A New Shaper for L.A. : Even Howe’s Critics Say Next Chief Is a Talented Planner

The man chosen to shape the look of Los Angeles into the next century walked the streets of west Manhattan, past the many newly constructed hotels and office towers, and pointed out one of the legacies of the New York City Planning Department.

Con Howe, 42, the former second-in-command of the department who was recently chosen to head the Los Angeles Planning Department, was showing how development was successfully shifted in the 1980s from the overcrowded East Side of Manhattan to the lower-density West Side.

But on another sunny afternoon, Susan Fainstein walked down the same streets and had a decidedly different view of the district. Fainstein, a professor of urban planning at Rutgers University, pointed out how the new skyscrapers blocked out light and created giant shadows. She walked past the many towers that had empty office space or were in default.

Welcome to the contentious world of the New York City Planning Department, an agency that was subject to many of the same criticisms as the long-beleaguered Los Angeles Planning Department.

Both departments were criticized during the 1980s for taking directions from mayors who cared little about planning, for allowing too much growth, for granting developers too many concessions, and for spending too much time processing building permits instead of fashioning an overarching vision for the city.

Many neighborhood groups in Los Angeles are fearful about the appointment of Howe, who helped run a planning department in one of the nation’s most crowded cities during an era when city planning often was criticized for being uneven and uninspired.

Still, Howe’s supporters and even many of his critics acknowledge that he is a talented planner and artful administrator who was able to push through some important initiatives.

Howe, who is expected to be approved for the job by the Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday, was personally involved in initiatives that protected neighborhoods of classic brownstone apartments from high-rise development and preserved historic theaters near Times Square. He helped implement zoning changes that shifted new construction from overdeveloped areas to regions where more development was targeted. And he was able to accomplish this in a political environment that often was unreceptive to urban planning.

That should prepare him for his next job because few environments are as unreceptive to planning as Los Angeles, local planners say. A recent management audit of the city’s Planning Department concluded that “planning in Los Angeles is at a crisis level.” A key to the agency’s future, according to the audit, is a new planning director who is “forceful, politically savvy” and “can play hardball and say no” to the city’s elected officials.

Can Howe provide vision and revitalize a department long known for mediocrity? Can he bring effective planning to a city that long symbolized an almost total absence of planning?

Many planning experts contend that no one will be able to succeed because the department has such a long tradition of inefficiency, such entrenched management problems and is subject to so much political pressure.

“Con Howe doesn’t walk on water and you might need someone like that to do the job,” said Alan Kreditor, dean of USC’s School of Urban and Regional Planning.

While the city was lauded by some planners for going outside the department for a planning chief, others said that a more daring choice for the position would have been another finalist--Norman Krumholz, former director of Cleveland’s Planning Department and an outspoken, iconoclastic planning leader who won a number of political battles for poor and working-class residents.

Howe, neighborhood activists said, is the safe choice. Los Angeles politicians have long been criticized for cozying up and caving in to development interests. Howe, who was a leader of the department during Manhattan’s building boom under a mayor criticized as being too pro-growth, is not the type of director who will “shake up and overhaul the system,” said Laura Lake, president of Friends of Westwood, a neighborhood association.

But Howe contended that if he could rally support for innovative planning initiatives in a city as complex and fractious as New York, he can succeed in Los Angeles.

On Howe’s tour of Manhattan, he walked through the theater district, where the the Planning Department created a preservation area to protect about 40 Broadway theaters from demolition. Urban-design ordinances required brightly lit signs on new construction near Times Square to preserve the glitzy, bright-light character of the area. New buildings were required to have steep setbacks and to devote 5% of their floor space to entertainment-oriented activities--also in an effort to retain the district’s atmosphere.

“I don’t think developers who had to implement these kinds of things thought we were too pro-development,” said Howe, who left the New York planning office last year and has been working for a group that is planning improvements in Lower Manhattan. “This is not just growth at any place, at any cost. I know some activists weren’t happy with what we did. But I think if you end up making everyone just a little bit mad, you’ve probably done your job.”

But Fainstein, who is writing a book about urban development in New York, said that community groups were more angry than developers. Because of all the development, she said, the scale and character of the neighborhood near Times Square changed. The division between rich and poor, she said, was exacerbated by the Planning Department’s focus on upscale development in Manhattan during the 1980s.

“This was one of the few areas of the city that had a lot of light and air . . . and a lot of that’s been lost,” Fainstein said. “Moderate development could have worked here. Instead, this massive development changed the whole feel of the area.”

Howe contended that planning departments are inherently controversial and it is impossible for planning decisions to please everyone. He is perfectly suited for the dialectics of planning, the art of skillful compromise, former co-workers said. He listens; he remains even-tempered during the most histrionic presentation; he seeks conciliation rather than confrontation.

Those who worked with Howe describe him as a tireless worker and extremely skillful mediator who was particularly adept at dealing with the sparring interest groups that make up New York City’s planning scene. He worked for Mayor Ed Koch, who was known as pro-development, yet he was able to sustain good working relationships with many of the city’s neighborhood groups.

Los Angeles Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky said the new planning director must be a “gutsy and butt-kicking” leader to survive the political pressures of the city’s planning process. While Howe’s personal style is professorial and low-key, those who worked with him describe him as a tough, hard-nosed leader.

