THE CITY-I recently heard an official presentation on the proposed Master Planned Development (MPD) zone (CPC-2010-3315-CA) for Los Angeles. This is a new land use category that would expedite building permits for mixed use, campus-type projects. If you are not sure what that means, imagine scaled-down versions of The Grove.
At this presentation the audience was told that this new zone is being rushed through the City’s adoption process because of its urgency. There is a backlog of 41 potential MPD projects, and – presumably – their investors want the City to approve these projects before market conditions change or the five-year re-Code LA program is completed.
When I heard the urgency argument, my first response was to review the hundreds of community meetings I have attended as a city planner in Los Angeles. I can remember local residents expressing an interest in a supermarket, a Trader Joe’s, a Target, or a Starbucks. But other than requests for public improvements, such as better street lighting or schools, this was it. Furthermore, none of these small commercial uses and public improvements requires a special new zone that is being quickly pushed through the City Planning Commission and the City Council.
My second response was to compile the following list of urgent, planning-related issues for Los Angeles:
- Outdated General Plan. By professional planning practice, common sense, and State of California law, every California City requires a timely and internally consistent General Plan to guide local government. Unfortunately, most of LA’s General Plan is in need of an immediate, comprehensive update.
Its backbone, the General Plan Framework Element, is based on 1990 census data, was prepared in the early 1990’s, and was adopted in 1996. Of the other mandatory and discretionary planning elements, only the Housing and Transportation Elements have been properly updated.
Everything else is old, and some General Plan elements, like Infrastructure, are downright ancient. The City Council adopted them in the 1960’s, and they have not been updated in a half-century!
- Monitoring. No General Plan element can be relied on if it is not regularly monitored. This monitoring process and program was built into the Framework, but was ignored over the past 14 years until City Planning recently released the 2014 Growth and Infrastructure Report. After such a long hiatus, it is a welcome first step, but many unanswered questions remain.
Will this report be paired with the permanent General Plan monitoring program called for in the General Plan Framework Element? Will this monitoring program regularly furnish elected officials, city staff, and the public with updated statistics for population, employment, housing, traffic conditions, air quality, and similar? Will the monitoring program finally determine which General Plan implementation programs are operational and effective? Will elected official and the public also be informed if the capacity of municipal services and infrastructure has kept up with changing user demand?
In the same vein, will they be informed about infrastructure decay resulting from deferred maintenance and the increasing numbers of natural disasters related to climate change? And given the current focus on seismic mapping and retrofitting, will these essential issues be added to the General Plan monitoring process?
Finally, once these data are prepared and analyzed, will there be future annual reports, and will they recommend mid-course corrections to the goals, policies, and implementation programs in the General Plan’s mandatory and discretionary elements? This, after all, is the reason why plans should be monitored.
- Traffic Congestion and Air Quality. LA’s fledgling efforts at mass transit and bicycle lanes are a step in the right direction to address the country’s worst traffic congestion and air quality, but just a step.
To tackle these momentous problems, it is urgent that LA supplement its new Mobility Element with well-funded implementation programs to get residents, employees, and visitors out of their cars. This means much more money for mass transit, for bicycle infrastructure, and for pedestrian improvements, especially sidewalk repairs.
These projects are expensive, but they are of the highest priority, and to be truly effective they must be partnered with better land use policies.
Once the transportation infrastructure is qualitatively improved, along with comparable improvements in other municipal services, the city can transition to higher densities. If higher density is encouraged --- as is the current practice -- without adequate transportation capacity, recreation and parks, schools, libraries, public safety, animal regulation, and a host of other categories, Los Angeles will experience a relentless downward spiral of urban decay.
Shiny new luxury apartments, office buildings, McBoxes, and shopping malls – even if rapidly approved as MPD projects – are hardly enough.
- Seismic Safety. We live in earthquake country, and the “Big One,” an earthquake much larger than the 6.7 Northridge earthquake in 1994, is certain. Yet, the city’s active earthquake faults have not been properly mapped, and the list of extremely vulnerable older buildings UC Berkeley engineers predict will fail in a large earthquake has not been made public.
Furthermore, unlike San Francisco, Los Angeles does not yet have an actual program to retrofit these structures so they can withstand a massive earthquake. As a result of this municipal negligence, thousands of preventable deaths and major injuries are a certainty.
- Urban Beautification. For lack of a better word, hundreds of miles of LA’s commercial, industrial, and residential streets are insufferably ugly. Drivers, passengers, bicyclists, and pedestrians must endure relentless visual pollution defined by billboards, super-graphics, pole and roof signs, overhead wires, ragged heights and building lines, and a lack of trees.
Most surrounding cities, such as Culver City, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, West Hollywood, Glendale, and Pasadena, have shown how they can look wonderful, given the same climate and geography. This means the models are literally in front of our eyes.
- Urban Forest. Of all the low hanging fruit to address many of LA’s most urgent issues, planting and maintaining a vibrant urban forest, is the most obvious. True, Mayors Bradley, Villaraigosa, and Garcetti have had Million Tree campaigns, but these were largely public relations shows. They depend(ed) on volunteers, not the expertise and professional resources of the City’s Urban Forestry Division.
Well planned tree planting is clearly the easiest way to literally green Los Angeles, and then reap a wide range of benefits, including carbon sequestration, recreation, habitat and water supply protection, improved pedestrian paths, passive solar heating and cooling, air pollutant reductions, including Green House Gases, and neighborhood beautification.
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While tree planting may not get a boost from the City Hall lobbyists now plugging new shopping centers, can there be any doubt which category will most benefit Angelenos?
- Climate Change. The climate change models developed or presented at our three research universities – UCLA, USC, and CalTech – all indicate that we are headed into a grim 21st century. We will experience increased heat waves, mega-droughts, forest fires, floods, rising sea levels, and extreme weather events, all of which have major social and economic consequences.
How should cities, like LA, respond? An obvious start would be to add a Climate Change-Sustainability element to the General Plan. Many California cities have already taken this step, and to assist them the Governor’s Office of Planning and Research has already prepared detailed guidelines for this optional element.
Furthermore, the State will soon require all California cities to prepare a Climate Change element for their General Plan. Luckily for Los Angeles, some of this work already exists. The Framework, the new Mobility Element, and older elements, such as Air Quality, all have policies and programs that reduce Green House Gasses. But, all of these policies and program need to be updated, integrated, augmented, and then meticulously monitored.
Furthermore, this new element would need to be reconciled with potentially contradictory planning policies and zoning practices that promote economic growth through auto-centric real estate speculation ranging from shopping malls to McMansions.
While this quick survey of seven urgent planning-related issues facing Los Angeles is hardly the final word, I do hope it makes at least one modest point: they are all much more important to Los Angeles residents than the expedited approval of new shopping centers.
(Dick Platkin teaches, writes, and consults on community planning issues in Los Angeles. He is a CityWatch contributor. Please submit any questions or comments to [email protected].)
-cw
