LOS ANGELES : City Council Adopts Hillside Regulations

The Los Angeles City Council gave final approval Tuesday by a 13-1 vote to a long-awaited ordinance regulating development in the city’s hillside neighborhoods.

The ordinance, adopted after minimal debate Tuesday, seeks to halt the trend of building large houses on small hillside lots and to make hillside living safer through a series of fire-protection measures.

Adoption of the law has been a top priority of homeowner groups, led by the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Assns.

Provisions of the ordinance set limits on the height and lot coverage of houses. It requires widening of substandard streets, extra parking for houses larger than 2,400 square feet and the installation of automatic sprinkler systems in new houses.

Advocates of the measure, such as Councilmen Zev Yaroslavsky and Michael Woo, charged that a “mansionization” building trend was ruining the natural beauty of the city’s hillsides. Overbuilding has resulted in narrow, winding streets becoming clogged with cars, hindering emergency vehicles, they said.

Woo cited the case of an elderly woman in Laurel Canyon who died of a heart attack because rescue vehicles were unable to quickly navigate the area’s narrow streets to get to her home.

Woo himself took some heat from the development community recently when it was reported that he has been remodeling his own hillside home in Silver Lake in a way that does not meet the conditions of the law he has been championing.