Trying to Make Life Livable in Urban Suburbs

“City making now is different from that of previous times. Modern transportation methods make it possible to weave (a city) into a harmonious unit ... to retain the flowers and orchards and lawns, the invigorating free air from the ocean, the bright sunshine and the elbow room which have marked it in the past. The transportation lines ... have made it possible to get far out in the midst of the orchards and fields for home making.”

In 1905 the San Fernando Valley inspired the Los Angeles Express to extol its virtues as a suburban paradise. But 84 years later, many of the Valley’s 1.2-million inhabitants believe that vision is rapidly vanishing in the smog.

The bright sunshine has faded, the elbow room has shrunk, the fields have been overrun with housing subdivisions and office complexes.

“It’s a disaster,” declared Gerald A. Silver, president of the Homeowners of Encino. “The Valley I moved to 35 years ago has been ruined. It’s fast becoming a mini-Manhattan, totally unfit for family life. Urbanization has run amok.”

Irate homeowners, frustrated developers, puzzled planners, troubled transportation experts, nervous politicians and agitated commuters fret about the Valley’s urbanization. But they lack a shared vision for the Valley’s future as a city--or collection of cities. Everyone agrees something must be done, but nobody seems to know quite what that something should be.

Deuk Perrin, the Los Angeles city planning official who supervises the south Valley, admits that planners are in a “reactive posture. We’re simply struggling to solve overwhelming problems. We have no way of developing a coherent vision for the Valley’s future urban shape.”

“As a planner I have to be optimistic,” said Perrin, who grew up in the Valley, lives in Reseda and works in the Van Nuys Municipal Building. But, “as a homeowner, I’m pessimistic about the area’s future as a pleasant place to live and raise kids. Like any homeowner, I worry about the intrusion of development into the quiet residential neighborhoods that attracted so many people to come and settle here.”

Preserving the integrity and amenity of single-family residential neighborhoods is a prime objective of Valley planners. The problem is how to achieve this while allowing the Valley to develop and cope with the extra traffic development brings.

Most planners and urban design experts envision this as the best possible scenario for controlled urbanization in the Valley:

* Construction of a comprehensive, attractive and efficient rapid transit system as part of a rational regional system.

* Introduction of projects that combine residential and commercial development concentrated in several centers.

* Construction of apartments (planners call them “multiple dwelling units”) mainly along major arterial roadways as buffers between commercial strips and the single-family neighborhoods that lie alongside.

The urbanization of suburban regions such as the Valley is a national phenomenon. As the old city downtowns become expensive and congested, commercial development has moved to the suburbs in search of cheaper space and proximity to where many office workers live.

The result is the creation of what some experts call “suburban downtowns” or “urban villages.” Warner Center is a prime example, as is the proposed $2-billion development planned for the transformation of Universal City into a huge commercial, entertainment and residential complex.

The shift of office space from traditional downtowns to the suburbs is reflected in the figures for commercial construction. “Since 1960, downtown Los Angeles’ share of the metropolitan office market has declined from 60% to 34%,” Christopher Leinberger and Charles Lockwood said in an Atlantic Monthly article titled “How Business Is Reshaping America.”

“Los Angeles is perhaps the most evolved example of the urban village phenomenon,” Leinberger and Lockwood suggest. “The metropolitan area has given rise to 16 smaller urban village cores, among them Century City, Costa Mesa/Irvine/Newport Beach, Encino, Glendale, the airport, Warner Center, Ontario, Pasadena, Universal City/Burbank and Westwood.”

But the urban village pattern--or Centers Concept, which has been the city of Los Angeles’ basic plan for 20 years--has often created more problems here than it has solved.

The concentration of commercial activity has generated tremendous volumes of traffic that spill over into residential neighborhoods. Several of the major intersections around Warner Center, for example, already have reached a point where drivers must wait for three or more traffic light changes before they can cross. And Warner Center is still several million square feet short of its total allowable amount of commercial development.

In addition, the concentration of development in centers runs counter to the long-established L.A. pattern of strip development or “linear downtowns,” such as Ventura Boulevard, the Valley’s “Main Street.” The stretched-out commercial strip, which serves to catch the eye of passing motorists, is an urban pattern developed in response to the private car.

“I still support the Centers Concept,” said Ted Stein, an Encino resident who is a member of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission. “It’s the only way to prevent the overwhelming of the Valley’s residential neighborhoods.”

Stein, like many policy-makers, believes the key to making the concept work is to allow a mixture of multiple housing and commercial development in the same project.

“Mixed use is the wave of the future,” he said. “It is the only way to allow the Valley to grow without ruining its character.

“It’s also a way to create affordable housing for the low-income families who service the Valley. If blue-collar workers have to locate beyond the Valley’s boundaries, in Palmdale or Lancaster, that will only exacerbate the rush-hour commuter traffic problem.”

Earlier this year, Mayor Tom Bradley convened a high-powered group of homeowners, developers, architects and planning officials with a mandate to study the introduction of zoning ordinances that would allow mixed-use development. A specific designation for mixed-use zoning does not exist at present in Los Angeles.

“Allowing mixed use is a vital step in the planned urbanization of the city,” said USC Architecture Dean Robert Harris, a member of the mayor’s study group. “Through careful design we can have increased density and increased amenities. We can have our cake and eat it too.”

Harris said he viewed the Valley as a perfect laboratory for trying mixed-use developments that could upgrade the architectural and human quality of many of its commercial strips.

“Growth without vision is a monster,” Harris said. “If growth occurs without a change in the character of the city it becomes a kind of elephantiasis. But the form this development must take is different from the all-too-common trashy design of the past that has degraded districts like Van Nuys,” he said. “It must be inventive and diverse. It must be urban.”

