Bradley Retreats From Affordable Housing Plan : Planning: Miscalculations by the mayor’s office triggered a backlash among homeowner groups.

Three months after Mayor Tom Bradley made homeowner groups the villain in a high-profile drive to build more affordable housing in the city, the mayor’s campaign is in retreat.

The affordable housing strategy, in essence, became a victim of the Bradley Administration’s faulty statistics and overheated rhetoric, which triggered a potent backlash among homeowner groups citywide. As a result, what began as a debate over housing policy is threatening to turn into a bitter dispute over the rights of haves and have-nots.

The debate asks whether Los Angeles can make room for a population that is expanding by more than 25,000 households a year, many of them poor, while preserving the single-family neighborhoods and low-density apartment districts that have been oases for the urban middle-class for generations.

The mayor’s original housing strategy would have made it easier to build apartments in many neighborhoods by relaxing environmental reviews of proposed buildings, by permitting low-rise apartment complexes in single-family neighborhoods, and by legalizing the construction of “granny flats” or extra units next to single-family homes.

However, none of those provisions remain in the revised version of the plan. After months of controversy, the strategy now is to focus on building housing near commuter rail lines and other transportation corridors and on preserving existing affordable housing.

As the latest plan heads for City Council consideration this week, neither side in the housing debate has much good to say about the way the issue has been handled. First, city officials exaggerated the shortage of residentially zoned land and then Bradley picked a fight with homeowners who make up one of the most formidable interest groups in the city.

“Suddenly, the mayor was attacking the bedrock of the city, the people who vote and who pay for most of the improvements,” said Barbara Fein, a Westside homeowner activist.

“The approach they (the Bradley Administration) took on this thing was wrong,” said Ted Stein, a developer and member of the city Planning Commission who is in favor of an aggressive policy on affordable housing.

Bradley blamed the housing shortage on the so-called “NIMBY” (not in my back yard) phenomenon. Homeowners, he said, contributed to the problems of homelessness and overcrowding by pushing through zoning laws that put thousands of acres of residential land off limits for low-income apartments.

In reaction to the mayor’s comments, more than 150 homeowner groups representing rich and poor neighborhoods joined in a federation to oppose the mayor’s plan.

The mayor’s affordable housing campaign culminated years of work by a new housing bureaucracy. An affordable housing commission, a housing department and the job of housing coordinator in the mayor’s office all were created. Partly, it was a response to criticism that Bradley had not done nearly enough about housing during the 1980s.

City officials estimate that only one in five families is able to afford to buy a home, that nearly 200,000 families are doubled up and tripled up in cramped quarters, that more than 40,000 families live in garages or other “bootleg” units and that up to 150,000 families are homeless at some point during the year.

No one disputes those figures. But when the Bradley Administration unveiled its affordable housing strategy last summer, it chose to use another statistic as the linchpin of its publicity campaign--and that proved to be a mistake.

Gary Squier, who heads the city’s housing department, announced that under existing zoning, the city had room for barely 100,000 more housing units. In other words, the city was four years away from running out of residentially zoned land. Clearly, the city was going to have to take drastic action to avoid homelessness and overcrowding at record levels, not to mention seeing its employment base disappear into the hinterlands in search of affordable homes.

But Squier’s figures did not hold up. Taken from a preliminary draft of a city planning department study, the numbers were quite different in the department’s final draft. In the revised study, the inventory of building space became 10 times greater. The city’s residential building capacity grew from a scant 100,000 units to over 1 million. According to the new numbers, the city had enough potential residential capacity to house 25,000 new families every year for 40 years.

Before the second draft was released, the mayor’s office embarked on the second phase of its strategy--blaming the housing shortage on homeowner groups.

City officials contend that the shortage is a direct result of massive court-ordered rezoning in 1985, which restricted or prohibited building on 200,000 parcels of land and reduced the city’s residential capacity by 2 million people. The rezoning was the result of a lawsuit brought by a federation of neighborhood associations arguing that the city was permitting new development in excess of limits allowed under various community plans.

In August, the mayor delivered two controversial speeches that emphasized the theme of homeowner responsibility.

Bradley said a major impediment to affordable housing is that “those who are already in place, those who have their neighborhoods very nicely built up somehow seem to believe that they don’t have a responsibility to those who follow them. And so the NIMBY attitude takes over.”

Homeowner representatives were furious. They felt that they were being depicted as racists and elitists.

Aides to Bradley who draft his speeches insist that the mayor was not trying to be provocative.

