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Mayor Eric Garcetti and several city council members have decided that the issue of a high-rise Los Angeles is too hot to handle and want to throw it into the bottomless pit that is the city hall bureaucracy, which is much akin to the Department of Circumlocution in Charles Dickens “Little Dorrit.” That’s why they favor delaying until 2026 new city plans regulating the big buildings.
Risk adverse is a kindly way of describing these officials. Gutless is more appropriate.
Development in Los Angeles is supposedly regulated by 35 neighborhood plans developed over many years by the city planning department and approved by mayors and the city council.
Here’s what it means: Whether those shops on your nearby shopping street are replaced by a 10-story apartment building is regulated by your neighborhood plan. Most of these plans are more than 15 years old.
But as someone who spent years hanging around city hall as a reporter and an ethics commissioner, I saw that these plans are worthless. Development in Los Angeles is actually controlled by a web of incomprehensible zoning laws that are regularly avoided by campaign-contributing real estate magnates and their city hall supporters. If developers want to put up a tall building, they go to the council member representing the area. Council members control zoning laws and developments in their districts. Their colleagues, no matter what a neighborhood plan says, routinely grant approval. Residents are left in the dark unless they happen to follow their neighborhood association website.
Market forces, not city laws and regulations, shape this process. Completion of the Metro subway through Hollywood into the San Fernando Valley helped sparked construction of high rises for apartments, condos, offices and retail in Hollywood. The backlash was an anti-development-limiting measure that is scheduled to be on the March, 2017 ballot. The Hollywood-inspired measure is likely to stir up enthusiasm in other parts of the city worried about gentrification, high rise construction and other changes that could come with new transit lines.
After the limit proposal surfaced, Mayor Garcetti and council members rushed into action with an odd plan that would delay a decision on regulating development, requiring the city planning to update the 35 existing plans by, believe it or not, 2026. It would require 28 more city planners to do the work at a cost of $4.2 million a year, which seems like a lot of money for a decade-long approach to rewriting existing plans.
Garcetti told David Zahniser of the Los Angeles Times that he wasn’t reacting to the limitation ballot measure. All he wanted to do, he said, is update. Actually, what he and the council members really want to do is delay action for a decade, hoping that protesters have short attention spans.
But we should have this debate next year, when the initiative is on the ballot, rather than letting the issue disappear in the city hall bureaucracy. Personally, I like the idea of residences, offices and retail around train and subway stops. But a lot of people worry about their neighborhoods being wrecked. And most everybody wants planning regulations with teeth, not the present laws that are easily avoided by developers and their city hall allies.
