City’s Planners See More Crowding as Cure for L.A. : Growth: Higher-density housing touted as remedy for lack of space. Officials seek way to make idea appealing.

In the nation’s foremost suburban city, where the American dream is embodied in back yard swimming pools, ranch-style houses and plenty of elbow room, the administration of Mayor Tom Bradley is trying to fashion a new look for Los Angeles, one with a distinctly cozier feel.

In sartorial terms, it is a bit like stuffing an overweight, middle-aged cowboy into an Armani suit. To the city that epitomizes sprawl, Bradley and his team of urban planners is saying, “Tighten up, pull in your gut.”

With the population now above 3 million and growing, officials contend the city is running out of room to expand. They say that Los Angeles must fill in some of the spaces that made it into the city that didn’t feel like a city. In the language of the planners, the buzzword is “densification.”

“We are reaching the limits of the suburban single-family, white picket fence model,” said Gary Squier, who heads the city’s Housing Production and Preservation Department. “The city of the future has to go in a different direction. . . . We must have more housing units per acre than this city was planned for.”

The population is growing at a rate of 25,000 to 30,000 families a year, but city officials say there is only enough residentially zoned land to accommodate about 75,000 new housing units. Los Angeles now has one of the lowest densities of any major city--about 4.4 housing units per acre. Overall, the density will not increase appreciably, Squier said, but some neighborhoods will see a tripling or even quadrupling of current densities.

As envisioned by the mayor’s office, densification means modifying the city’s profile by building homes and apartments closer to each other and to businesses. In some places, it means a blending of single-family and multifamily neighborhoods. If the mayor has his way, the process will also involve locating subsidized housing developments throughout the city and not just in poor neighborhoods.

For the past year, Squier and other officials have been working on a broad array of land-use strategies. They include reducing minimum lot sizes and apartment sizes; selling off some of the city’s 7,000 parcels of undeveloped land; creating new building sites by turning some streets into dead ends, and allowing multifamily housing development in certain single-family neighborhoods--for example, where guest houses or garage apartments are already commonplace.

Much of what the mayor is advocating adds up to a recipe for controversy. The business community already is bristling over Bradley’s recommendation, announced earlier this month, to pay for more low-income housing with a tax on new commercial construction. Environmentalists have taken issue with his proposal to waive environmental reviews for housing projects under 100 units.

Another proposal would reverse one of the slow-growth movement’s most significant achievements, Proposition U, the 1987 ballot initiative that restricted construction in commercial districts. The Bradley Administration now would like to double building capacity in many low-rise commercial districts in order to make room for new housing and create what are known as “mixed-use” neighborhoods.

The very idea of densification--of eliminating the space between people--could strike fear in the hearts of a populace increasingly apprehensive about crime and wary of strangers in their neighborhoods.

“People who have been insulated from urban problems are suddenly being introduced to some pretty serious problems as a result of the densification we have already had,” said City Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky. “The schools aren’t safe. The streets aren’t safe. People are getting shot in my neighborhood and in a lot of other neighborhoods that used to be considered safe.

“Why do you think so many people are packing up and leaving?” said Yaroslavsky, who represents one of the city’s most affluent council districts, including portions of the Westside and the southern San Fernando Valley.

Officials of the city planning staff, who are in the midst of reviewing zoning throughout the city, said they have encountered “a high degree of resistance to new multifamily housing” in the first three communities, Sylmar, West Adams and Northeast Los Angeles, where the review process has been undertaken.

“People say multifamily just doesn’t fit in,” said Emily Gable, a principal planner. “They are concerned that apartment buildings will be out of character with the neighborhood. They complain about traffic impacts and about crime.”

Over the past decade, many neighborhoods in the city have undergone densification.

The city’s stock of detached single-family homes has gradually dwindled, from about 520,000 homes in 1980 to 512,000 today, according to the 1990 Census. During the same period, the Census reports, the number of multifamily units increased from about 662,000 to over 760,000.

“As residentially zoned land started to get scarce, developers began collecting adjacent single-family homes, tearing them down and putting up apartment buildings,” said James Fleck, a senior researcher in the Community Development Department.