In the mid-1980s, during Donald Trump’s heyday in New York, Howe and the Planning Department “stood up to” Trump, who was seeking approval for a massive commercial and residential project called Television City, said Phillip Hess, former counsel to the Planning Department. The agency considered the project overwhelming in scale and poorly planned.

“Con was instrumental in taking a clear position on why the plan was deficient . . . and that plan was shelved,” said Hess, now a planning deputy for Los Angeles County Supervisor Ed Edelman. “If Con could stand up to Trump during his heyday, when he was deploying all the resources at his command, then I think he’ll be tough enough for the Los Angeles job.”

While some former co-workers can provide insight into Howe’s abilities as an administrator, it still is difficult to discern what kind of job he will do as head of the Los Angeles Planning Department. Howe did not head the department in New York--which planning experts said was underfunded and understaffed--and he did not set policy.

Many critics of New York City planning during the 1980s had little negative to say about Howe personally, or his abilities as a planner. But they were outspoken about what they considered the deficiencies of the department he worked for. Ron Shiffman, a city planning commissioner and frequent critic of Koch, said there was “no commitment” by the Koch Administration to urban planning.

Issues such as affordable housing, development in the outer boroughs and many “livability issues” often were ignored, Shiffman said. Instead, he said, there was a focus on fueling the building boom in Manhattan during the 1980s, which included too many giveaways and tax incentives to lure big developers to the city.

“The 1980s were one of the weakest periods of planning (in) the city’s history,” Shiffman said. “There was more of a priority to responding to developers and their projects than there was to actually setting a cohesive planning policy.”

In the late 1980s, the New York Times architecture critic lambasted the city’s planning, writing: “It is difficult not . . . (to) conclude that today it is the developers, not the city planners, who are making the decisions about how buildings get built in New York. The laws, such as they were, were put second to the convenience of the developers.”

Some cannot distinguish between the man and the department. “Howe was a typical bureaucrat. Whatever city policy was, he’d embrace,” said Ruth Kahn, former chairwoman of Community Board 5 in Manhattan.

Although Howe, a lifelong Easterner, has spent little time in Los Angeles, he became familiar with the Planning Department’s woes last summer. The firm that audited the department asked Howe and other outside planners to spend three days investigating the department as part of a peer-review panel.

Howe is fully aware of the department’s problems. But, he said, he would not have taken the $145,000-a-year job if he did not believe that he could greatly improve the department, which makes critical decisions on issues that include traffic, aesthetics, economic development and low-income housing.

The city’s response to the highly critical audit, and the growing support for planning in the city, persuaded him that “the job is doable.” Howe was impressed, he said, that city leaders “seemed committed to making the necessary changes.”

The audit recommended a major overhaul of a department it characterized as highly politicized and influenced by public officials who often were pressured by powerful developers or affluent homeowner groups. The audit criticized the department for having “no proactive work program or clear setting of priorities.”

The first goal of the department, the audit said, should be updating the city’s General Plan, a series of documents--some more than 15 years old--that are supposed to provide broad planning objectives.

Howe said he will use the audit “as a blueprint” for the changes he will make. But because he has not been formally approved and because he is not entirely familiar with the department, he was reluctant to delineate his priorities or his plan of action.

“Basically, we’ll have to build up the credibility of the department. . . . We’ll have to send out signals that we’re not susceptible to political pressure. It will be irrelevant to me whether the developer pushing the project is a campaign contributor or not.”

In New York, some of Howe’s most innovative planning work was done in an area of turn-of-the-century brownstone apartments on Manhattan’s Upper East Side. In the early 1980s, when pressures for luxury housing were mounting, developers began constructing “sliver buildings”--narrow, high-rises between brownstones and, sometimes, on top of them.

Howe, who was head of the Planning Department’s Manhattan office at the time, moved quickly, after only a handful of these buildings were constructed. He helped create a zoning initiative that prohibited the oversized buildings. Howe called this “contextual zoning,” and he instituted this zoning in several residential areas to preserve the neighborhoods’ character.

Howe stood at a busy intersection on the Upper East Side and pointed out one of the first sliver buildings. It is a 25-foot tower plopped on top of a five-story brownstone.

“We figured if you could do that kind of thing here, you could do it anywhere,” said Howe, pointing out the row of brownstones surrounding the tower. “So this initiative could be applied to other neighborhoods threatened with this type of construction . . . and could be applied to a city like Los Angeles . . . where, for example, you might not want high-rises in a neighborhood of small- to medium-sized apartments.”

Howe, who studied political science at Yale University, began work as a planner in New York in 1978, after receiving a master’s degree from from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s School of Architecture and Planning. Howe quickly rose through the ranks. He was named head of the department’s Manhattan office in 1982, and five years later was appointed to the department’s No. 2 position.

A year after Koch left office, Howe was named director of the Lower Manhattan Project, a public-private partnership formed to promote economic improvement at the southern tip of Manhattan. Howe, who lived in a loft shortly after he moved to New York, now lives with his wife--a former officer for the National Trust for Historic Preservation--and their two young children in Battery Park City, a highly regarded planned community in Lower Manhattan.

Howe has the experience, the ability as a planner, the administrative skills and the inner strength to head a department as troubled as Los Angeles’, said Ruth Messinger, Manhattan borough president, who has worked with Howe on many projects.

“I know he has a lot of ability as a planner and as an administrator who has to work with a lot of constituencies,” Messinger said. “But does he have the vision and creativity? That’s unanswered. That’s for Los Angeles to find out.”