It’s Zoning, but It’s Also High Drama

Room 561-A in City Hall, home of the obscure city Board of Zoning Appeals, is not often a stage for high drama. Its usual features are neighborhood feuds over home remodeling, garage construction or a new mini-mall.

The city promotes actual theater five blocks down Spring Street at the Community Redevelopment Agency’s Los Angeles Actors Theater, which presents plays compatible with its somber site near Skid Row, exploring the meaning of poverty, racial segregation and, this week, nuclear disaster.

But recently, gloomy old Room 561-A upstaged the theater. Two zoning hearings--one starring the rich and the other the poor--displayed some of the most troubling problems facing Los Angeles. When the hearings were over, after almost seven hours--just two less than The Mahabharata--the weary audience had learned much.

They had seen, up close, one of the city’s great contradictions: the gulf between the growing numbers of privileged and poverty-stricken. They had learned how the major political issue of planning touches the lives of rich and poor. And, most important, they had been given a lesson in how government, like Solomon, can use common sense to try to reconcile all this and keep the city plodding along.

The rich came to the board with a problem peculiar to them. A homeowner in Brentwood Park, above Sunset Boulevard in West Los Angeles, wanted a three-car garage, with storage space, as part of his new house. Furious neighbors complained that the garage would come too close to the street, violating city zoning laws and destroying the ambiance of an area of $1-million-plus homes, set back on large lots.

The homeowner, who happened to be a prominent citizen, Los Angeles County Chief Deputy Dist. Atty. Gilbert Garcetti, protested that he was the victim of bad guidance from City Hall officials, who, he said, had given permission to build the garage. Garcetti recoiled at his neighbors’ demands that he tear down most of his uncompleted garage.

The poor’s problem was also typical. The Los Angeles Men’s Place, which cares for the chronically mentally ill on Skid Row, wanted to convert a city-owned warehouse into a residential treatment shelter for 50 men and women. A zone change was needed, from light industrial to residential, and business owners in the area objected. It would, they said, be a magnet for the homeless, hurting an area that was adding businesses and jobs to the city’s economy.

The referees were the five unpaid members of the Board of Zoning Appeals, appointed by Mayor Tom Bradley: Chairwoman Ilene Olansky, a leader in community charitable organizations; John. W. Mack, who heads the Los Angeles Urban League; Nikolas Patsaouras, a wealthy businessman, and Joseph D. Mandel and James D. Leewong, attorneys.

There is not much glory serving on these citizen commissions. The Board of Zoning Appeals is especially difficult, for its members spend most of their time refereeing nasty, no-win neighborhood fights. If the city bureaucracy turns down a request for a zone change, Zoning Appeals is the board of last resort. “These are very tough cases,” Leewong said during the hearing. “They bring out the emotion in everybody. Unfortunately, it sometimes brings out the ugliness.”

The juxtaposition of the Brentwood and Skid Row cases seemed to make board members aware that this day was different. “Quite a contrast,” Mack told a reporter when he took a break from the dais.

The combatants attacked with ferocity and, in the Brentwood case, with expensive weapons that befit a Porsche and Jaguar neighborhood. Garcetti’s foes produced an aerial photograph to show what they considered the aesthetic evil of his garage. He hired one of the city’s most influential planning-lobby firms. His opponents had a lawyer.

The Skid Row shelter opponents also had an attorney, as did the advocates. But more to the point, the shelter supporters had Deputy Mayor Grace Davis, who reminded board members that Bradley, their patron, was “wholeheartedly supporting” the project.

When such intense combat confronts the City Council or mayor’s office, illuminated by newspaper, television and radio coverage, political leaders often become prisoners of their own rhetoric, locked in positions from which they find it difficult to move.

But here, common sense won. The board, acknowledging the complaints of Garcetti’s neighbors but unwilling to make him tear down his garage, gave him permission to build a smaller one--enough for two cars. Then board members, aware of the need to care for the mentally ill but sharing some of the opponents’ doubts about the shelter, granted a four-year permit to see if the project worked.

“We have to see beyond strict application of the law. People don’t operate that way,” Leewong said. The little-known board, confronted in a small way with some of the city’s biggest problems, had provided a lesson in political compromise to the much better-known politicians in the City Council chambers and mayor’s office two floors below.