A Compromise on Spurring Investment, Saving Historic Sites : Planners Iron Out Hollywood Renewal Proposals

After a year of debate, city planners and a citizens advisory group are nearing completion on the first major step of Hollywood’s redevelopment plan, ironing out proposals to encourage commercial growth while protecting neighborhoods and historic buildings.

Planners with the Community Redevelopment Agency and most of their citizen advisers say the plan would lower zoning densities, but would also keep land-use controls flexible enough to stimulate investment.

“It’s a good compromise document,” said Marshall Caskey, an attorney who is president of the renewal agency’s advisory Project Area Committee. “To get a bunch of people who represent every interest in Hollywood to sit down and agree on such complex, loaded issues, I think, is remarkably harmonious--somewhat of a minor miracle.”

But a number of Hollywood’s most vocal interest groups still harbor doubts about the plan. Preservationists insist that it lacks the detailed authority to maintain many of Hollywood Boulevard’s landmarks. Homeowners in the Hollywood Hills fear that traffic will worsen and the skyline will be cluttered with office and apartment towers. And some community activists complain that Hollywood’s ethnic poor have had no voice in the planning process.

“It’s a plan with no vision,” said Frances Offenhauser, an architect and hillside homeowner who is on the committee. “It cements into place a plan that’s too vague. We’re being asked to take an awful lot at face value.”

The area committee and redevelopment planners expect to formally approve the proposal within the next month. The CRA will then prepare an environmental impact report. The plan must be adopted by the city Planning Commission and then the City Council--a process expected to take at least another year--before the CRA can proceed with the details of revitalization.

Redevelopment agency planners said they tried to keep the plan flexible because once adopted, it charts an urban renewal process that could take up to 30 years.

“The very nature of the plan is long range,” said Richard Bruckner, the agency’s senior planner for the Hollywood project. “That requires that we keep it fairly general. You have to start somewhere.”

Once the plan is adopted, Bruckner said, the CRA and its citizen advisers will develop a more detailed framework. “If you’re too specific at the beginning, you run the risk of setting into stone something that might not be appropriate for the Hollywood of 15 or 20 years from now,” he said.

What makes Hollywood such a difficult planning area--and such a controversial one--is its size and diversity. The redevelopment area covers 1,100 acres, “as large as some cities,” Bruckner said.

It encompasses new glass-and-concrete commercial office towers on Sunset Boulevard and older, sometimes vacant brick buildings on Hollywood Boulevard. Neighborhoods change character within a few blocks, from the stucco single-family bungalows on the west side to the film-editing laboratories and storage warehouses in the south-central corridor, to the cramped, decrepit apartment houses and small stores that line Western Avenue.

CRA planners divided Hollywood into seven planning areas, each with its own character and its own problems. Over the past year, planners and citizen advisers have developed goals for each of the areas.

Densities Lessened

The result is a general lessening of zoning densities, accompanied by land-use changes that strengthen residential growth in some sections and commercial growth in others.

“We’re reinforcing a lot of current trends,” Bruckner said. “What we’re trying to do is provide for a variety of residential densities, develop Hollywood’s commercial core and expand industrial uses in outlying areas where there hasn’t been much residential growth.”

Almost all area committee members give the CRA high marks for proposing zoning changes that would strengthen zoning for single-family homes in the area around DeLongpre Park, attract warehouses and light manufacturing to the western Santa Monica Boulevard corridor and support entertainment and film production facilities near Hollywood’s western edge and in the vicinity of the Sunset-Gower studios.

“Most of the changes have gone through with the unanimous approval of the PAC (Project Area Committee),” Marshall Caskey said. “In most cases, I think the plan plays to Hollywood’s greatest strengths.”

Controversial Aspects

But planned zoning changes on Hollywood’s northeastern edge and along Hollywood Boulevard have been more controversial.

The change that has drawn the most fire is the CRA’s plan to lower residential density along Franklin Avenue, on the area’s northeast edge. Homeowners in the hills north of Franklin fear that developers will be allowed to cram apartment houses along the avenue, clogging the area with traffic and raising the skyline.

