Old Process a New Weapon in Slow-Growth Arsenal

It was a little over a year ago when Shanaz Ardehali-Kordich, a young mother and dock worker, learned how to stop bulldozers in Los Angeles.

Small houses in her northeast San Pedro neighborhood were vanishing as developers, capitalizing on a building boom in the harbor-front community, replaced them with cookie-cutter apartment buildings.

“We had one going up up the street, and then suddenly one went up right across the street,” Ardehali-Kordich recalled. “I walked up and down the street and got a whole lot of people to sign a petition.”

Ardehali-Kordich and her neighbors dumped the petitions in the lap of their councilwoman and appealed for an end to the activity. What they got was a temporary measure--known as an interim control ordinance--that has stopped the apartments and, Ardehali-Kordich says, saved her neighborhood.

The interim control ordinance, a variant of the well-known building moratorium, has taken Los Angeles by storm. While Ardehali-Kordich was collecting signatures in San Pedro, homeowners in Hollywood Hills, Sherman Oaks, Eagle Rock and West Los Angeles were pushing for similar building restrictions in their neighborhoods.

Residents throughout Los Angeles have discovered the interim control ordinance, transforming the relatively obscure planning tool into one of the most widely used instruments in the slow-growth arsenal.

“The citizens are forcing us to be responsive to them,” said city planning officer Glenn Blossom, whose office has been besieged by council members and homeowner groups requesting interim control ordinances. “It is government of the people. It is a real Populist kind of thing.”

Bill Christopher, president of the Westside Civic Federation, a coalition of homeowner organizations, said the measures have given homeowners much-needed muscle in struggles with the city over worsening traffic congestion and unbridled development.

“We have all become extremely sophisticated over the last four or five years as we deal with these issues on a day-to-day basis,” Christopher said. “The system has to respond to the concerns of the neighborhoods. As the city becomes more crowded, the neighborhoods will become more vocal.”

An interim control ordinance, in effect, is a partial moratorium. Instead of banning all new building, it temporarily prohibits certain kinds of construction--large apartment complexes, for example--while setting specific criteria for other projects. It is designed to hold the line on building while permanent protections, such as new zoning regulations and more restrictive community plans, are developed.

Planning officials and City Council members prefer the ordinances because they restrict new development without bringing construction to a standstill. City attorneys like them, too, because they do not deprive property owners of their right to build something, which makes the ordinances difficult to challenge in court.

And while many homeowner groups would rather see outright bans on new construction, they recognize that such prohibitions are difficult to get past the City Council, which is still attentive to the contributions-rich development industry.

But critics of the ordinances complain that they have become the tool of elitist and selfish homeowners who care little about the housing woes of others in Los Angeles. Real estate brokers and builders say the controls drive up housing prices, force new buyers out of the market and worsen housing shortages.

“The homeowners are using the classic drawbridge theory,” said Dave Colby, president of the California Assn. of Realtors. “They are there, and they don’t want anyone else there, so they are pulling the drawbridge up.”

Others fear that city planners are spending time on the ordinances that could be be better spent encouraging new development in the city’s depressed neighborhoods.

Recent figures show that the city has 27 interim control ordinances and 12 others working their way through the approval process. The ordinances go through various stages of review and ultimately must be approved by the City Council. Planning Director Kenneth Topping predicts that the number will surpass 50 by the end of the summer. By contrast, there were 10 such ordinances in 1985.

Range of Restrictions

The ordinances range from blocking high-rise development along Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley to restricting mini-mall construction throughout the city. They have been used to limit hillside building in the Westchester Bluffs, reduce traffic in Westwood and impose parking requirements on new projects in Venice and the Fairfax area.

“They really have become the chic and trendy device,” said Amy Forbes, a land-use attorney who last year joined her neighbors north of Wilshire Boulevard’s Miracle Mile in demanding an interim control ordinance to regulate apartment construction there.

City officials and residents alike say the phenomenon was born out of frustration. Residents have become increasingly perplexed by their inability to ease traffic congestion, slow high-rise development and preserve their so-called “quality of life,” a catch-all phrase that encompasses everything from clean air and water to a parking spot at the end of the front walkway.

The proliferation of the ordinances testifies in part to the changing character of homeowner organizations throughout the city. Coalitions have transformed the fractional slow-growth movement into a sagacious and demanding political power. With the help of desk-top publishing and shared mailing lists, the groups can mobilize letter-writing campaigns on a neighborhood issue one week and get 50 people at a hearing on a different issue the next week.

