Still Without Planning Guidelines, W. Hollywood Lives in Uncertainty
From her second-floor apartment overlooking the Marix Tex Mex restaurant, Tade Thomas has a unique perspective on the issues that are about to dominate West Hollywood politics as rival interest groups struggle to shape the city’s future.
She is threatened with eviction if the restaurant’s owners receive permission to tear down the house she lives in to make way for a parking lot that they need to stay in business at their popular location.
Thomas knows what it’s like to live next door to a commercial district. “My clothes smell like fajitas (the restaurant’s specialty, a grilled dish of meat, chicken or shrimp), and I’m a vegetarian,” she said.
Different Perspective
Mary Sweeney, co-owner of the restaurant, has a perspective of her own. Together with partner Victoria Shemaria, she expects a lengthy court fight if the city turns down their request to tear down the two-story Spanish-style residence. They bought the house earlier this year.
“I’ve learned two lessons,” Sweeney said. “Never live on the border of a commercial zone and never take up another business on the border of commercial and residential.”
Although Thomas and the restaurant owners are on opposite sides of this issue, they share a plight that goes beyond kitchen odors and the fate of one pink, tile-roofed structure to illustrate a key issue in the ongoing debate about the city’s future.
The site, on Flores Avenue north of Santa Monica Boulevard, is on the uncertain border between commercial and residential districts in a 2-year-old city that has yet to adopt its general plan--the basic guidelines that will govern development until well into the next century.
Once the plan is in place, city officials expect that residential, commercial and industrial areas will be more clearly defined. Developers will have a better idea of what they can build on their properties and renters and homeowners will know what to expect in their neighborhoods.
“There’s a strong feeling in the neighborhoods that the battle lines are drawn and we’ve got to stop it here,” said Allen Chivens, past president of the West Hollywood West Residents Assn.
What they all can expect is less potential growth than in the days of county rule, before West Hollywood became a city in 1985.
Just how much less is still up in the air, although consultant Elwood C. Tescher has just submitted a two-inch-thick draft general plan that calls for a 50% cut in the maximum amount of development contrasted with the old county guidelines.
“What we’ve really done is gone through the entire city and downzoned it,” said Mayor Alan Viterbi. “Anytime you do that, it’s an explosive situation, because you’re taking away from people their potential profits. You balance that with the community’s need to control traffic and related problems.”
The plan also provides for limited parking areas on what are now residential lots behind commercial property, mostly on Santa Monica Boulevard but also on Sunset and Beverly boulevards.
The issue is controversial because merchants complain that there is not enough parking for their customers, while residents are concerned about noise and exhaust fumes, especially if they live next to a restaurant.
Other points include preservation of single-family-home neighborhoods, moderate increases in areas already dominated by apartment houses and designation of a few high-density residential areas.
The plan envisions bonuses that will allow developers to put in more units per development if they dedicate some of the apartments for low- and moderate-income tenants.
“The last thing our people want to see is our city turn into another Beverly Hills, to exclude the people that can’t afford to live there or to exclude different minorities,” Viterbi said.
“West Hollywood was created to maintain the kind of mix we have today. Otherwise we wouldn’t have rent control. If you can’t keep the people who live there, then let them go. Let the poor people go and replace them with yuppies.”
However, members of a new group called WHAT (West Hollywood Action Team) said such a policy would choke the city. They are asking instead for “very strict guidelines, similar to what Beverly Hills adopted,” according to Peter Freed, one of its founders.
He said the scale of development bonuses proposed under the plan was “horrendous. With bonus densities of 50%, you’re going to end up with tenements.”
The plan also calls for high-intensity development along existing commercial corridors, with “targeted development-opportunity areas” at busy intersections and at the city boundaries.
It also seeks to preserve typical features such as old Hollywood-style bungalow courts, all part of the urban village concept that has become a buzzword for what virtually all the interested parties want to see in the city.
They disagree in many cases on just what that will mean, however, and the issues are expected to be thrashed out at the Planning Commission later this year and before the City Council when the draft comes up for final approval in 1988.
One point that will be raised by business people will be that the city’s revenues largely depend on commercial enterprise, said Ron Kates, a commercial real estate broker who sat on the city’s General Plan Advisory Committee.
