Rooms With a Downtown View: Housing Moves to the Workplace

A bit of California political wisdom, usually attributed to former Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown Sr., has been the practical religion of generations of elected officials: “Never mess with a man’s gun--or his car.”

Urban planners and environmentalists who lamented that turning over land-use to the highway engineers would create sterile suburbs, blighted cities and a landscape of smog were derided as unreconstructed Easterners who couldn’t understand the city of the future.

Responding to people’s seemingly limitless appetite for single-family tract housing--and willingness to drive any lengths to get it--local governments zoned housing and industrial/commercial areas as far apart as possible.

Suddenly, like a teen-ager waking up to find his parents not so dumb after all, local business and community leaders have discovered the cure for traffic congestion, air pollution and uncontrolled growth: jobs-housing balance.

To achieve federal air quality standards by 2010, the South Coast Air Quality Management District has adopted a plan calling for drastic emission reductions. A whopping 34% of the planned transportation reductions will come from jobs promoting housing balance. The Southern California Assn. of Governments has adopted regional plans to shift new economic development and pull Angelenos out of their cars.

Moving Southern Californians to high-rise apartments--walking-distance or shuttle-bus distance from work, shops and entertainments--once seemed like an impossible feat of social engineering. As a vision of the future, it looked strangely like a rerun of cities past. But it is happening.

Take a look downtown at South Park. Within this section of the Los Angeles redevelopment area bounded by Eighth and Main Streets, between the Santa Monica and Harbor freeways, the Community Redevelopment Agency has on the drawing boards or already built 15,000 residential units surrounding a rather grandiose (on paper) three-acre park. One condominium development, the Skyline, is fully occupied after a slow start and has a long waiting list. A 14-story luxury apartment building with 270 rental units, the Metropolitan, has now opened next door.

Who occupies the Metropolitan? So far, with about half the studio, one- and two-bedroom apartments leased, it looks like a fair cross-section of the downtown work force. There are singles and couples--some newly married with two careers, some with grown-up children. Some have moved from houses in the San Fernando Valley, Orange County or the San Gabriel Valley. Many are newcomers from New York or other big cities; some don’t even own a car. A few even have babies. The only common denominator for these urban pioneers is a downtown job.

The Met’s new tenants rarely think of themselves as subjects of a massive social experiment. They were attracted by what looks like a good deal. Although billed as luxury housing (the building is attractively designed and landscaped, with pedestrian walkways, outdoor pool, spa, exercise facilities and a social center where free continental breakfast is served each morning), the rents rise from $690 for a studio to $1,295 for a unit with two balconies, two master bedrooms and two baths--relatively reasonable for new construction.

Parking is extra but tenants have free van service to downtown destinations; the landlords hope some couples will decide they can get by with one car.

For some tenants, rents are lower because the state law authorizing tax-exempt bond financing for construction of multifamily housing requires that 15% of the residences be set aside at below-market rates.

This means that the units set aside at $440 to $570 are within reach of families with $16,000 to $20,000 annual incomes. The other units are affordable by families with combined incomes of $2,000-$2,500 per month. When secretaries at downtown law firms draw $30,000 a year, this upscale housing is accessible to the broad middle of the downtown work force. Neither the senior partner nor the janitor is likely to find a home at the Met.

The CRA worked hard to lure a major private developer downtown, not so much to fight smog but because housing is essential in fulfilling the agency’s intention to create a round-the-clock downtown, alive 24 hours a day.

Only a close-in residential community can support the cultural events, social life and sense of security needed to keep major employers in the central city.

CRA’s harshest critics, including advocates for the poor and the homeless, complain that to bring middle-income folks downtown, the agency is also using public resources to displace less affluent residents. An estimated 10,000 people currently live in the central city area. Only about 2,000 of them occupy new buildings; the rest are in tenements, hotels, treatment centers, shelters or other places such as artists’ lofts. None of those facilities were torn down to build South Park; the Metropolitan does not represent the sort of gentrification process so familiar in older cities where, with or without urban renewal assistance, yuppies take over solid but deteriorating housing stock from poorer owners.

Yet if 25,000 souls are ultimately to be housed in various types of mixed-use projects, as the planners project, it is hard to envision this urban village coexisting happily with Skid Row. Tolerance of diversity is one thing; living next to a detox center is another.

There are other, more intriguing questions. Where will the families go when they have a second child? Under current rules, no more than three people may live in the largest units. And what happens when the allowed only child is ready for school? These urban homesteaders, once settled in, are going to create a demand for goods and services that don’t exist downtown today. Meeting their legitimate demands will necessitate cooperation among school officials, transit planners and other public agencies at levels never before required in Los Angeles.

The Metropolitan looks like a safe bet to succeed as a market-rate rental housing development, paying back the $9-million CRA loan and turning a profit for the developer/manager.

That still does not make room for the busboys and maintenance workers who also work downtown, at minimum wage, often helping support extended first-generation immigrant families. Housing the lower-middle and working class can’t be done by the private sector alone, even with the incentives available for current South Park developments.

Creative financing schemes already tested in other cities, including government land-banking for affordable housing, bond funds to assist first-time home buyers, a housing trust fund to write down land costs with dollars extracted from commercial developers--all need exploring.

Los Angeles might take a cue from Irvine, where inclusive zoning calls for housing and requires commercial developers to provide such community amenities as schools. Such ideas are under active study by city housing officials, but the gap between need and available money continues to grow.

Local tax limits plus fractured government authority equals poor urban planning: It is clearly cheaper to build new housing than new freeways, but cities build housing while the state collects the gas taxes to build new freeways, thereby opening up marginal land for development in ever-widening circles.

Living in high-rise apartments is still not for everyone. Some people stubbornly refuse to give up large pets or back yards for 490 square feet in a studio at the Met. Fortunately, they don’t have to. SCAG and the SCAQMD figure that a shift of only 9% of new housing growth to employment centers around the region (plus 6% of new jobs to outlying areas that already have plenty of housing) will achieve the jobs-housing balance needed to meet air quality standards. As the region continues to grow, South Park will be one of dozens of small nodes of vertical urbanity in the horizontal suburban vastness of Los Angeles. We will all breathe better because of it.