40-Year-Old Community on Verge of Unprecedented Commercial Development : Once-Sleepy Westchester Awakes to the Din of Growth

Kendra Meader had just struck a deal on a new, bluff-top home in Westchester when she learned that the vacant land below it was set aside for an ambitious high-rise commercial center.

She didn’t let it change her mind.

“People kept telling me, ‘That land’s been vacant for 30 years,’ ” she recalled two years later. “They said, ‘Who knows if (the center) will really go through?’ ”

But today, like most of her neighbors, Meader no longer wonders whether the community will change. The first phase of the massive Howard Hughes Center--a 16-story office tower--dominates the view from her backyard. Soon there will be at least four other high-rises in a project one-third the size of Century City.

It is only the beginning for Westchester. The 40-year-old bedroom community, wedged between Marina del Rey and Los Angeles International Airport, is at the onset of a transformation. Plans for unprecedented commercial development have given rise to a bitter political fight over the small town, placing it squarely at the forefront of Los Angeles’ continuing growth controversies.

‘A Really Tough Decision’

Each new tower in the Howard Hughes Center will block Meader’s view of distant city lights. But she said she is not sure whether she regrets her purchase.

“We wanted the house,” she said. “It would have been a really tough decision if we knew what was going to happen.”

Vast patches of vacant Westchester land--much of it held since the 1940s by the late billionaire Howard Hughes and his estate--are about to give way to new corporate cities. Howard Hughes Center will be followed by an even larger neighbor, Playa Vista, which is expected to bring in 20,000 new residents and a forest of hotels and office buildings. At least two other large projects are also in the works.

The growth could nearly double the area’s current population, about 28,000. And even if anti-growth activists win last-ditch battles to scale down some of the projects, the likely implications for the community are enormous. Residents expect thousands of new jobs, escalating traffic, road construction, housing speculation and urban flight.

Developers say Westchester in 10 years will join Century City and Westwood among the city’s major urban centers.

“We are definitely creating a center where one does not exist now,” said Christine Henry, a spokesman for the Summa Corp., the giant firm that is developing the Howard Hughes Center and Playa Vista. “Los Angeles is different than most cities; there’s no real downtown, just a series of regional centers. This will be one. The character of the community is changing.”

The growth is the result of available land and “all those things that make Southern California great,” said Bill McGregor, project manager for the Howard Hughes Center. “A superior climate . . . the large professional labor force of the Westside . . . the airport and the increasing importance of the Pacific basin . . . (and the city’s) multifaceted economy.”

Opponents say the intensive development threatens to destroy the small-town way of life that characterizes Westchester. They argue that high-rise office buildings will block the views of many bluff-top homeowners, and that new traffic will create chronic gridlock at many intersections, despite new transportation programs designed to ease the load.

They also say that huge numbers of commercial offices will worsen an imbalance of jobs and housing in the West Los Angeles region, where planning studies have shown an acute shortage of new homes.

Homeowners Selling Out

“It’s shocking,” said Patrick McCartney, president of the Coalition of Concerned Communities, an organization representing 14 neighborhood groups in Westchester. “A lot of people are selling their homes right now. Interest rates are low and people see the handwriting on the wall: Their neighborhoods won’t be worth living in in 15 years.”

Four projects are expected to account for most of Westchester’s new growth. They include:

- The Howard Hughes Center: Designed to contain 2.7 million square feet of office space and a 500-room luxury hotel. Located on 69 acres at Sepulveda Boulevard and the San Diego Freeway.

- Playa Vista: A planned community designed to contain nearly 10 million square feet of office space, enough homes and apartments for 20,000 residents, and 700 to 900 new boat slips as part of an expansion of Marina del Rey. Located on 957 acres just south of Ballona Creek and Marina del Rey.

- The northside development of Los Angeles International Airport: Designed to contain up to 4 million square feet of office space and at least two 500-room hotels. Located on 350 acres between the airport and Manchester Avenue.