Vision Van Nuys, an intensive workshop held last fall by the City Planning Department and the Urban Design Advisory Coalition, suggested in its report that, while existing areas of single-family, low-density housing should be protected, new mixed residential and commercial developments should be encouraged.

Offering developers the carrot of a bonus for building affordable housing should be combined, some planners suggest, with the stick of “linkage” fees levied on commercial developments to finance such much-needed amenities as traffic- flow improvements and day care.

“Developers must provide funds to mitigate the traffic consequences of their projects,” said Studio City citizen activist Dan Shapiro. “Such measures might include a subsidy for local transportation projects such as minibuses, van pools, street widening, traffic lights and so on. This levy on developers is no different in principle than requiring industrial polluters to solve the problems they create.”

Developers agree in principle with the concept of linkage fees, but they demand a trade-off in an elimination of the delays their projects now often face from militant homeowners.

“Developers desire certainty,” said Bob Selleck, developer with his brother, actor Tom Selleck, of The Village shopping center in Reseda. “We need to know up front exactly what the rules of the game are, and how we can speed up the approvals process.”

Selleck said it has taken almost six years to negotiate with the community to get approval of his medium-size commercial development.

Selleck insisted that the only fair exchange for such levies is a guarantee of certainty in the process--”the certainty that you can develop your own property according to a fixed set of rules that don’t get changed on you all the time as one protester after another springs up out of the neighborhood.”

In an attempt to create such certainty and formalize community input into the planning process, the L.A. City Council last year instituted a program of Community Plan Advisory Committees (C-PACs) in each of the 35 community plan areas into which the city is divided (14 community plans areas are in the Valley).

The 15-member C-PACs will have the responsibility of advising city planners on the character of the community plans, which are being revised citywide to bring them up to date while complying with the court-mandated down-zoning required under Assembly Bill 283.

“We have to formalize the community’s involvement in planning, to give it an official and steady voice,” said Jerome Daniels, chairman emeritus of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns. “The present ad-hoc situation, where homeowners have no recourse but to organize in spontaneous protest groups, encourages conflict more than rational negotiation.”

The Valley cannot grow without change, Daniels believes. And one of the changes he favors is a shift in emphasis from the private car to public rapid transit.

“Cars are killing the Valley,” he said. “We must get people out of their cars and into public transport. I know people resist the idea of a rail line running through their back yards, but it’s an idea whose time has come. Without it we shall choke to death on our own gas fumes.”

Architect Rudolph De Chellis, president of the San Fernando Valley Chapter of the American Institute of Architects, said a coherent rapid transit system will have to be forced upon the Valley.

“My feeling is that people simply won’t buy it, no matter how urgent the need,” he said. “It will simply have to be rammed down the Valley’s throat. But where is the leadership with the courage to take on public opinion on such an unpopular issue?”

The lack of bold municipal leadership troubles many people concerned about the Valley’s growth.

“There’s a widespread feeling that Los Angeles is out of control, that nobody’s at the wheel as we head for the shoals,” Silver said. “The Valley is an Exxon Valdez disaster waiting to happen.”

A major problem, many observers say, is that solutions to the Valley’s dilemmas depend upon regional forces that are not under the control of the city or any coherent political body.

Last year’s much-publicized LA 2000 report recommended the creation of a regional Growth Management Agency to coordinate planning in the entire Southern California area from Ventura County to the Mexican border.

“Chaos is ensured when so many small political jurisdictions work in isolation from one another,” said UCLA architecture dean Richard Weinstein, a member of the LA 2000 Committee. “This old, porous political quilt, which allowed the energy of developers and entrepreneurs to push through the gaps in the fabric of control and create the vigorous and varied economy we all enjoy, will not serve us well in the future. Major problems like transportation, air quality, waste disposal and sewage require regional planning coordination.”

The LA 2000 report declared that “current regional planning efforts have not been implemented because existing organizations lack authority to move ahead with them.” A coherent plan should relate regional transportation strategies to growth management planning, the report suggested. It should define standards for the use of space and specify the desired concentration of residents in relation to economic activity.

Population changes over the region also challenge planners. The proportion of residents over 65 is rising fast. At the same time, the scarcity of affordable housing in areas such as the Valley forces less affluent families to live on the edges of the metropolitan region in new developments in Palmdale and Lancaster, a long way from the main centers of work in the Valley and the Westside.

Put simply, as the population gets denser and the economy grows richer, the houses and apartments get scarcer and the commutes get longer.

What kind of new form can the Valley’s urbanization take to resolve these tensions and cope with the Valley’s future?

Most parties agree that the basic single-family home character of the Valley must be preserved. At the same time, housing must be provided for lower-income families close to the blue-collar jobs that must be created to eliminate the long commutes that make up so much of the area’s traffic congestion.

“The Valley needs a greater density of housing if it is to continue to prosper,” said Norman Emerson, a public policy consultant. “Along with the housing, the Valley needs commercial development to create jobs close to where people live. A rational jobs-housing balance is the only way to reduce the intensity of cross-Valley commuting that now comprises around half the volume of rush-hour traffic.”

Build more apartments, some experts urge. Multifamily units, which already comprise about 44% of the Valley’s housing stock, are projected to increase to half the housing over the next 20 years.

“Such strategies will transform the urban shape of the Valley without destroying its original character,” said USC’s Harris. “The new Valley will, I believe, still be tranquil, but it will also be more a varied and interesting place to inhabit. It will, in a word, become urbane.”