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Short piece in the U.K. magazine on L.A.'s move toward more density — and how cities around the West want to avoid becoming the next Los Angeles. Excerpt:
The original metropolitan miscreant is now trying to reform itself so fundamentally that Joel Kotkin, an urbanist at Chapman University, compares it to rewriting a DNA code. Last summer the city council changed zoning rules to allow tiny apartments to be built in and around downtown Los Angeles. On March 19th it rejected a plan to put 5,600 homes on the city's northern frontier, signalling that the metropolis must now grow up, not out. From next month developers will be allowed to build blocks of flats up to 35% bigger than previously, so long as they include some cheap housing.
[skip]Six miles (10km) west of North Hollywood, a four-storey building is rising next to a car-wash on Ventura Boulevard. When finished, it will contain about 130 apartments and an underground car park. To an outsider it seems innocuous. To local residents, schooled by almost a century of strict zoning to believe that bedrooms must be separated from shops, it is anathema. Gerald Silver, a local homeowner, predicts epic traffic jams from this and similar developments nearby. He complains that, without consultation, the neighbourhood is being turned into a version of Manhattan. He is not alone.
“You're beginning to see a neighbourhood revolution,” says Zev Yaroslavsky, one of Los Angeles' shrewdest and most powerful politicians. He gives warning that outraged citizens may add an initiative to the ballot next year that would block dense housing projects, “smart” or not. Mr Yaroslavsky knows about the power of ballot initiatives. He sponsored one in 1986 that cut the size of most new office buildings in half, and another in 1998 that virtually halted subway construction.
Planners retort that Los Angeles will continue to grow, and it is better to build new apartments on run-down commercial streets than plonk them next to bungalows or bulldoze virgin land. They are particularly keen to put people next to express bus lines or subway stops. At present few use Los Angeles' skeletal rail system—259,000 journeys are made each day, compared with 1.2m bus journeys—and the network is growing painfully slowly. If the subway cannot reach the people, the thinking goes, the people must be brought to the subway.