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UPZONING - My parents immigrated from Mexico, and I was born here. I have been a resident of Los Angeles my entire life, except for a few years when my husband was on military assignment. I was educated at St. Monica’s and Loyola Marymount University. I’ve lived in Venice, Santa Monica, and Westchester. My husband and I have three children and five grandchildren. As for my career, I was a trial attorney for plaintiffs. I am retired now, and my husband and I live in Westchester.
Until last year, we were loving life in Westchester, living very close to the historic Downtown Westchester area, attending church close to home, and looking forward to building a new home on our Westchester lot. That changed when we learned our single-family lot was proposed to be upzoned by several levels, to allow for housing high-rises. Thousands of other Westchester residents faced the same fate with these proposed “density districts.”
This year we learned that while single-family lots were now safe from this fate, now the city proposal is to upzone our Downtown Westchester area, and several other areas, to allow for buildings of heights with “no limit.” Although I had heard of the Mayor’s “Plan to House LA”, including the homeless, and her “Executive Directive No. 1,” I started paying attention after developers began requesting streamlined approvals for hundreds of ED 1 units in my community.
Here's what I learned. The purpose of upzoning is to allow for people of low-income levels to live in “high opportunity areas” and to have access to better opportunities and outcomes in areas with better schools, fewer environmental toxins, and closer to good jobs. The purpose of ED 1 is to streamline the housing permit process by providing ministerial approval and incentivizing projects that provide units for people of low-income levels and the homeless.
My research shows this isn’t working out as planned. Let’s use CD-11 as an example. Two of the most affluent communities in all of LA are in CD-11, but they were not included in this cycle of community plan updates and have no upzoning proposed. So, there will be no opportunities for people of low-income levels in those “high opportunity areas” anytime soon.
Then I began hearing about “exemptions” to ED 1 for areas in the coastal zone and fire zones. Not even a five-unit ED 1 project will be allowed in those high opportunity areas, which include probably half of the land area of CD-11, and the most affluent and whitest communities.
We began feeling the effects of those exemptions in Westchester several months ago, when we learned developers filed for permits for nearly 1,000 units in or near our historic Downtown Westchester area, in a community already jammed with airport traffic that slows vehicle passage to the airport for 45 minutes to one hour just to move a few blocks, and hundreds of people park on our residential streets to rideshare to LAX. Seems our historic and beloved DT Westchester won’t be long for this world.
The worst part of all is the proposed ED-1 projects are in areas with high and unsafe levels of noise pollution and air pollution because they are under or next to the incoming flight path and extremely close to the north runway of LAX. That runway has incoming flights every minute or two, generating unsafe levels of noise and air pollution for the low-income areas east of LAX. A few decades ago, 4,500 Westchester and Playa Del Rey homes were taken by eminent domain because it is unsafe to life that close to the airport.
This is not working out for Westchester, or for the people who will be housed in these polluted areas. Remember the USC study, showing people in these communities suffer from high levels of childhood asthma, increased risk of preterm labor, and pulmonary problems, etc.? Here’s the article.
And our schools? Well, most of us send our kids to private schools because all of our Westchester schools, except for one single elementary school for residents, are magnets and serve kids from other areas of LA. They are low-achieving schools. The good jobs? The city’s own jobs heat map shows the vast majority of the jobs in the Council District are much farther north in the District than Westchester, miles away, and certainly not walkable from Westchester.
So the way it has worked out is that the city is exempting the highest opportunity areas that have the cleanest air, the good schools, the most jobs, and the best opportunities, and instead have chosen to put the low income and homeless housing projects in Westchester near LAX. Nice work, Mayor Bass and Councilwoman Park.
(Rosa Padilla is a retired trial attorney and lifelong Los Angeles resident who has been a vocal advocate for her Westchester community, challenging city upzoning plans that threaten local neighborhoods with overdevelopment and environmental risks.)
