Making room for more
In the mid-1980s, Los Angeles residents discovered that a boom in land values was creating a new streetscape of mini-malls and multistory buildings. They worried that the low-rise neighborhoods they deemed vital to L.A.’s style and quality of life were endangered by shadow-casting towers and commercial enterprises that didn’t provide enough parking for visitors. Voters approved an initiative that in some parts of the city put a strict cap on the allowable floor-area ratio. It wasn’t a height limit, but its effect was to keep buildings from rising too high.
Later, a mayor’s panel studying slum conditions found that housing prices had become so high that 200,000 people were living in garages or tripling and quadrupling up in apartments meant for single families. That was long before the real estate market’s astronomical ascent of the last several years. The city responded with inspections to make sure rental housing didn’t fall into substandard conditions, but also with incentives to encourage developers to build more units and to reserve some for prices below the market rate.
These two pressures -- to protect the quality of life for current residents and to build decent homes for new ones -- could easily morph into a no-win political battle pitting demographic groups against one another and squandering L.A.’s special status as a promised land of comfortable living. In one corner are Angelenos prepared to protect their investments in their homes. In the other are builders seeking to cash in on the housing market, labor unions that see the chance for construction jobs and affordable-housing advocates trying to secure more below-market units for residents of modest means. On the table -- in a City Council committee today and before the full council soon -- is the city’s density bonus ordinance, commonly referred to as SB 1818 after the state law mandating that cities allow developers to build even more market-rate units than current zoning laws allow, in exchange for promising to include some affordable units as well.
The city’s future is on the line, but no battle is necessary. Residents see that density is coming to their neighborhoods one way or another, as families again triple and quadruple up. Homeless-service providers report that their clients include more and more families whose rents were raised beyond their ability to pay. Our choice is to accommodate our neighbors in our parks or in the garage next door or on a two-hour commute from Riverside -- or to make room for builders to build.
That doesn’t mean that L.A. is fated to become a Third World city of endless residential high-rises along every transit corridor -- which here means pretty much one street after another. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who wrote the 1980s floor-area cap, spotted alarming provisions in the city’s SB 1818 proposal that he believes would undermine the livability of many neighborhoods. He noted that new residents could be accommodated in smaller units without the shadowy towers. City officials are responding, and more give-and-take may be needed.
But the dickering can’t go on forever. There are places it makes sense for Los Angeles to soar: downtown, for example, and Century City, Warner Center and some neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway. In the rest of the city too, it’s time to figure out how to make room for more.
