CommentsPLATKIN ON PLANNING-In city planning circles Houston is (in)famous for its lack of zoning laws. Furthermore, Houston only adopted its first General Plan in January 2017, which means blind market forces continue to determine all of its local land use decisions. The result is that developers can and do build anything they want anywhere, and that includes areas with a long history of flooding.
While Houston’s market-driven land use decisions did not cause Hurricane Harvey, like climate change, they made the human impacts of the storm much worse.
This is a critical lesson for Los Angeles. Even though LA -- at least on paper – has elaborate planning and zoning laws and regulations, LA’s tainted political process ensures that the end result is also market driven, an outcome barely different from Houston. As carefully argued by Mike Davis in “The Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster,” Los Angeles long ago allowed its many vulnerable areas to be paved over and developed with homes and commercial structures. Since then LA’s fragile geology, such as major earthquake faults in Hollywood and many parts of west LA, have not stopped major construction projects, even when they are subject to the state’s Alquist-Priolo Earthquake Fault Zoning (AP) Act. As for other areas, no problem:
- Flood plains. No problem. We paved over the rivers and tributaries to allow the rapid evacuation of heavy rains in order to allow construction in flood plains.
- Open space? No problem, even though the famous 1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the entire Los Angeles area would have saved them, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which commissioned this three year study, quickly killed it.
- Hillsides? No problem. Why devote a wonderful perch to hiking trails and parks, when someone will pay good money for a hillside house built on stilts?
Of course, LA’s most serious safety threat is earthquakes, especially an inevitable 8.2 big one on the San Andreas Fault. According to seismologist Lucy Jones, this quake will be 45 times more powerful than the 1994 Northridge earthquake. It will cut off LA’s lifelines, including water and highways. Thousands will perish in fires and collapsed buildings, landslides, and freeways.
We should not, however, ignore LA’s other natural hazards, such as fires and floods. Because of climate change, we already know these dangers will steadily worsen throughout the entire 21st Century:
- Floods? In 1861, it rained for 28 straight days in California, including Los Angeles. In fact, the entire San Joaquin Valley flooded, in some cases to a depth of 30 feet. In Los Angeles, the local flood area was 18 miles long, stretching from Signal Hill in Long Beach to Huntington Beach.
- Hurricanes? We may suffer when tropical storms from Mexico, like Lidia, frequently bring rain, heat, and humidity to Southern California, but if and when the Pacific warms enough, California would have full-strength hurricanes.
- Wild Fires? Southern California, like the entire Western United States, has a long history of wild fires that are growing in frequency and intensity, such as the recent 11 square mile Verdugo fire in Sunland. This was the largest wild fire in Los Angeles history and a portend of things to come. The latest predictions are truly ominous since the combination of climate change and intrusive urban development is ushering in much greater wild fires. What we have experienced in recent years -- the expansion of the wild fire season to the entire year -- is here to stay.
- Heat waves? LA’s recent record-breaking heat waves are becoming the new normal. Accord to UCLA’s Los Angeles Regional Collaborative for Climate and Action and Sustainability (LARC), Los Angeles will be 4 to 5 degrees warmer by 2050. Heat waves, similar to the past week, will become much more frequent.
Planning for LA’s Changing Threats: Luckily for Los Angeles, a rigorous, bottoms-up planning process could be one of the most important tools to deal with these certain natural disasters. Who, after all, has a better sense of how local communities should comprehensively prepare for certain calamities than local residents? For that matter, who has a better overall understanding of the quality of life issues facing LA’s residents in the decades ahead?
To assist in this process, the State of California has recently issued a totally updated guide on how local communities should prepare their legally required General Plans. These mandatory plans are the guiding document for all local plans and laws, including their implementation through such municipal programs as zoning ordinances, as well as continuous General Plan monitoring.