In the years to come, the planned network of commuter rail lines should further abet the process of densification, with stations acting as magnets for new clusters of commercial and residential development.

But for the time being, the process of building affordable shelter for the city’s expanding population is not moving fast enough, in the view of Bradley and his aides. They contend that the citywide production of new housing units is about half of what is needed.

Moreover, they argue that downzoning efforts by homeowner groups are largely to blame for the shortage. They point to a lawsuit by a federation of mainly Westside and San Fernando Valley homeowners that led to a reduction in land zoned for apartments and reduced the city’s potential housing capacity from 6 million to 4 million people.

In recent speeches to the planning and housing departments, Bradley lashed out at homeowner groups, accusing them of trying to fence out newcomers and of advocating zoning policies that favor a minority of privileged residents--the estimated 16% who can afford the average monthly mortgage payment in Los Angeles, $1,897.

Yaroslavsky and other critics branded the mayor’s comments divisive and counterproductive.

“If the mayor wants to lead the city in a certain direction, he ought to try to inspire people, not berate them,” Yaroslavsky said.

Squier, the city’s housing chief, said the Bradley Administration has not come up with an effective marketing strategy for densification.

“The city lacks a vocabulary for making the process appealing,” Squier said. “It’s very hard to articulate a vision for accommodating growth in a way that enhances life in the city.”

Squier has his vision of the Los Angeles of the future. “We’re talking about a way of life that relies less on the automobile, that allows people to walk to the dry cleaners or to the movie theater, that promotes a sense of community,” he said. “I think ultimately it is a very appealing concept.”

It is also a foreign concept--European in its origins--being imposed on a still-spacious western city full of people who fled the confines of refugee camps, ghettoes, small towns or other big cities that became too crowded and too dense.

The key to selling densification, Squier believes, is making it look good, requiring high standards of design and seeing to it that a new development complements the surrounding neighborhood.

Easier said than done, argues Jim Wood, the chairman of the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, which builds subsidized housing.

“The problem with the design argument is that it forces a trade-off that many people don’t want to accept,” Wood said. “Imaginatively designed, nicely landscaped housing takes up more land and costs more money. So you build less of it than if you are putting up shoe boxes.”

Wood should know. Three years ago, over the protests of skeptical Hollywood neighbors, his agency set out to build a prototype of sorts--an artfully crafted low-income apartment building that could serve as a model for future projects. Its design was the outgrowth of an architectural competition sponsored by the Museum of Contemporary Art. It called for 40 units to be arranged like individual houses around courtyards set amid a hillside garden.

No groundbreaking has taken place at the site, however. The estimated cost has risen from less than $2.9 million to $4.2 million. Part of the reason for the delay is that many of the project’s most innovative qualities don’t square with the city building code, a problem that officials say could bedevil unconventionally designed projects in the future.

With or without good design, many experts remain convinced that densification offers the last best hope for housing not only the poor, but a middle class that is increasingly dependent on subsidized housing.

According to a recent City Planning Department study, less than 60% of local residents can pay the average monthly rent in Los Angeles, $675, without spending more than a third of their income.

“The beneficiaries of the mayor’s housing policy are going to be the secretaries, teachers, office workers and other middle-income people who have been priced out of the local (housing) market,” said Richard Peiser, director of USC’s Lusk Center for Real Estate Development. “We’re talking about the city’s employment base and whether or not they’re going to be able to live here.”

But Peiser and others stressed that Bradley must figure out a more effective way of “marketing” densification, or political opposition from the city’s anti-growth forces will prove insurmountable.

“You don’t need to create the impression that the city is going to be turned into Manhattan,” said Richard Weinstein, dean of UCLA’s School of Architecture and Urban Affairs. “A lot of the building can be done almost imperceptibly, in unused freight yards and industrial sites.”

If the city does have to change, said Weinstein, politicians like Bradley should stress the positive consequences--the savings in energy and water, the reduction in pollution and congestion that could come from a citizenry that lives closer together, takes up less space and drives shorter distances.

“The whole idea of density may be new to us,” said Weinstein, “but this is a population that is famous for embracing the new. The love of novelty is part of our cultural history. Our leaders have to play to that spirit.”