Will the Westside Plan to Create a Westside Plan?

This is not a difficult concept to understand or appreciate—when large projects such as Bundy Village, Bergamot Village, the Entrada Tower or the Exposition/Pico/Sepulveda Casden projects are planned in the traffic-laden Westside, the jurisdiction choosing to approve it is confined to one city, but acutely felt by residents of all adjacent city and county jurisdictions.

Yes, there are the legal and political actions taken by one city against another with respect to traffic and infrastructure-related impacts, but ultimately the problem lies with this terrible, undeniable reality:

That when the City Council of other governing body of a given city or other jurisdiction (be it Santa Monica, Culver City, L.A. or the unincorporated county parcel of Marina Del Rey) is willing to thwart and undermine the needs of its own residents, it certainly has no problem doing the same to residents of adjacent jurisdictions.

Unfortunately, the legal reality is that judges and zoning administrators have the ability to ignore residents from a bordering jurisdiction even though that border has nothing to do with the traffic, pollution, parking, water, visual and other impacts. The border is just a line on a map, but living on the wrong side of the border leaves a person with virtually no voice or ability to slow down or demand mitigation for an oversized project.

Sometimes we get lucky—the Bundy Village project at Olympic/Bundy had an opposition with some very deep pockets to help fight and defeat that project. More often than not, however, the deep pockets are to be found on the side of the developer, his/her lobbyists and any political leaders for whose election campaign the developer has helped fund.

Frankly, we’ve been lucky as of late because the devastating economic downturn has left banks with the inability to fund large developments, so there’s been a slowdown of construction and lobbying over the past few years. Unfortunately, as credit begins to loosen a bit, the financial (and therefore political) trend shifts more to the developers.

So we will end up hearing the same old moral/political “cover” for a project that the city or other department of transportation deems too big and unmitigable—with a few new convenient paradigms thrown in for good measure:

--We need affordable housing (even though the costs of the condos or apartments are anything but affordable, and net affordable housing units may actually go down as a result of a new mega-development replacing an older project).

--We need construction jobs to help the local economy (even though the increased density and traffic inevitably encourages businesses to avoid our region).

--We need transit-oriented development (even though we create projects that are anything but transit-oriented that will inevitably increase car traffic and encourage population growth that makes local and regional traffic worse).

So the latest oversized project to threaten our economy, environment and quality of life is the Bergamot Transit Village in Santa Monica (link), and grassroots entities on both sides of the Santa Monica/Los Angeles border are expressing their concern about the likelihood that traffic will be worsened at the expense of Westside businesses and residents of both cities.

There is also the issue to be raised of whether the future Expo Line and Wilshire Subway will relieve or encourage Westside traffic, and there are many who still find the question of whether passenger rail helps traffic remain unanswered (link).

It should be reminded, and re-reminded, however, that none of the citizen/grassroots advocates who fought for either the Expo or Wilshire rail lines are in favor of these megaprojects—and that those building the large Westside developments pay very little mitigation towards their impacts, or to the creation of these rail lines or other infrastructure projects.

Land use and zoning laws exist for a variety of reasons—the livability and preservation of a neighborhood or city are two prominent reasons. Yet every transit or transportation advocate worth his/her salt will tell you that one cannot build one’s way out of traffic—one can only plan, enforce the density and zoning laws as is reasonably and realistically possible, and expand in a sustainable manner.

And we’re into sustainability, right? Right?

On a final note, the Westside Cities Council of Governments, which includes L.A., Santa Monica, Culver City, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and the County of L.A.) does exist in theory for this endeavor, but it has not as of yet truly taken on the thornier but more messy issue of policing and restricting overly-large, variance-heavy projects that make no sense for an area that hasn’t enough water, electricity, police/fire services and traffic infrastructure as it is.

It may have to fall to the grassroots again to police their electeds…but the money and the power have not historically favored the grassroots in this endeavor. Yet to avoid the diminution of the quality of life in the Westside, regardless of city or county boundaries, there will need to be some sort of Westside Plan that addresses big-ticket mega-developments that impact residences and businesses in any and all portions of the Westside.

There is just no other way to ensure the livability of the Westside…for either ourselves or future generations.

(Ken Alpern is a former Boardmember of the Mar Vista Community Council (MVCC), previously co-chaired its Planning and Outreach Committees, and currently is Vice Chair of its MVCC Transportation/Infrastructure Committee. He is co-chair of the CD11 Transportation Advisory Committee and chairs the nonprofit Transit Coalition, and can be reached at [email protected]. He also co-chairs the grassroots Friends of the Green Line at www.fogl.us. The views expressed in this article are solely those of Mr. Alpern.)