Specific Plan Called Idiocy

As one of the 130 developers affected, I found the story of the unraveling of the Ventura Boulevard Specific Plan a bittersweet reminder of the idiocy a builder often must confront in trying to ply his trade.

I was lucky, I guess, because I got frustrated and sold out before the plan was enacted. I had already been taken to the cleaners by my neighbors, who objected to an imaginative and handsome mixed-use building which I proposed to terrace up a hillside in Studio City.

My successors had a more optimistic view. They bent over backward trying to change the project into something the neighbors would accept, wasting months of precious time. They were forced (as a condition of getting a building permit) to sign an agreement to pay the “Trip Fees” when assessed (without knowing how much they would be!) and to scale back their floor space to the figure allowed by the soon-to-be enacted Plan.

Then they went broke, leaving the project stalled and the land in the hands of a bank. Today, it is worth a 10th of its former value.

Of course, the city sent a bill for the trip fees anyway: nearly half a million dollars for what had been boiled down to a puny little 15,000-square-foot retail/commercial building!

Is it any wonder the city can’t collect?

The Specific Plan was doomed from the beginning because it heaped on one class of land-use--new development--all the costs that had accrued and been shelved for the past 50 or 75 years. If traffic mitigation costs were assessed to all boulevard property, and perhaps even to adjacent residential property, there might be hope for success. New developers can’t be expected to pay for everything that wasn’t done for most of a century.

Additionally, the Plan put such severe and uniform restrictions on what can be built that a builder is hard-pressed to come up with a profitable project. Anyone starting to develop on the boulevard today should hire a bankruptcy attorney in advance.

Anyone who believed the Plan would bring about the beautification and improvement of Ventura Boulevard would do better to believe in the Easter Bunny. The end of the recession, when it comes, will not revive collections.

Any developer who paid his trip fees when the bill came should recite kaddish over his money. It has been spent on salaries, rents, consultants, travel and frou frou. Not a penny has gone to traffic mitigation or to any other good cause.

And my former neighbors should prepare themselves to get what they deserve: more auto repair shops. Because that’s about the only thing one can get to work economically in that section of the Boulevard.

IRWIN SPECTOR, North Hollywood