still be cases where units will be taken off the market rather than comply with retrofit requirements, but the majority of the bootleg units can and should be brought out of the shadows and recognized as a means to address some of the City’s affordable housing needs. At the same time, however, the City should aggressively work to prevent the establishment of new sub-standard units.
In summary, cities are highly complex organisms. Cities go through growth cycles and through cycles of retrenchment. The urban form of Los Angeles is fed by its service infrastructure encompassing public safety, transportation, utilities, social services and educational facilities. In order to continue to sustain itself and to accommodate reasonable growth, the city’ planning focus needs to identify appropriate locations for new growth and set distinct limits on scale, while addressing the infrastructure needs that will support the new arrivals.
But the bottom line is that the long range planning efforts of the City need to mean something. The past planning efforts have, for the most part, taken a meat axe to the city’s organic core. Examples abound such as the transit oriented planning efforts that, in effect, turn the entire city into potential sites for denser “transit oriented development”, and the spot implementation of the RAS zone classification. Couple that with state mandates such as the current density bonus discussion and the underlying planning docs can not stand up to the whims and desires of the development industry in the city as Jane Usher has noted in her recent arguments against SB1818.
We have a situation in the City where community planning is too general, leading to developer requests for changes and deviation because the plans allow too much wiggle room, and we have Specific Plans which are in some cases too draconian, stifling needed investment and leading to conflicts within communities that could otherwise be avoided. Our Community Plans need to be more detailed and actually target growth to certain areas, while recognizing that other areas need protections to maintain the quality of life we have come to expect in the City.
If we move in that direction, the development community needs to understand that the City will hold the line with regard to the plans and only consider zone changes and plan amendments in unusual or extreme circumstances. Until the City Council says no to developer driven requests on a more regular basis (grounded in a sound planning foundation which probably includes some form of inclusionary zoning mandating affordable housing as part of any development project) the crazy quilt development pattern we see in the City will continue unabated, and the City’s “DNA” will continue to mutate out of control.
I mentioned back at the start of this discussion, that zoning is treated in this City like a commodity. If we move in the direction of more specificity in our Community Plans, zoning could actually become a real commodity and be literally sold to the development community (and be potentially resold in a secondary market place).
(Bill Christopher is an architect and planner, former member of the City Planning Commission and former President of the Board of Neighborhood Commissioners.) _
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