|
How Can LA Plan Housing without Water? |
|
|
Coffin’s Corner
By David Coffin
“I have not seen a more serious water situation in my career, and I’ve been doing this 30 years,” said Timothy Quinn, executive director of the Assn. of California Water Agencies.
 “This is a harbinger of relatively tough times, not just for this year
but for a set of years,” Quinn said. He and others urged Californians
to rein in water use.
So while contemplating Quinn’s words and closely reading the draft Housing Element that was just released, how on earth could the City of Los Angeles Department of City Planning have completely ignored housings most critical component, water and how it relates to housing?
One could surmise that the city has more overriding goals than providing and maintaining safe, quality housing. According to the draft, the City of Los Angeles is assigned to provide an additional 112,876 new housing units between January 2006 and June 2014 which calculates to about 14,109 new housing units per year. In the six county Southern California region, the goal is for 733,000 new housing units.
Setting aside housing goals there should be an even more important discussion because as this important draft is being discussed, debated, dissected and commented on, the entire Southern California region is in the second year grip of a severe water shortage. As water supplies are being sharply cut back and restrictions are being imposed on residents, the 225 page draft barely devotes a single page to the water supply system for housing. It begins by stating unconvincingly that the “water supply for new projects is generally adequate.”
The entire section of the draft devoted to Los Angeles’s water supply is just four paragraphs and two bullet-points long while elsewhere, the document devotes a dozen pages to other forms of non-potable water such as grey water, storm water and waste water.
No Safeguards-The draft makes no policy attempt to safeguard the supply for the current level of housing units by withholding new building permits or providing for a building moratorium when the city’s water supply falls below adequate levels.
Remarkably the draft Housing Element describes only two mitigation measures and neither one of them actually protect today’s residents. The first mitigation measure benignly suggests drip irrigation and soak hoses in lieu of sprinklers, automatic sprinkler systems to irrigate at specified times and watering less in the cooler months and during the rainy season. It also goes on to suggest financial incentives to encourage consumers to purchase water-efficient appliances.
The second mitigation measure is a bit more severe by imposing water conservation on today’s residents by implementing a two-tiered block rate (hikes) but it says nothing of curtailing new projects.
The underlying ‘water’ message of the draft housing element is that LA’s residents are expected to pay more, get less and just deal with shortages while the city continues to sign permits for the next one hundred thousand housing units.
In the second and last bullet-point the draft housing element finally suggests that under certain conditions it may postpone water connections to new projects although it doesn’t say what those conditions might be and it still allows the projects to continue. Clearly those conditions exist today.
While this last scenario sound’s like a moratorium of sorts, politically it would be impossible for the LADWP to refuse connections to any completed projects. Consider the $3 Billion Grand Ave project with it 2600 new housing units or the development at Figueroa and 11th and its 860 units. Lawsuits would fly if the LADWP told Related Cos. or other project financiers that it would be postponing water connections to their multi-billion dollar projects until water supplies were shorn up.
The only fair and practical solution is to block new permits for projects before they start and hold off until water supplies could be guaranteed. Postponing connections to finished projects would not be fair to developers and providing new connections during severe shortages would not be fair to current customers.
The Los Angeles Times - California communities face a strong possibility of water shortages and even mandatory rationing this summer because of record dry weather in March and April, a fast-shrinking snowpack and below-normal reservoir levels, state officials said Thursday. The bleak news, contained in California’s final Sierra snowpack report of the snow season, means a second consecutive year of water anxieties in a state heavily dependent on water from the melting snow in the Sierra Nevada.
In the meantime the city’s housing plan ignores the most critical component of housing as the draft continues to be centered on meeting housing quotas set by regional government councils. Quota’s that are leading to substantial burdens on today’s residents.
Ignoring the ability to supply water in sufficient quantity to residents will ultimately mean that the city’s housing plan, in fact the entire regions housing plan was built on a house of cards.
(David Coffin is a writer and a contributor to CityWatch. He is an education activist and a member of the Neighborhood Council of Westchester-Playa del Rey. Read more of Coffin’s views at www.westchesterparents.org ) _
|
