CommentsPLATKIN ON PLANNING-Once upon a time, in world far, far away, Los Angeles called itself the city of the future. In 1985 Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley assembled a blue-ribbon panel drawn from the city’s elites to chart the future of Los Angeles.
Completed in 1988, their LA 2000 – City of the Future report set the year 2000 as its horizon. Now, 30 years after the report’s release, and 19 years into the 21stt century, some of the report sounds dated, while other parts remain relevant.
Unfortunately, the still relevant recommendations did not include funding mechanisms, allowing City Hall foot dragging to stretch out for three decades, with no evidence that a sudden influx of revenue would bring these forgotten recommendations back to life. As a result, the LA-of-the-future is associated with the dystopian film, Bladerunner, not the LA 2000 – City of the Future report.
While we can’t fault this report’s authors for having a cloudy crystal ball, there are legally required procedures that, if utilized, would have ensured that the report’s big picture outlook survived the test of time. These are the legal requirements of California State planning laws and the Los Angeles City Charter. They require the preparation, adoption, implementation, monitoring, and regularly updating of a comprehensive General Plan, including the categories examined in the LA 2000 report, such as transportation, housing, and public safety.
In LA, repeated decisions to evade these state and local planning requirements became the LA 2000 report’s Achilles Heel. If City Hall had followed these laws – many of which the LA City Council had formally adopted -- the critical issues the report both missed and advanced, would still be front and center.
The fate of the LA 2000 report truly demonstrates the folly of allowing ever-changing real estate crazes to substitute for carefully monitored and regularly updated plans that guide the governance of Los Angeles. For example, the LA 2000 report called for an updated General Plan, paired with new regional plans for growth, infrastructure, environmental crises, and seismic safety. But, since the 1980’s, the liberal planning vision then held by the planning professionals and city elites who prepared the LA 2000 report was replaced by neo-liberalism. Trickle-down myths that building more private housing for the rich, to meet the unmet housing needs of the poor, supplanted Federal, state, and local public housing programs. Deregulation of land use has marginalized planning, zoning, and environmental laws. Finally, supply-side economics that made the rich even richer substituted for steady increases in consumer incomes and reductions in economic inequality to alleviate the housing crisis.
In practice, LA’s legacy of General Plan elements, implementing zoning laws, and environmental regulations was skirted to promote “growth,” a euphemism for highly profitable short-term real estate investments. This change explains why in 2019 no one pays attention to what the LA 2000 report overlooked and what it got right.
What the LA 2000 report overlooked:
- Climate change, including the natural and social science that drives it, as well as the long list of programs necessary to mitigate the emission of Green House Gases and adapt to climate change.
- Homelessness, homeless encampments, overcrowding, rent gouging, and induced out-migration.
- Crumbling infrastructure, especially sidewalks and streets.
- Cracked and failing water mains, gas lines, sanitary sewers, and storm drains.
- Dying urban tree canopy, despite exemplary models in surrounding cities.
- Missing bicycle and scooter infrastructure.
- Mansionization, leading to the demolition of thousands of affordable homes.
- Plan monitoring.
LA 2000 proposals that local officials ignored:
- Prepare and adopt metropolitan Growth, Environmental, Housing, Job-Housing Balance, and Earthquake Plans.
- Prepare a new City of Los Angeles General Plan and apply it locally through Community Plans and their implementation programs (e.g., pedestrian infrastructure).
- Spend $4-12 billion locally to overcome the housing shortage and lobby the Federal government to restore low and moderate-income housing programs.
- Require employers to manage their employees’ commutes.
- Provide adequate water supplies.
- Establish a Southern California Consortium of human service providers.
- Direct public and private investment to job-poor neighborhoods.
- Expand the City’s urban forestry program.
The official plans that the LA 2000 report emphasized could still address the important issues (e.g., climate change) the report missed, as well as those that City Hall subsequently ignored. This cannot be explained away by negligence because local officials had full access to California’s planning laws and full knowledge of the City Charter’s General Plan requirements. They decided to govern an enormous city, Los Angeles, without planning it.
Unfortunately, this non-planning has extensive and often irreversible consequences. To avoid them, municipal plans must thoroughly assess the capacity of public infrastructure and services. To effectively govern, cities must also carefully monitor population trends, not just accept wildly inaccurate population figures from the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). Finally, dependable municipal General Plans must track the location of developable land based on zoning ordinances and construction trends.
These planning tasks are not only challenging in their own right, but they must overcome the rapidly shifting real estate trends that echo throughout City Hall. No one can correctly predict shifts in consumer preferences, hedge fund whims, interest rates, tax laws, environmental regulations, and profitability among so many different real estate investment options. Pay-to-play back room deals and legislative band-aids are stuck in a perpetual and unwinnable game of catch-up. Today’s most valuable speculative real estate investments might be high-rise apartment buildings for the well-to-do, but next year it could be campus shopping centers, single-family homes, cannabis retailers (photo below), ramen restaurants, high tech work centers, or psychics.
Look out landlords; this might be the next big real estate trend?
When, not if, this happens, the true, long-term costs of bending or even jettisoning planning, zoning, and environmental laws for the immediate benefit of investors in high-rise apartment buildings – or future real estate alternatives -- will become apparent. Undergrounded utilities will fail more quickly; transit ridership will continue to nose dive; traffic congestion will become more snarled; gentrification and homelessness will expand; fragile trees canopies will dies; and an already unattractive city will wither before our eyes.
The only difference between this current downward spiral and the eventual weaknesses of the LA 2000 – City of the Future report is that we now have better tools to reverse the slide while it is happening.
We also know that the the same blinkered process drives the State legislature’s real estate schemes, such as SB 50, SB 330, and AB 1270, despite their preventable local consequences. For that matter, we can see similar calamities unfolding in Los Angeles through a laundry list of local rip-offs, such as Transit Neighborhood Plans, re:code LA, and density bonus ordinances. This current march of folly is well underway, with the same short-term view that allowed so many good things in the LA 2000 – City of the Future report to be flushed down the memory hole.
(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner who reports on local planning controversies in Los Angeles for CityWatchLA. He serves on the board of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA) and welcomes comments and corrections at [email protected].) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
