Panel Backs Plan to Cut Down on Hillside Mansions

A Los Angeles City Council panel on Tuesday approved a plan to stem the tide of mansion-building in the Santa Monica Mountains and to improve the ability of emergency vehicles, especially firetrucks, to traverse narrow hillside streets often made impassable by over-development.

Without the reforms, warned council members Ruth Galanter and Hal Bernson, the Los Angeles Fire Department might face the nightmarish problems that bedeviled Oakland firefighters as they battled the hillside conflagration that claimed 24 lives and did more than $1.5 billion in property damage Oct 20 and 21.

Both lawmakers, members of the council’s Planning and Land-Use Management Committee, recalled that Oakland emergency crews at times had difficulty reaching the fire via the narrow streets that serve that city’s foothills.

“We’ve had bad fires before, and the odds are we’ll have them again,” Galanter told a crowd of about 100 homeowner leaders and developers who monitored the committee’s discussion of the so-called Hillside Ordinance, a measure that’s been five years in the making.

The committee debate was marked by fireworks of its own as Galanter and Bernson dueled with their panel colleague, Councilman Nate Holden, who voted against the plan. At one point, Bernson and Galanter walked out of the hearing room in a display of pique with Holden.

“You’ll have a chance to debate this again before the council, and then you’ll have an even bigger audience,” a testy Galanter told Holden.

But Holden was heavily cheered several times by property owners when he denounced the plan. “I’m sick of it,” Holden told his colleagues. “You’re going too far.”

Some property owners have complained that the ordinance would unfairly restrict their ability to develop their property.

The plan, if adopted by the council, could require those who build new houses along narrow hillside streets to widen the roads in front of their properties. They also would have to provide more off-street parking than existing building codes mandate.

The same provisions would also apply to existing houses that are extensively remodeled or are expanded by more than 750 square feet.

Other provisions would limit the height of houses and the percentage of a lot that could be covered with a structure built along substandard-sized streets.

To some homeowner groups and lawmakers, such as Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky, the legislation is seen as a way to block the construction of oversized houses in the city’s hillside neighborhoods, the “mansionization” trend propelled in recent years by rising land costs that encourage builders to squeeze the most out of their properties.

Others, such as the Fire Department, have seen the legislation as a way to get wider streets that will improve the access of firefighters to the city’s fire-prone hillside areas.

Holden, however, charged that the measure would not really help the Fire Department. Instead, the city would end up with small swathes of wider streets in front of new or remodeled houses but not in front of older ones, he said.

But Frank Eberhard, the city Planning Department’s deputy director, said that while it may “be years before we get all the street-widening improvement, this ordinance is a start.”

Bernson also tried to dispel the widespread notion that the measure would automatically require hillside property owners to widen their streets if they embark on new construction. In fact, the city’s Bureau of Engineering will have the discretion to waive the street-widening requirement when issuing a building permit, Bernson said.

The complicated plan is still several months from being adopted by the full council. Among other things, parts of the measure must be reconsidered by the city’s Planning Commission.