CommentsPLATKIN ON PLANNING-What exactly do we mean by “business-as-usual” when it comes to city planning in Los Angeles? After all, LA has a long history of recurrent lawsuits, external government mandates and voter initiatives that periodically push back against the ordinary slipshod planning.
Parcel Level Legislative Actions. The most visible feature of business-as-usual planning is unique legislative actions by the City Council -- specifically General Plan Amendments, Zone Changes, and Height District Changes – used to eliminate laws regulating individual parcels. Once the City Council takes these precise actions, projects that are otherwise illegal can be legally built.
Furthermore, when the City Council changes zoning and General Plan Designations for specific lots, it creates enormous windfalls for property owners. This spot-zoning and spot-planning for cronies is the municipal equivalent of the goose that laid the golden egg: The market value of re-zoned lots soars.
Pay-to-Play, AKA Corruption. For the City Council to wave its magic wand of legality, there are many pay-to-play exchanges winding their way through the backrooms of City Hall. For real estate investors and contractors to build projects that are otherwise illegal, they pony up the bucks for office-holders’ campaigns and pet projects. Even though much of this pay-to-play is technically legal, when too many embarrassing facts bubble to the surface, it is called by its correct name, corruption. For example, in 2011, Mayor Villaraigosa and Councilmembers Garcetti, Huizar, Wesson, and Cardenas were together fined $36,000 for unreported gifts. And who paid their fines? The same special interests who gave them the gifts!
A more recent example, according to investigative reporter Patrick Range McDonald, is Beverly Hills-based real estate speculator, Michael Hakim. He contributed $250,000 to City Council President Herb Wesson’s Community Benefits Trust Fund. Hakim also gave Mayor Garcetti $1 million for the City's Affordable Housing Trust Fund. After these payments, Mr. Hakim successfully obtained long-stalled approvals for the construction of a 27-story skyscraper on a narrow street in a two-story Koreatown neighborhood. A million dollars sounds like a lot, but it’s chump change compared to the tens of millions in profit Hakim will reap from a project that only contains three units of affordable housing.
In Los Angeles, pay-to-play has become the blood pulsing through the veins of business-as-usual city planning. And it’s inherent to a planning process in which parcel level discretionary actions determine how Los Angeles develops. If the General Plan were followed correctly, according to Framework Objective 3.3, greater density could only be permitted when it can be supported by sufficient infrastructure and services.
These parcel level handouts from the Los Angeles City Council are hardly trivial. Over the past decade the City Council has considered 579 Zone Changes and General Plan Amendments. In the same period the City Planning Department handled 2682 Variances, an administrative process that legalizes the construction of otherwise illegal projects without City Council legislative action.
Languishing General Plan. While the business of the Planning Department, the City Planning Commission, and the City Council’s Planning and Land Use Committee hums along with discretionary zoning and planning cases legalizing projects that otherwise could not obtain building permits under existing municipal laws, LA’s General Plan languishes. One required element, “Mobility” was completed in the past year; and another required element, Housing (2013), was updated several years ago. But the other required elements: Conservation (2001), Open Space (1973), Public Safety (1996), and Noise (1999) are all out-of-date.
The Land Use element, also known as the Community Plans, is another out-of-date required element. Except for recent updates in Granada Hills and Sylmar, the City Council adopted the other 33 Community Plans in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Remember, the Land Use Element is only one portion of a much larger, legally required General Plan. But, because the City Council attaches intricate land use ordinances to updated Community Plans in order to loosen up zoning and planning restrictions, these are the updates that attract the most public attention.
In addition to the legally mandated elements, Los Angeles has prepared several optional elements. One, Health (2015), is new. In contrast, the City Council adopted its Air Quality element in 1992. Another optional element, Service Systems, does not even have a date, but appears to be from the 1970s. The Infrastructure Element is no longer even listed on the City Planning website, but it dates back to the late 1960’s, prepared a few years after the 1965 Watts Civil Disturbance.
The best-known optional General Plan element is the General Plan Framework, which the City Council adopted in 1996. One indicator of how poorly it has aged is its population figures. It forecast a 2010 population of 4,306,000 people in Los Angeles, which ended up exceeding LA’s actual 2010 population of 3,793,000 by over a half million people. Yet, this gross error barely registered at City Hall.
The 1990 data is now 26 years old and reflects a much different Los Angeles. Prior to LA’s enormous civil disturbance of 1992 and the highly destructive Northridge earthquake in 1994, LA was a boomtown. But, the combination of the end of raw land and the precipitous decline of LA’s auto, steel, aviation, and garment industries, the city began its economic descent that has still not ended. Not only has LA not gained any jobs during this period, but there has hardly been any population growth – except in the starry-eyed plans that the City is unable to successfully defend in court.
Failure to Monitor the General Plan. As some CityWatch readers may remember, the State of California’s General Plan guidelines stipulate that all cities and counties must monitor their General Plan. They must also prepare and distribute an annual report addressing changes in the General Plan’s demographic assumptions, demand for public infrastructure and services, capacity of infrastructure and services based on maintenance programs, and, finally, the success or failure of the General Plan’s many implementation programs, such as zoning.
Even though Los Angeles has dodged this requirement, it nevertheless officially committed itself to such a monitoring program and annual report through Chapter Two and Chapter Ten of the General Plan Framework. Partial reports addressing infrastructure capacity appeared in 1997, 1998, and 1999.
These reports did not address other monitoring categories, and since then there has only been one other partial report, inconspicuously prepared in 2014. Like its predecessors, it, too, was ignored, despite LA’s failing infrastructure.
Blind Faith in Markets. To the extent any assumptions can be identified in business-as-usual planning Los Angeles, they are what I have previously described as blind-faith market fundamentalism. Others might compare them to a belief in supernatural forces that benevolently govern human affairs, including the magical creation of solutions to pressing urban problems through real estate speculation.
In essence, this planning paradigm postulates that LA is still a rapidly growing boomtown, that its future residents will need good jobs and housing, and that deregulation of planning and zoning will provide sufficient private sector incentives to build ample housing and provide high quality employment for this boomlet. A final assumption, which I have previously argued also lacks any supporting evidence, is that the new luxury housing resulting from the deregulation of land use will “filter” down to become affordable housing for Angelenos priced out of market housing.
The California Legislative Analyst’s Office writes that it takes a generation for market rate housing to become affordable, a macroeconomic view. In Los Angeles, this macroeconomic trend cannot be found. Your own eyes will tell you that once-new market rate housing in your neighborhood is still out of reach and has yet to trickle down. In Los Angeles, market rate and luxury housing acts as a gentrifying force where it appears. It drives up land costs and rents, triggers land speculation and displaces longtime residents.
An Alternative to Business-as-Usual: While the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative is not a total cure all, it is a powerful and long overdo alternative to these and other aspects of business-as-usual city planning in Los Angeles. Consider it to be one more chapter in a long line of ballot initiatives and lawsuits that have forced the planning process in LA back on track whenever it reverts to business-as-usual.
(Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. Please send any comments or corrections to [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