- Continental City: Designed to contain about 2 million square feet of office space and two 600-room hotels. Located on 29 acres at Imperial Highway and Aviation Boulevard.

Altogether, the projects are designed to contain nearly three times the office space of Century City. And there may be more. The Garrett Corp., for example, owns 20 acres of land at Sepulveda and Century boulevards, which was being planned for a commercial complex containing 2 million square feet of office and hotel space.

Although Garrett has abandoned that plan and is trying to sell the land, commercial growth is still expected at the site, company spokesman John Meyer said. Additional growth also is being planned at nearby Marina del Rey--where Los Angeles County expects 900 new hotel rooms during the next three years--and at other, smaller sites in the area.

Heated Opposition

In a community where modest stucco homes rest on twisting streets and hillsides, and where children ride bicycles through open fields, the plans have met heated opposition. Neighborhood groups have filed two lawsuits over Playa Vista and are threatening to file an additional suit over city zoning actions that have paved the way for high-rise offices at Howard Hughes Center.

One lawsuit, brought by Friends of the Ballona Wetlands, seeks to enlarge the portion of Playa Vista--now about one-fifth of the site--that would be preserved as coastal wetlands.

A second suit, filed by the Venice Town Council, is aimed at invalidating the environmental reports prepared for the project. Town Council members hope to cut in half the number of new residents who would live in Playa Vista and to eliminate all but a fraction of the 10 million square feet of commercial development now being planned for the project, McCartney said.

Last Friday, a Superior Court judge upheld Playa Vista’s environmental reports, but coalition members said they would try to reverse the ruling.

“We’re not ready to quit,” McCartney said. “Outrage is too mild a word to express the way we feel about the way Summa and the city have treated the public.”

Seeking Candidate

Coalition members say they plan to sponsor a candidate to challenge Pat Russell, the powerful Los Angeles City Council president who has supported each of the four projects. Russell, whose four-year term expires in 1987, has written letters backing the Howard Hughes Center and Playa Vista projects as they moved through critical votes before city zoning and planning commissioners.

Critics charge that Russell has sacrificed the interests of Westchester residents in favor of major developers. Her former chief deputy, Curtis Rossiter, is a lobbyist representing the Howard Hughes Center, Playa Vista and Continental City. In 1985, at a time when she was actively supporting the Howard Hughes Center and Playa Vista projects, Russell was paying the lobbyist more than $50,000 to help her plan future political campaigns.

Critics say their association is a possible conflict of interest that has done much to protect the large-scale growth planned for the community.

“Our interests have been trampled upon,” coalition spokesman McCartney said. “That . . . relationship (illustrates) the difficulties that other interests have in catching the attention of our councilwoman. It shows how bankrupt the (political) process is.”

Shelley Rosenfield, an assistant city attorney specializing in conflict-of-interest cases, said the arrangement does not appear to be a legal conflict because Russell was paying for the consulting work she received and she gained no financial benefit by supporting the projects. But Rosenfield said she does not believe that the city attorney’s office has ever studied the ethical implications of lobbyists working as political consultants for elected officials.

Association Defended

“If there’s no law against it,” McCartney said, “there should be.”

Russell defended her close association with Rossiter by saying it has been to the advantage of homeowners. It has helped her win compromises from developers before projects come up for a public vote, she said, contributing to what she called a balance of healthy commercial growth and community preservation.

“My view is, ‘Thank goodness I’ve got somebody out in the private sector I know and can trust,’ ” Russell said of Rossiter, who managed her 1971, 1975 and 1979 election campaigns. “He knows the needs of the city.”

Russell’s approach to handling commercial growth in Westchester rests largely on a traffic plan that city planners consider a possible model for other portions of Los Angeles. The plan calls for developers to pay for a long list of road-widening projects, new traffic signals, commuter vans and other measures designed to eliminate the impact of their projects.

Whether the plan will work is considered critical to Westchester’s future by both city officials and residents. Supporters say it will enable the community to improve traffic conditions without infringing on the rights of property owners to develop their land. Critics question whether the road projects will be enough to handle the new traffic, and whether all of the projects can be built when they are needed.

