Many Factions United to Achieve New Plan for Wilshire Center

Developer Wayne Ratkovich has a big stake in Wilshire Center and its future.

He has returned the Wiltern Theatre to its past grandeur and rebuilt the shops and restaurants at Chapman Market. His next Wilshire-area project, the new Craft and Folk Art Museum, will rebuild the museum and add a 22-story condominium tower and retail shops.

It’s all part of his plan, Ratkovich said, to bring new vitality to the urban core. He shares the planning process with Wilshire-area residents in an innovative, formal consensus-building effort.

In the mid-1980s, weary of battles among special-interest groups, public agencies and private enterprise, Ratkovich decided to try to unite warring Wilshire-area groups with a common goal and include them in the planning process.

Thus Ratkovich helped create Wilshire Stakeholders, a group of business and community leaders. They hired a consultant, Urban Innovations Group, and asked it to help formulate a development plan for Wilshire Center.

The Stakeholders, with Ratkovich as chairman, represented a range of constituencies that each had a stake in the outcome: the Wilshire Center Plan.

Discouraged by the adversarial nature of previous efforts to plan for the area, they agreed to try to work together.

They studied guidelines for growth, urban design and social amenities for housing and public improvements for the area. “What we decided very soon,” Ratkovich recalled, “was that we wanted to improve the quality of life in the area.”

As the experiment progressed, the Stakeholders held brainstorming sessions with architects, designers and planners, addressing the area’s traffic, housing and economic problems.

Panelists included:

--Ratkovich, founder of The Ratkovich Co.

--Rex Lotery, architect, UCLA architecture professor and president of Urban Innovations Group. He was principal in charge of The Stakeholders.

--John Ferraro and Nate Holden, the two Los Angeles city councilmen whose districts cover the study area.

--William Luddy, president of the Los Angeles City Planning Commission.

--Kenneth Topping, director of the Los Angeles City Planning Department.

--Kathleen Brown, chairwoman of the Wilshire Center Study Group Citizens Advisory Committee, which represented a variety of citizens groups.

--Richard Weinstein, dean of the UCLA Graduate School of Architecture and Urban Planning. He provided urban design, policy planning and implementation services to the panel.

With funding from several sources, including the Ratkovich Co. and city of Los Angeles, the group worked with the understanding that a consensus of the participants would be required at certain points throughout the study.

If all parties couldn’t agree, the Stakeholders would be dissolved.

The process, said UCLA’s Lotery and developer Ratkovich, was considered a risky one. It required individuals with very different agendas to share ideas and compromise, pledging unanimity in writing.

The panel met regularly, beginning in 1985, in a variety of settings, from a synagogue to a public library.

Although his development company helped to finance it, Ratkovich had no control over the outcome of the study and said he was apprehensive as the work got under way.

“There was no precedent for this consensus planning approach,” he said.

“I was nervous at first. It was a very fragile agreement. But we decided very soon we wanted to improve the quality of life in the area. That was our common bond. Once we had that common tie, it was quite easy. None of us wanted this agreement to blow up.”

Resistance to compromise gave way as the project progressed and each participant felt he or she had a growing stake in a satisfactory outcome. Disagreements that could have derailed the project were resolved and final consensus on a detailed plan was obtained.

“The proof is in the pudding,” Lotery said. “We went through a complex study and ended up with unanimous consent from all the groups.”

The Wilshire Center Plan, a “framework planning study,” was completed in August, 1989. It cost about $200,000, excluding time donated by city staff members.