The 2017 General Plan Guidelines offer remarkable direction to local communities, as well as to City Hall, on the best ways to currently update the City of LA’s outdated General Plan. While there is no guarantee that City Hall will take heed and follow the latest State planning laws and guidelines, I will call out some of the most important sections, in the hopes that local communities can take the lead, pointing the way for elected officials and City staff to follow.
Role of Public Participation: The new Guidelines, quoted below, emphasize the critical role of extensive public participation in updating and maintaining a city’s General Plan. The public’s role should be continuous, not just LA’s current approach, which consists of a few perfunctory briefings explaining what City Planning staff and their handpicked advisors have already privately determined to be the content of a General Plan element.
“A local general plan should start with a shared community vision that will help set priorities throughout the planning process, and inform decision makers about community values. Creating a community vision may include the following:
- Expanded outreach to all members of the community, including public agencies and local residents.
- Looking back to identify past challenges and accomplishments.
- Examining current data and emerging data trends.
- Considering future issues, challenges, and goals.
With continued input and engagement from community members and decision makers, the processes of preparing, adopting, implementing, and maintaining the general plan serves to:
- Provide a basis for local government decision–making, including decisions on development approvals and exactions.
- Provide residents with opportunities to participate in the planning and decision–making processes of their communities.
- Inform residents, developers, decision makers, and other cities and counties of the ground rules that guide development within a particular community.
Engaging the community in multiple ways ensures a strong general plan…
Preparing for Disasters. The Safety Element is a mandatory General Plan element, and new State of California requirements now require all cities, including Los Angeles, to carefully assess how climate change affects local safety issues. This means that L.A’s updated General Plan must not only address the enormous earthquake dangers facing Los Angeles, but also heat waves, more frequent and intensive storms, sea level rise, and wild fires. This approach is not optional; it is mandatory through Senate Bill 379, adopted in 2015 and effective January 2017. To best comply with this new law, LA City Planning should immediately solicit guidance from local communities on all safety issues.
Furthermore, local communities have no need to passively wait for City Hall to set up these meetings and hearings. They can and should take the initiative. Local groups, such as Neighborhood Councils and HOA’s, can prepare their own Safety Elements. Following the new State guidelines, it should include local preparations for the full range of anticipated dangers, both seismic and climate-related.
In doing so, the State of California also offers these detailed guidelines for the implementation of Senate Bill 379 regarding the impacts of climate change on local safety planning.
Climate Change: An increasingly important factor affecting disaster management functions is climate change. Climate Change reflects new uncertainties and factors shaping and conditioning hazard mitigation planning. Chapter 4.5 in the 2013 California State Hazard Mitigation Plan (SHMP) addresses a specific approach for local communities to evaluate their risk as a result of climate change. The Safety Element of the general plan plays an important role in ensuring consistency with the Local Hazard Mitigation Plan (LHMP) and the SHMP. The general plan and LHMP both provide a local vehicle for implementation of the SHMP, including the provisions dealing with climate change. The SHMP outlines tools, resources and a process for addressing climate change at the local level. The resources the SHMP and LHMP guidance materials reference are the same materials referenced in Chapter 8 of the General Plan Guidelines, Climate Change. This provides for consistency across multiple documents such as an adaptation plan, climate action plan, general plan, implementation plan, local hazard mitigation plan, etc. For more information refer to the website for the State Hazard Mitigation Plan.
With the lessons from Houston’s awful land use decisions and the State of California’s 2017 General Plan Guidelines both staring Angelinos in the face, this is the time to properly update LA’s General Plan, especially its Safety Element. We need to understand how LA’s appalling record of allowing market forces to substitute for careful bottoms-ups planning have jeopardized us in the short-term, but can be properly rectified in the long term if local communities now take the lead on the planning and safety issues.
(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner who reports on local planning issues for City Watch LA. He welcomes comments and corrections at [email protected]. Previous columns can be found at the CityWatch archives and selectively at: www.plan-itlosangeles.blogspot.com.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
-cw
