Los Angeles May Not Be Los Angeles Anymore

Imagine rock stars throwing a benefit performance to back a ballot initiative on land use.

Only in Los Angeles, you say? In fact, you’re right. But there’s the wonder of it all: The town that got started and grew as a grand real-estate speculation, the city that set the global standard for sprawl development, may soon vote to mend its ways.

And a group of rock stars demonstrated their civic-mindedness by signing up to appear at a benefit to raise cash for the so-called “Initiative for Reasonable Limits on Commercial Building and Traffic Growth.” A citywide vote is scheduled in the November election.

It will be the first time in their history that Angelenos have had a ballot test on curbing development. Northern Californians have done it 65 times. San Diegans have done it several times. But for Los Angeles to even think of becoming less L.A., to challenge its growth-at-any-price birthright, suggests that something must be drastically wrong.

It is. Bulky office buildings and commercial emporiums have exploded in number and size in the 1980s, turning tree-lined residential streets into throbbing traffic corridors.

The problem has become even more critical in the last 36 months through the tax-shelter boom set off by the Reagan-backed 1981 federal tax law: Buildings often don’t even have to be occupied to yield tax-shelter advantages.

The city’s antiquated zoning allows extraordinarily dense commercial development along most thoroughfares--a holdover from the days when the city expected to grow to 10 million instead of its current 3 million. While the city’s master plan calls for concentrated centers of development, thus protecting residential neighborhoods, it’s more honored in the breach than in the observance.

You might have expected the initiative to start with angry neighborhood leaders. Instead, the idea originated with two politicians from the heavily affected Westside, City Councilmen Marvin Braude and Zev Yaroslavsky. Last winter this pair concluded that the council simply doesn’t have the guts to face down developers and their campaign cash to approve planning controls with real teeth.

Braude and Yaroslavsky admit that their cure is a very blunt instrument--an initiative that would halve the allowable square footage, from 3 times to 1.5 times the land area, for any building put up in the zoning category that covers 85% of the commercial properties in the city.

As citizens moved to preempt the politicians and change the tax system through Proposition 13, now voters may be ready to use direct ballot-box power to block big stores and high-rise office structures that blight and clog their neighborhoods.

Braude and Yaroslavsky say that the citizen response to their initiative signature drive was “overwhelming.” They had feared that it might be tagged as an elitist effort of affluent West Los Angeles. But 40,000 citywide signatures were returned from a mailing to 400,000 voters.

Zoning variances would still be possible under the new initiative. But any big project would have to undergo public hearings, citizen and environmental-impact review. The burden of proof would be shifted in an exciting fashion: Developers would have to prove, up front, the need for and the desirability of a project.

Developers and lobbyists so far are remarkably quiescent in the face of apparent strong support for the initiative. Organized labor, perennially for building anything anywhere at any time, opposes the measure--but not vehemently. City Council President Pat Russell, a potential future opponent of Yaroslavsky for mayor, criticized the measure as “planning by initiative,” but hasn’t fought it actively. Opponents are pushing, but not strongly, a watered-down substitute measure before the Planning Commission and the council.

In the meantime, a new pro-planning alliance has emerged. In Los Angeles, as in most cities, Braude observes, “It’s been difficult to build up a broad constituency for land-use reform. People are concerned just about their own neighborhoods. Each land-use battle becomes an isolated local battle. Nobody sees the big picture. This initiative is a vehicle.”

Yaroslavsky tells of a second big reason he and Braude went for the initiative: “We wanted to shake up the system--from the city staff and the Planning Commission to the council, the mayor--to start being more attentive to density issues, urban design, parking requirements, architectural sensitivity, the whole gamut of land-use issues.”