Under the plan, adopted in December, developers must contribute $2,010 for every new car their projects add to afternoon rush-hour traffic. The pool of money is expected to exceed $200 million over the next two decades and to pay for many large road projects before new commercial centers are completed, according to city planners.

Priority Streets

North-south streets, such as Lincoln and Sepulveda boulevards, which carry commuters from residential areas in Culver City and Santa Monica to jobs at the airport or in El Segundo, will be given top priority for improvement, traffic engineers said. Lincoln will be widened from six lanes--three in each direction--to eight lanes between the airport and Venice Boulevard. Sepulveda will be widened from six to eight lanes between the airport and Centinela Avenue.

About 10 other streets also are targeted for widening--including portions of La Tijera and Aviation boulevards and Arbor Vitae Street--and at least a dozen intersections are scheduled for additional lanes or traffic signals.

But many residents argue that Westchester intersections are already overcrowded, and the traffic plan will do little or nothing to help.

“I’ve sat as long as five minutes to get through one intersection,” said coalition member Marilyn Cole. “Can you imagine someone having a heart attack and needing emergency service?”

City traffic surveys taken between 1982 and 1984 show that 13 of the 70 major intersections in Westchester are near or over capacity during the afternoon rush hour--a figure that is considered substantial, traffic engineer Ray Wellbaum said.

“Theoretically, you shouldn’t be able to count beyond capacity,” Wellbaum said. “It is not an acceptable condition.”

Projections based on expected commercial growth and Russell’s traffic plan show only 10 intersections near or over capacity by the year 2000, he said. “Overall, things should get better,” he said. But Wellbaum cautioned that the calculations are “not a pure science. You’re looking at a lot of assumptions on top of assumptions.”

Property Donations

For example, the critical widening of Lincoln Boulevard will require the city to acquire extensive portions of commercial property lining the thoroughfare. Since the traffic plan is not designed to condemn commercial property, Wellbaum said, the city must require property donations whenever old buildings are torn down and new ones are constructed.

The process could take many, many years, he said.

“If we get enough dedications, 10 years down the road we would probably put a project together,” Wellbaum said.

Similar assumptions are being made for other widening projects, he said. Meanwhile, projects that are undertaken will create their own havoc until the tractors and road crews have disappeared. “Traffic will be there while the work goes on,” Wellbaum said. “You’ve got to accept the congestion as part of the (road) projects.”

But supporters say the traffic plan has two significant advantages. First, it will apply to all new commercial projects in Westchester, regardless of whether they require city zoning approvals to be developed, Russell aide John Hartmire said.

Continental City is one such project. The Continental Development Corp., which plans to begin construction this year on the 29-acre project east of the airport, expects to contribute about $12 million to the plan, project manager Jerry Saunders said.

Business leaders, eager for growth, see another possible advantage. The plan may help absorb some of the traffic generated by the inevitable commercial growth occurring outside Westchester, in Culver City, El Segundo and Santa Monica, according to D. A. (Curt) Curtiss, president of a business and homeowners group known as the Westchester Vitalization Corp.

Congestion Predicted

“Traffic is going to get worse,” Curtiss predicted. “But it would be a helluva lot worse without the (traffic) plan.”

Although critics charge that the traffic plan is an excuse to allow excessive development, supporters of new commercial development say the opposite is true. Three of the large Westchester projects are actually smaller than they might have been because city officials and developers have placed a heavy emphasis on effective planning, Russell said.

The Howard Hughes Center, for example, could have contained up to 6 million square feet of office space if its developers had been willing to use an old parcel map establishing the street layout for the 69-acre project site. But developers felt the parcel map was poorly drawn for the mix of restaurants, office buildings and pedestrian walkways that were to be included in the project.

“It was not optimum development,” project manager Bill McGregor said, “even though we could have built 60-story office towers.”

