CommentsPLANNING WATCH-The Los Angeles Department of City Planning prominently placed two self-congratulatory awards on its web site. Other than promoting eye-rolling and head scratching, what else is going on?
According to City Planning’s press release, one award was for the Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) Incentives, and the other for Urban Design Citywide Guidelines. The same press release also patted the Department of City Planning on its back for its transparency and its planning and policy initiatives to encourage a more sustainable Southern California. A similar City Planning public letter took credit for “supporting Los Angeles's long-range planning efforts.”
While this is an amusing demonstration of the puff pieces that a new City Hall public relations unit can gaslight us with, it has little connection to day-to-day planning processes. In fact, viewed in the context of enormous demonstrations in front of City Hall and increasing criminal prosecutions of endemic pay-to-play real estate corruption two floors from City Planning’s offices, this back-patting is filled with irony.
Let’s take a closer look at these awards.
Transit Oriented Communities (TOC) Incentives is a quasi-ordinance implementing voter-adopted Measure JJJ, a lucrative upzoning-giveaway to commercial property owners peddled as a program to build affordable housing. But, since the City Council never adopted this “ordinance” before it inexplicably appeared in the Los Angeles Municipal Code, and because these guidelines do not follow the provisions of voter-adopted Measure JJJ, Fix the City sued the City of Los Angeles. Their lawsuit maintains that the TOC Guidelines are a fraud that the courts should terminate.
The Urban Design Citywide Guidelines are exemplary documents, but the City Council has not adopted them as ordinances. Furthermore, there are no land use procedures that require the Department of Building and Safety to use the Urban Design Guidelines in their review of ministerial projects or the Department of City Planning to apply them to the many discretionary zoning and planning cases they review and routinely approve.
The praise for long range planning initiatives is totally at odds with City Hall’s lackadaisical maintenance of LA’s General Plan. Most of the General Plan elements (chapters) are two decades old. Other than the Housing Element, there are no detectable efforts to update any other General Plan elements, especially it central organizing document, the 1996 General Plan Framework Element. While the Mobility and Health elements are current, like the rest of the General Plan, there are no monitoring programs to determine if their goals and policies have been met.
In addition, the General Plan’s Land Use element consists of LA’s 35 Community Plans and two District Plans. Their update began 15 years ago, through the New Community Plans Program. So far, the City Council has adopted six Updates, and its directive to update all 35 Community Plans on a six-year cycle has been forgotten.
Transparency is easy to boast about, but CityWatch readers know about the barriers the public faces to learn about discretionary real estate projects, to submit comments on these projects, and to participate in public meetings. I can also share a personal story of my exasperating efforts as a CityWatch columnist to find out the status of the Wilshire Community Plan, the Purple Line Extension Transit Neighborhood Plan, and the Purple Line Extension’s First-Last Mile program. My multiple inquiries, as well as those from other groups and residents, have yet to get straight, transparent answers from planners and public relations intermediaries about the schedule and scope for these three programs.
Planning Initiatives to encourage a more sustainable Southern California are undermined daily by planning ordinances and approvals for auto-centric houses, apartments, and commercial buildings. They accelerate climate change and make the Los Angeles region less, not more, sustainable. As for the big picture of sustainability, Los Angeles only has executive documents that respond to quickly emerging climate change trends. These are Mayor Villaraigosa’s and Mayor Garcetti’s short-lived executive climate action plans. Unfortunately, these mayoral documents have never been subjected to public debates and environmental reviews. More telling, the City Council has never debated of adopted them. Furthermore, LA’s current climate change document, pLAn, will expire when Mayor Garcetti leaves office in 2022. The chance that City Planning will replace it with a State-supported Sustainability/Climate Change General Plan element is, to be charitable, remote.
Since the press releases are so disconnected from the real planning process, the question is why.
To the extent that Los Angeles has a planning process at all, market trends drive it, not an analysis of realistic population, employment, and housing trends, much less the long-term capacity of municipal infrastructure and services. If this, not real estate speculation, was carefully considered, those awards might have been justified. In practice, these market-driven planning processes accentuate social and economic inequality in Los Angeles, a trend that can only be momentarily constrained by a militarized LAPD when it attacks demonstrators.
(Dick Platkin is a former Los Angeles city planner who reports on local planning issues for CityWatch. He serves on the board of United Neighborhoods for Los Angeles (UN4LA) and is co-chair of the new Greater Fairfax Residents Association. Please email comments and corrections to [email protected] or via Twitter to @DickPlatkin.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