“We were trying to make the point that in some instances neighborhood groups have opposed new residential development no matter how benign the development is,” said Michael Bodaken, the mayor’s housing coordinator.

Others disagreed.

“There are people around the mayor who felt they needed a stick to hold over the homeowners. They felt they needed to create a crisis to get their program through,” said a highly placed city official who is involved in the housing debate but who asked to remain anonymous.

Bradley’s invective was accompanied by an eight-point strategy on affordable housing, much of it aimed at the teeth of the homeowner movement.

Especially galling to homeowner groups was a proposal to eliminate environmental reviews for small- and medium-sized apartment buildings. Such a waiver would cut developers’ time and costs but would deprive neighborhood groups of a hard-won right to make sure that new buildings match the character and quality of their environs. It would have affected an estimated 50% of all new apartment buildings.

Homeowner representative Fein called the mayor’s plan “a developer’s wish list come true.”

She and others noted that more than 85% of all apartment construction in the past five years has been market rate projects in affluent neighborhoods where there has been little population growth. Many of those projects were fought by homeowner groups, and Fein argued that the mayor’s proposals would do little to redirect development toward overcrowded, lower-income neighborhoods.

Neighborhood groups had another bone to pick with the mayor. Accused of keeping affordable housing out of their neighborhoods, groups pointed to their efforts to preserve moderately priced apartments in several parts of the city--only to meet resistance from City Hall.

An especially bitter battle has been fought in the Fairfax and Mid-Wilshire area, once home to the city’s largest concentration of elderly renters. The area has been changing, according to neighborhood activists, because developers supported by the Bradley Administration and City Council have succeeded in tearing down 50 apartment buildings and replacing them with complexes that rent for an average of $500 more per month.

“It’s been a case of real estate rape and pillage in our neighborhood, and we have yet to hear a peep of protest from the mayor’s office,” said activist Denise Robb.

The mayor’s housing strategy began to come unraveled in late August with the release of the planning department’s second set of figures on housing space.

Housing chief Squier said he was blindsided by the new numbers. Not so, say planning department officials who insist that they told Squier that the first set of statistics were “preliminary” and subject to change.

Some of the strongest advocates of the housing strategy argue that the first set of numbers paints a more realistic picture of housing space than does the later version. For example, planning commissioner Stein still insists that there are only about 100,000 vacant residential plots where housing could be built any time soon.

Any larger figure, Stein said, counts property that is developed, though not to its fullest potential. Reaching that potential is unlikely, he said, because it would necessitate tearing down thousands of older apartment buildings to make way for larger complexes.

However, Stein and Squier conceded that the confusion over the figures has made the housing plan seem less urgent and made it an easy target for the newly formed homeowners federation.

“Instead of looking for more housing opportunities, we had to shift into a defensive mode where we focus on trying to preserve what we have,” Stein said.

Much of what the homeowner groups objected to in the housing strategy was deleted.

“They went through and edited out a big chunk of our concerns,” said architect William Christopher, one of the organizers of the new homeowners federation.

Squier talked about the lessons he has learned from the episode.

“I learned that there exists a number of neighborhood groups that have fought hard against unplanned, wanton development, and I learned that we can’t succeed unless we have those groups on our side, knowing that they aren’t going to be victimized in the process.

“It’s also clear to me that we don’t need any more NIMBY rhetoric,” Squier said.

Squier said that when the remains of the housing strategy come before the City Council, he hopes to win approval for several important provisions, including proposals to pay for the rehabilitation of homes and apartments in low-income neighborhoods, to establish a slumlord task force to target slum properties for criminal prosecution, and to identify city-owned land that could be used for housing.

Despite Squier’s conciliatory tone, he maintains that the slow-growth tactics of homeowner groups--curbing development through lawsuits, downzoning and building delays--are the main obstacles to new affordable housing in the city.

Some homeowner representatives agree that their efforts to protect their neighborhoods have limited the number of renters.

Jerry Bonar, who heads a Silver Lake residents association, talks about the balance a neighborhood must achieve between homeowners and tenants to preserve safe streets and good schools.

He estimates that his association has reduced multifamily zoning in Silver Lake by 30% to 40%, at the same time ensuring that most apartment buildings are comparatively small, with 12 to 24 units.

“Where a massing of units is allowed, and we’ve had some of that, we predict there will be slums,” he said.

Bonar is an architect and much of his work is with nonprofit groups building apartment buildings for poor people in downtown Los Angeles. Yet, away from work he shares the apprehension of many homeowners about any program that would inundate his neighborhood with apartments.

“It scares the hell out of us.”