“This is a difficult city to plan, because it was laid out in the ‘20s, ‘30s and ‘40s,” when we didn’t have the urban village concept we have now,” Kates said.
“I have a tremendous amount of empathy for the residents who have a desire for a good quality of life, but on the other hand we have a city where 70% of the revenue comes from business and business-related enterprises” through sales tax and other taxes, he said.
Kates said he sees parking as the single major issue, but he also said that a limited amount of growth has to be allowed, “because any community that is of quality has to grow, or it usually goes backwards.”
Given West Hollywood’s location, he said, there is no immediate danger of the city falling victim to blight, but “if you don’t have reasonable amounts of controlled growth, what you usually have is stagnation and disincentives for people to invest in the community.”
By contrast, Chivens of the West Hollywood West group, which is made up of both homeowners and renters, called for minimal development, arguing that taller buildings and parking areas near residential neighborhoods are excessively intrusive.
“There are a lot of serious parking problems in West Hollywood, but I just don’t like sacrificing the neighborhood character for a solution,” he said.
“Each time these issues come up, if you give a little then they want more. If they can have a parking lot, why can’t they have a parking structure, and then, why can’t they have a commercial structure.”
The question of what makes an urban village is not a new one. The problems of parking, traffic, congestion and building height have been under discussion since before the founding of the city, now home to about 37,000 people on 1.9 square miles of land.
The formal planning process began on Jan. 19, 1986, when members of a newly appointed General Plan Advisory Committee got down on their hands and knees and scribbled their dreams for West Hollywood on a gigantic aerial photo montage of the city.
“Turn Melrose-Santa Monica-Robertson into a ‘Little Westwood’ with more shops, restaurants and theaters,” one comment said.
“More parking for Safeway,” said another.
“Tennis courts!” said a third.
The issues have been aired in monthly meetings that have continued ever since, administered by consultant Tescher and co-chaired by Mark Lehman, an attorney, and Teresa Garay, community relations director for a television station.
The community input part of the process was budgeted at $250,000, which makes it one of the most expensive ever in California on a per-capita basis, Tescher said.
While both Lehman and Garay said there have been spirited discussions in the course of the last 18 months, they said they found a broad consensus despite the wide range of groups represented, including homeowners, renters, real estate agents, owners of small businesses and others.
“There was a pretty broad feeling in the community that growth should be very carefully planned and limited,” Lehman said.
“We liked the idea of pedestrian-oriented walking streets, a kind of community where everything is oriented to eye-level,” he said. “A community where people can walk to services, to entertainment.”
“We also don’t want buildings that are huge and voluminous, that block the sun and views and the human scale of the community,” he added.
But what about the Pacific Design Center? Known as the “Blue Whale,” the glass colossus dominates the skyline on the west end of the city, with the bare girders of a new wing now visible from miles away.
“That was a fait accompli before we came around,” Lehman said. Although he acknowledged it as an architectural landmark, he said “the whole plan was approved well before cityhood. Nothing like that will ever happen again in the city.”
Co-chair Garay said she expects the Planning Commission, and eventually the City Council, to go along with most of their recommendations once the final draft is approved, as expected, this weekend. Dissident views will be represented in minority reports, she said.
“That way the Planning Commission can go back and look at why this decision is reached,” she said. “That way they have some information to draw on.”
Some landlords attended one of the consultant’s separate meetings with interest groups, but Grafton Tanquary, president of West Hollywood Concerned Citizens, said the process ignored property owners’ concerns.
“I think one of the things we tried to get across to the various people involved, totally without success because they just didn’t want to listen, was that with the existing policy set in the city they’re in the process of destroying 80% to 90% of the property in this town, which is housing,” he said.
He said there was little point in producing an elaborate formula for land use without modifying the city’s strict rent control ordinance, which does not allow for landlords to increase rents to market rates when apartments are vacated.
“It ignores the problem that the housing in this city is already deteriorating and that owners have no incentive whatever to maintain that housing,” he said.
Larry Gross, head of Coalition for Economic Survival, a renter-oriented group that was instrumental in formation of the city and passage of rent control, took a different view.
“We want to ensure that whatever plan is developed does not speed up the gentrification of West Hollywood,” he said. “We’re also worried about the gentrification of stores. We want the city to address the needs of people who live here. We don’t want stores that people can’t afford to buy anything in.”