Hughes representatives, including Rossiter, worked with city planners and Russell’s council office to plan a new site layout that earlier this year won unanimous approval from the City Council and the city’s Board of Zoning Appeals.

Under the traffic plan, developers of the center were asked to commit about $10 million toward roadway improvements near the site. The money was to be directed toward a number of specific projects, including a critically needed freeway ramp connecting the eastbound Marina Freeway to the southbound San Diego Freeway, that must be completed before the project is fully built.

Developers also agreed to contribute $3 million toward traffic improvements in nearby Culver City, which had threatened to file suit to try to block the project.

Tried to Be Sensitive

“The (developers) attempted to be quite sensitive to the surrounding community,” said zoning board member Joseph D. Mandel, who initially opposed the project because of homeowner complaints over building heights. Mandel and other board members nearly voted down the project in January, but reversed their positions in March after reviewing alternatives for the site.

“If we had denied the (project) . . . they probably would have proceeded with a project that would have been less desirable to the surrounding neighborhood . . . and nothing would have been gained by it,” Mandel said.

Despite homeowners’ protests over Playa Vista, that project also won praise for its overall design when city planning commissioners endorsed the annexation of the site to the city late last year. The project will have about one-tenth of the floor space per acre that is found in high-density centers like Century City, Russell aide Hartmire said.

Similarly, the northside development near Los Angeles International Airport is considered a low-density project by city zoning standards. Approved by the city two years ago, the plan calls for 5 million square feet of offices and hotels to be strung along a 3 1/2-mile site south of Manchester Avenue.

The city’s Department of Airports, which plans to solicit developer bids for the project by the end of the year, is expecting to create 15,000 new jobs and generate $12 million a year in city tax revenues, said Maurice Laham, chief of the department’s environmental management bureau.

New Highway

The project will contain about twice the development of Continental City in more than 10 times the acreage, he said. In addition, it will result in construction of a new six-lane highway between Pershing Drive and Lincoln Boulevard.

“We’re going to revitalize the (Westchester) business district, which is in need of some stimulus,” Laham said. “When you look at our negligible development, combined with a new . . . highway, we should be given a medal.”

But other community members questioned why Westchester should add to what they call an overabundance of commercial growth in the West Los Angeles area. Surveys conducted by the Southern California Assn. of Governments in 1984 describe the region as “job-rich and housing-poor.”

Job growth in the region has far exceeded new housing development in recent years, SCAG program manager Dennis Macheski said. “It is a problem all the cities should get together to address,” he said.

Russell, a former SCAG president, acknowledged that the imbalance of jobs and housing is a problem. But the city has done what little it can to correct the imbalance, she said.

The city successfully brought pressure to increase the amount of housing planned for Playa Vista, where the number of residents will roughly equal the number of new jobs, according to Russell. Other projects, such as Howard Hughes Center and the airport development, are too near freeways or runways to provide good housing sites, she said. The city actually condemned about 800 homes north of the airport because of aircraft noise.

“You can hardly condemn 800 homes and put in more housing,” Russell said.

Seeking Initiative

Westside council members Marvin Braude and Zev Yaroslavsky have begun campaigning for a ballot initiative that would cut in half the amount of growth permitted on most of the city’s commercially zoned property.

Russell has opposed the measure, which needs more than 69,000 signatures to qualify for the November ballot. But the initiative may not apply to the major projects in Westchester, even though response to the proposal there has been substantial, said Braude aide Cindy Miscikowski.

Playa Vista was annexed to the city with special zoning that would probably make it exempt, she said. Other projects, such as the Howard Hughes Center and Continental City, are entering development contracts with the city as part of Russell’s traffic plan, Miscikowski said. Those contracts, designed to guarantee road-improvement revenues for the city, could protect the projects from the ballot measure, she said.

McCartney said homeowners recognize that the ballot measure may not satisfy their aims.

But he expressed hope that increasing political pressure may cause Russell to reassess her support for big development. Ultimately, he said, it may be up to the courts to decide what’s best for Westchester.