LIVING IN LA-There are many lessons about city government that community activists can draw from 10 years of campaigning to curb the mansionization of Los Angeles’s single family residential neighborhoods.
But, the most important lesson of all is that City Hall is in no hurry to halt the mansionization process. True, the City Council has adopted a General Plan and subsidiary Community Plans that are as clear as could be that the City’s official policy is to protect the character and scale of its residential areas. And, the City Planning Commission was even more to the point when it adopted its Do Real Planning document: stop mansionization.
But talk is cheap. Even though many communities have repeatedly complained about shady contractors who demolish local homes in order to quickly build and sell spec McMansions, little has actually happened. The Baseline Mansionization Ordinance (BMO), adopted in 2008, and the parallel Hillside Mansionization Ordinance (2011) are both deliberately toothless. As explained in CityWatch and now in the mainstream media, their laundry lists of exemptions and bonuses have permitted the very McMansions they were supposed to stop.
So, does all of the media attention and local activism mean that the City is finally changing directions on mansionization? Will the Planning Department now clean up the defective mansionization ordinances and will the City Council then quickly adopt them?
The answer is “not really,” and it was on full display at Tuesday’s (11/04/14) City Council meeting.
Without taking any more public testimony, the City Council voted unanimously to approve Councilmember Paul Koretz's motion to remove the loopholes from the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance, but with City Planning’s vague, convoluted, time-consuming work program.
This approach involves drafting Interim Control Ordinances for nine neighborhoods requesting Residential Floor Area Districts and five neighborhoods requesting Historical Preservation Control Ordinances. Once adopted, these temporary ordinances could remain in force for only two years.
Tuesday’s City Council vote does not create these 14 Interim Control Ordinances, it only instructs the Department of City Planning to prepare them. That means that City Planning must now determine the boundaries and zoning limitations for these areas.
Furthermore, Councilmember Paul Koretz verbally requested a large ICO district for the greater Beverly Grove area. Its boundaries would be West Hollywood on the north, Wilshire Boulevard on the south, Doheny Boulevard on the west, and Citrus on the east. This area might include several other proposed ICO areas, but it still means that City Planning would need to determine separate boundaries and provisions for the remaining dozen districts.
After the 14 ICO's are finally prepared and adopted, City Planning then proposes to actually implement Paul Koretz's motion by eliminating the mansionization loopholes from the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance through a set of amendments.
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City Planning claims this process will take 18 months, but there is no technical basis for this time line because the process for “cleaning up” an existing ordinance is simple. Excuses based on elaborate environmental and legal reviews are not credible.
This is because single-family homes are exempt from the California Environmental Quality Act.
The City Attorney has already subjected the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance to an extensive legal review, and the elimination of its loopholes only simplifies the ordinance and its legal issues. It absolutely does not complicate them and require an extensive re-analysis.
And, until now, whenever community groups have requested Interim Control Ordinances to stop mansionization, Council offices and City Planning officials have rejected this approach because it would divert precious staff time and, therefore, slow down the ultimate objective of stopping McMansions.
What should happen now? I intended to address this point in remarks prepared for the City Council, and this is what I would have said:
First, the 14 communities most impacted by mansionization welcome short-term protection through Interim Control Ordinances.
Second, these ICO's should be prepared and adopted immediately, and they should all be modeled after the successful formula of the Beverly Grove Residential Floor Area District (RFA), adopted and implemented in October 2013.
This RFA is based on the concept that houses should be proportionate to lot size and adjacent homes, with a maximum Floor Area Ratio (FAR) of .5, including all bonuses and exemptions. More precisely, this template would permit houses of 3000 square feet in R-1 zones with 6000 square foot lots, as long as the proposed projects located garages at the rear of the lot instead of attaching them to the front of a house.
Third, the cleanup of the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance should also take place immediately and not be postponed for 18 months. The loopholes that have gutted the BMO are well known, and Councilmember Paul Koretz precisely identified them in his adopted BMO amendment motion.
Furthermore, supporters of the Councilmember's motion have submitted a draft strikeout version of the amended BMO to City Planning precisely based on the Council motion, along with a cover memo assessing all of the associated planning issues.
This means that the preparation and adoption of the amendments to eliminate the BMO’s loopholes is a straightforward process that should take several months, not a year and a half, to prepare and adopt.
Finally, this expedited schedule for the Interim Control Ordinances and the amendments to correct the Baseline Mansionization Ordinance are necessary to protect the many Los Angeles neighborhoods that are not shielded from mansionization by an ICO, HPOZ, RFA, or Specific Plan.
At the current rate of 1500 demolitions per year, over 2000 more homes could become history by the time the City eventually takes any permanent, citywide action to stop McMansions.
(Dick Platkin is on the board of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Association and also teaches Sustainable City Planning at USC’s Price School of Social Policy. He is an occasional contributor to CityWatch. Please send any questions or comments to [email protected].)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 12 Issue 90
Pub: Nov 7, 2014