“The press has treated homeowners as naive, unsophisticated people who get trampled by City Hall,” said Dan Garcia, president of the city’s Planning Commission. “There is nothing further from the truth. Some are into bullying public officers. Some are highly organized. They know what is going on just as much as anyone else does.”

Interim control ordinances also have become a popular alternative to the ballot initiative, which residents used in 1986 to slash commercial development in much of the city under Proposition U.

Political Process

In a city as large as Los Angeles, it is difficult to wage a citywide initiative campaign on an issue important to just one or two neighborhoods, even with cooperation among homeowner groups.

And, unlike ballot initiatives, interim control ordinances require City Council concurrence, meaning council members have a hand--and a stake--in shaping growth controls. Some astute politicians have been able to craft “compromise” ordinances that address many community concerns but also protect some development interests.

“They are being used by community groups, but also by politicians to ward off community groups,” said Daniel J. Curtin Jr., former city attorney in Walnut Creek, who now lectures on growth-control issues.

Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, said many homeowners are being denied more meaningful controls by City Council members hiding behind the interim restrictions. As an example, he said height limits on Ventura Boulevard do not go far enough to stop new development.

But, the interim ordinances have raised the most opposition among developers who see the ordinances in terms of economic penalties.

Dori Pye, president of the Los Angeles West Chamber of Commerce and a Housing Authority commissioner, said ordinance backers have used growth as a scapegoat for other problems in the city. With the Los Angeles area projected to attract hundreds of thousands of new residents over the next two decades, Pye said, homeowners should focus on providing more housing and an infrastructure to support it.

“I think it is very evil,” she said of the increase in interim control ordinances. “I believe in quality of life, but I believe it has to be shared. It is not just for the rich.”

Such criticism raises socioeconomic questions about interim control ordinances that even some proponents find disquieting.

The ordinances are clustered in middle-income and affluent areas of the Westside and San Fernando Valley. And while they pop up in places such as Wilmington, there are few that affect South-Central Los Angeles, Watts or Southeast Los Angeles.

City planning officer Blossom acknowledged that as the number of interim measures grows, planners have fewer hours to spend on problems in the inner city.

“Instead of being able to control the work program we do, the citizens are forcing a revised work program on to us,” Blossom said. “In some ways that is good, in other ways we are yielding to certain pressure groups and neglecting other parts of the city that really have urgent needs. South-Central Los Angeles is the most distressed part of Los Angeles and we are spending relatively little time there partly because we are working on this kind of stuff.”

Some homeowner leaders say it is just a matter of time before residents in poorer parts of the city learn about the magic of the interim ordinances. Laura Lake, president of Friends of Westwood, said she has met with South-Central activists about getting an interim measure to protect some older churches in the area.

“Once the folks in South-Central start screaming for their ICO, we will quash any talk of elitism,” Lake said.

Homeowners pushing for interim control ordinances got some help from two important changes at City Hall. First, in 1985, a court ordered the city to bring zoning in line with its community plans, a massive undertaking that three years later still is not complete. This process introduced hundreds of thousands of residents to planning and zoning issues and set off a flurry of requests for new building restrictions.

Slow-Growth Advocates

Second, the City Council lost two members--Peggy Stevenson and Pat Russell--in election campaigns that pitted slow-growth advocates against the incumbents. The election of Michael Woo in 1985 and Ruth Galanter in 1987, both of whom have planning backgrounds and ties to slow-growth advocates, sent a clear signal to the remaining incumbents that elections can be lost over development.

Galanter, who beat then-Council President Russell, said her office has been inundated with requests from residents “to do something right now” about specific traffic and development-related problems. Interim control ordinances, she said, have given council members the ability to “put a finger in the dike” while they search for a permanent solution to the neighborhood problems.

San Fernando Valley Councilman Hal Bernson, chairman of the council’s powerful Planning and Environment Committee and a strong property-rights advocate, said the interim ordinances are overdone and make development confusing in the city. But Bernson, who has several proposed ordinances in his district, said political realities and the city’s outdated community plans make the laws unavoidable.

“We are political creatures, and we stay in office by means of the support of our constituents,” Bernson said. “There is no question that most of (the ordinances) are being imposed by council members who had pressures put on them by our constituents. But if the community plans were up to date, there would be no need for them.”

Woo, who has five interim control ordinances in his district as well as two others awaiting approval, said the council’s emphasis on the laws reflects a growing concern about planning issues in general.

The recently approved 1988-89 city budget, for example, allows the Planning Department to keep more than 40 employees--hired several years ago--to bring zoning in line with community plans. The employees will begin work on revising the city’s 35 community plans--a process that officials hope will make interim control ordinances unnecessary.