The homeowners pushed for an 80-unit-per-acre limit on residential density, but the area committee voted for a 130-unit-per-acre limit. The current Hollywood Community Plan adopted by the council in 1973, allows a high residential density in that area.

“Our infrastructure won’t support that kind of development,” said Brian Moore, a Whitley Heights homeowner and Hollywood activist.

Moore, who was recently appointed to the advisory group by 13th District Councilwoman Peggy Stevenson, said he hopes to lower the density limit before the plan’s final draft is approved. “It seems to me that there’s a distinctly pro-development slant in the plan,” he said.

Bill Welsh, president of the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce and an advisory committee member, said he expects the compromise to hold.

“We’re not going to have 80-story buildings going up on Franklin in a solid phalanx,” he said. “With some new apartment buildings there, maybe we can get a neighborhood for people who want to live and work in Hollywood. The people fighting it are an affluent group of homeowners with a lot of clout.”

The plan’s section on Hollywood Boulevard has also come under attack by preservationists alarmed by what they insist is inadequate attention paid to historic buildings in Hollywood’s commercial core.

No Assurances

“The CRA says all the right things about preservation but they don’t give us any assurances,” said area committee member Frances Offenhauser. “There needs to be a distinction made on the boulevard between areas where commercial development is encouraged and areas where it should be limited.”

Proposed changes in the redevelopment plan’s land-use map would reduce commercial density along the boulevard from the current ratio of 13 square feet of building space allowed for every square foot of land to a 6-1 ratio.

The reduction would be accompanied by a set of specific goals that call for the development of commercial projects on Hollywood Boulevard, but “recognize and reinforce its history and architecture.”

The CRA also promises to develop a detailed “overlay plan” for the boulevard within two years after the City Council passes the redevelopment plan.

Offenhauser and other preservationists say they would prefer more specified zoning reductions indicated now in the plan’s land-use map. “My worry is that while we wait for the CRA to give us more details, we may be losing our historic buildings one by one,” she said.

The most radical change proposed by the CRA and its citizen advisers would take place along Western Avenue, Hollywood’s eastern border and its most blighted area.

Bruckner said planners would like to transform much of the area’s tawdry commercial strip--where bars, liquor stores, nude dance clubs and motels often frequented by prostitutes are clustered along with small groceries and shops--into a residential area.

“We think that’s where the most substantial changes need to take place,” Bruckner said. “We’d like to see neighborhoods built up there.”

Little Say

Those changes would take place in an area where many of Hollywood’s ethnic poor live and work. But some members of the CRA’s area committee worry that those residents have had little voice in determining their future.

Coffee shop owner Doreet Rotman, who is on the area committee, complained that she and a few supporters have had difficulty getting the panel to pay attention to social issues. She said the 25-member panel has no representatives from Hollywood’s large immigrant population and has had trouble keeping its four tenant representatives.

The committee was chosen by a Hollywood community election in December, 1983, and included four tenant representatives among its 21 elected seats. Four more members were appointed by Stevenson.

But over the past year, two of the four tenant members moved from Hollywood and a third, according to CRA staffer Len Betz, has not attended recent meetings. Although Betz said the tenant representatives had already accomplished much of their work, Rotman and several others said their absence has meant less support for social issues.

Rotman also criticized Stevenson for not using her appointments to bring in at least one representative from Hollywood’s immigrant community.

“The little people are always overruled and outnumbered,” Rotman said. “The only time you see any community participation is when the homeowners come down to fight about the high-rises. The CRA tolerates me and the few others who are working for social issues, but they don’t really listen to us.”

At the area committee’s meeting last Monday night, Rotman tried to inject a provision into the final redevelopment plan text which would ensure that the CRA consults with the committee whenever it plans to use eminent domain powers in acquiring land in Hollywood.

Questionable Issue

Caskey and CRA staff members worked out a compromise under which the CRA would agree to consult with the committee on all “implementation matters.”

“Eminent domain is a pseudo-issue,” Caskey said later. “It’s rarely used but people are always worried that the government’s going to come in and tear down their home or business. It’s kind of like a shotgun--you need it for protection, but you don’t want to wave it around unnecessarily.”