Yaroslavsky Stirs Homeowners’ Ire on Westwood Plan

While City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky is tuning up an expected slow-growth, 1989 mayoral campaign, homeowner organizations in his district are busily portraying him as pro-growth in preparation for an attack in the council next week on his plan to preserve Westwood Village from further big development.

They say the preservation features of the plan do not go nearly far enough.

Large numbers of Election Day votes are not directly at stake in the dispute. If Yaroslavsky runs against Mayor Tom Bradley, who says he will seek a fifth term, polls indicate that he is a big favorite in his 5th Council District. Westwood-area homeowner group critics have been even more hostile to Bradley’s planning policies than they have to those of Yaroslavsky.

However, the fate of the Westwood plan in a council committee hearing Monday will still have an impact on Yaroslavsky’s future.

If he pushes it through the committee, and later the council, he will have passed a test of his political skill. But even if he wins, the pro-growth attacks of Westwood foes in the current dispute will be picked up by citywide opponents as the mayoral campaign heats up, possibly hurting Yaroslavsky’s efforts to portray himself as a strong foe of intensive commercial development.

Yaroslavsky got a taste of the attack Thursday night when a crowd of more than 270 showed up at a Westwood-area elementary school to protest the plan.

“Councilman Yaroslavsky has aspirations to be mayor,” Westwood-area neighborhood leader Chip Chaslow told the meeting.

Then, in a remark that drew laughs from the crowd, Chaslow said scornfully, “He has managed to identify himself with something called slow growth.”

The plan, done by Gruen Associates, reduces the size of prospective new buildings, imposes new height limits, increases parking requirements for new commercial and office buildings and seeks to preserve what is left of the village’s Mediterranean-style buildings from the 1930s and 1940s. It has already been approved by the Planning Commission.

Major objections were expressed at the meeting of Westwood homeowner groups, presided over by Laura Lake, a UCLA political science professor who heads the Friends of Westwood and who is a candidate to replace Yaroslavsky on the City Council.

“The purpose of the meeting is to mobilize you,” Lake said. She urged “telephone calls, letters and telegrams to Councilman Yaroslavsky.”

One of the strongest objections was to a provision for a 600-room hotel, with homeowner representatives demanding that it either be scaled down to 315 rooms or that no hotel be built in Westwood. The height limit established for the hotel--40 feet in some areas, 70 feet in others--was assailed.

Proposals for high-density residential construction in the north Westwood Village area were strongly criticized, as was a recommendation to extend Hilgard Avenue through to Wilshire Boulevard.

The intensity of the attack made an impression on Yaroslavsky, who was not at the meeting, but was represented by his planning assistant, Virginia Kruger.

“There will be substantial changes” in the plan, he said.

Yaroslavsky said he will discuss areas of compromise with the homeowner groups, including the need to tighten the height limit and reduce the size of the proposed hotel.

“We are reevaluating our position on the hotel,” Yaroslavsky said.

He said that he and the homeowners agree on most features of the plan.

“I can’t believe on those remaining items, we can’t find common ground,” he said.