Five-Year Projection

Planning Director Topping said it will take about five years just to begin revisions on all 35 plans. In the meantime, calls for interim control ordinances are expected to continue--as are objections from developers.

Just as homeowners have learned how to use the ordinances to their advantage, opponents are learning how to exploit the ordinances’ failings. Early this year, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky lost a bitter struggle for an ordinance on high-rise condominiums along the Wilshire corridor after property owners and developers persuaded the council that it amounted to an unfair change in the rules of the city’s development game.

In another incident, a public battle erupted between Galanter and some developers and residents in March over the Venice interim control ordinance. Opponents accused Galanter of trying to rush through the new restrictions without notifying residents or soliciting their suggestions.

As a result, city officials are planning changes that would require the proposed ordinances to be reviewed at a public hearing before getting city approval. Property owners would be formally notified of the hearing.

Even with the changes, city officials acknowledge, longstanding animosity between homeowners and developers over growth-control measures is not likely to disappear. But Topping predicted that eventually they will opt for cooperation over confrontation.

“We have to get people to talk to one another a little better, which is really the fundamental problem facing us,” Topping said. “As long as people are shouting at each other, nobody is going to listen. . . . Nobody can afford to let the city die. It has to have life, and that means a certain flow of reinvestment and a certain flow of development.”

LOS ANGELES’ TEMPORARY GROWTH CONTROLS Residents are employing a new weapon--the interim control ordinance--to curb development in their neighborhoods. The City Council enacts the ordinances, which temporarily halt specific construction projects. The temporary laws have become a popular alternative to general building moratoriums. The ordinances are in effect for varying periods of time--ranging from several months to several years. 1. Development restrictions based on the city’s sewage-treatment capacity 2. Building ban for properties that have conflicting zoning and planning designations 3. Limits on new mini-mall construction 4. Restrictions on the demolition and conversion of single-room occupancy hotels. 5. Restrictions on new development and major alterations in the Porter Ranch area of Chatsworth. 6. Density reduction for property south of Chatsworth Street near Owensmouth Avenue in Chatsworth. 7. Mobile homes protections on Lassen Street in Chatsworth. 8. Development restrictions in the Granada Hills central business district. 9. Development restrictions in the Reseda central business district. 10. Transportation-related restrictions on new development in the Warner Center area of Woodland Hills. 11. Restrictions on building on small lots in the Girard Tract area of Woodland Hills. 12. Residential development regulations in areas north of Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, Studio City and Toluca Lake. 13. Height, parking and building ‘bulk’ requirements for construction along the Ventura Boulevard corridor from Studio City to Woodland Hills. 14. Residential development regulations in areas south of Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks, Studio City and Toluca Lake. 15. Construction limits for apartments on substandard streets in North Hollywood. 16. Height and density restrictions on apartments in the Valley Village area of North Hollywood. 17. Multifamily residential development restrictions in Arelta and Pacoima. 18. Multifamily residential development restrictions in Sylmar. 19. Construction restrictions along McGroarty Street in Sunland. 20. Mini-mall restrictions on Colorado Boulevard in Eagle Rock. 21. Restrictions to protect views, preserve historic structures and ensure setbacks in Mt. Washington. 22. Traffic mitigation requirements for development in Westlake. 23. Parking, density and setback requirements along Mariposa Avenue between Melrose and Rosewood avenues. 24. Ban on mini-mall construction in Hollywood. 25. Multifamily residential construction limits in Hollywood. 26. Building regulations on small lots in the Hollywood Hills. 27. Height, open space, parking and other development restrictions in Hollywoodland section of Hollywood. 28. Restrictions on new apartment construction in the Detroit Street area of the Miracle Mile. 29. Restrictions on the number of auto body shops in Council District 10.

30. Traffic mitigation requirements for development in the west Wilshire area. 31. Height restrictions and residential and commercial building limits along and near Sepulveda Boulevard in Bel Air. 32. Traffic mitigation requirements on development in Westwood, West Los Angeles and portions of Brentwood and Pacific Palisades. 33. Limits on commercial and industrial development along Westwood, Pico and Sepulveda boulevards in West Los Angeles. 34. Regulations on apartment construction on Centinela Avenue between Venice and National boulevards. 35. Building, parking and density restrictions in Venice. 36. Limits on commercial and industrial development along Lincoln Boulevard between Washington Street and Maxella Avenue. 37. Restrictions on hillside residential development in the Westchester Bluffs. 38. Limits on large apartment construction in Wilmington and Harbor City. 39. Restrictions on apartment construction in the Leland Park area of San Pedro.