Finding Ways to Live With Growth in Our Back Yards : Housing: City needs to adopt a vision of community protection that makes room for unavoidable higher density.
Mayor Tom Bradley is correct in attributing some of Los Angeles’ housing problems to neighborhood groups that he describes as NIMBYs (not in my back yard). But he also should have recognized the developer-driven chaos that spawned these groups in the first place.
In the early 1970s, Bradley forged a consensus among Los Angeles residents that growth was good. And through the 1970s and 1980s, the city saw extraordinary growth. It developed an impressive skyline, became capital of the Pacific Rim and an economic boom town. Growth brought jobs, increased municipal services and cultural activities. Indeed, many residents were attracted to the city because of this.
But in the 1980s, residents began to see another side to growth. Increasing traffic congestion raised the temperature of trapped commuters; seniors found themselves evicted to make way for higher-density luxury apartments, and some neighborhoods were gutted or destroyed, replaced by ill-conceived mini-malls. As outraged residents turned to city planners, they found them asleep at the switch. For the planners, the 1970s motto, “growth is good” had seemingly changed to “the bigger the better.”
In the late 1980s, neighborhood groups fought back, initially through lawsuits and then the ballot box. City planners now became submissive to neighborhood groups. And, just as before, excesses occurred. Some groups opposed all development, no matter how benign. Others extracted payoffs from developers for unrelated purposes. One huge city-sponsored rezoning project limited building in large parts of Los Angeles to single-family residences, even in many poorer areas that were pleading for increased development. It also reduced the city’s residential capacity by almost one-third.
In addition, sympathetic City Council members placed vast areas under more than 50 “interim-control ordinances,” which virtually prevented any new development. Finally, and sadly, some neighborhoods opposed new apartments solely because they were affordable to lower-income families.
The mayor rightly insists that the city must continue to grow. Indeed, we have little choice, since Los Angeles is expected to gain at least 25,000 new households each year for the foreseeable future. But at present we are unable to accommodate them. Only 15,000 new residential units are produced in Los Angeles each year, most of them luxury apartments. In addition, even without the building moratoriums, the city has already reached about 90% of its residential-zoning capacity. If these policies continue without change, the city will accelerate its trend toward pricey condos and luxury apartments for the rich and substandard slums for the poor, forcing the middle class to move farther and farther north or east. And in similar cities around the country, jobs and economic growth will eventually follow the middle-class work force out of Los Angeles.
What Los Angeles needs is a new consensus, a new vision of the city that will accommodate growth but also meet the legitimate concerns of our neighborhoods. This consensus cannot attempt to turn the clock back, to return control to developers, even “sensitive” developers, at the expense of neighborhoods. Rather it must guarantee the integrity of the neighborhoods and the protection of current residents. In particular, it must encourage the nascent attempts at neighborhood-based planning, social services, housing and economic development. Conversely, however, it must also plan for overall economic and population growth, housing, land use and transportation, all of which require citywide planning and solutions.
Fortunately, there are several models that could combine all of these elements. One model, mentioned by the mayor, would require each of the Planning Department’s community-planning areas to assume some “fair share” of the city’s residential growth. The community could decide the location of the new housing but could not reject it. Another model would encourage development along mass-transit corridors. Los Angeles is undergoing the most rapid expansion of mass transit of any city in the country. Community organizations and city planners could prepare now to increase development significantly along transit corridors, providing jobs and housing in close proximity and minimizing any increase in traffic.
During the next year, the state and federal governments will be looking intensely at models for “growth management.” It is important that the city of Los Angeles, and its mayor, be leaders in creating a new vision which guarantees that the legitimate concerns of neighborhood groups and the city’s essential need for growth will be met.
