Blueprint for a More Livable L.A. Takes Shape : Growth: Residents are asked to help achieve goals proposed for an updated General Plan. The first Valley meeting is scheduled Wednesday.

Now more than ever Los Angeles is looking for a future.

It could look something like this: A metropolis where neglected boulevards are teeming with life, where more people move more easily through the urban landscape, where the isolation born of freeways and gate-guarded enclaves gives way to a sense of community, and where the benefits and burdens of new development are spread evenly throughout the city’s fractured neighborhoods.

Halfway through the two-year process of redrawing the city’s long-term blueprint for growth, that is the Los Angeles that residents from communities as diverse as Chatsworth and South-Central and San Pedro are telling local officials they want.

How to get there is the subject of a series of community meetings now taking place across Los Angeles. Armed with colorful sketches of different communities, urban planners are showing residents what the future could hold for their neighborhoods and explaining how to make it happen.

The first meeting in the San Fernando Valley will be held Wednesday in Sherman Oaks.

Yet whether the vision of planners and residents ever develops from colorful maps and charts into reality depends on political will and on the willingness of residents to accept changes that may be unpopular in the short term, but necessary to make Los Angeles livable in the next century, everyone involved in the process agrees.

“We’re selling this as a plan for people’s children,” said Los Angeles planner Ron Maben, who is helping to update the city’s General Plan, the document that serves as the constitution for future growth.

The General Plan--last updated in 1974--establishes broad policy. Although it does not govern how individual pieces of property should be developed, it sets the tone for smaller, more specific community plans that do.

“This is the guideline, the superstructure for the city,” said Phyllis Winger, planning deputy for Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson, who is chairman of the council’s Planning and Land Use Management Committee.

Over the past several weeks--and continuing until next month--planners have taken preliminary ideas on the road to ask residents across the city what they think of a plan that seeks to accommodate more people without overloading the freeways and the sewers or worsening the quality of the air.

The ideas stem from community meetings held last year when community members told planners what they did and did not want Los Angeles to be. Although each neighborhood had specific ideas about its future, planners were struck by the similarities in what residents wanted in Los Angeles as a whole.

They wanted more parks, more livable neighborhoods and more affordable housing. They did not want more traffic, more smog or more of the other headaches that go with urban living.

In short, they all agreed that something has to change.

Indeed, early data compiled by planners demonstrate that if Los Angeles continues to grow as it has--namely, an auto-dependent suburban sprawl--the results could be disastrous. Sewer systems will be overloaded. Roads will be gridlocked. Air quality will worsen. And the need for imported water will outpace supply.

“If we continue the rules as they are, the net outcome will exacerbate existing conditions,” said Woodie Tescher, the consultant preparing the plan. “If all land is built out at current zoning, average speed on local streets would be 4 m.p.h.--that’s on every street.”

So planners devised a preliminary vision for the future that borrows heavily from the past. Their preliminary ideas include:

* Encouraging denser development around mass transit centers and along major transportation corridors. That would allow more people to live within walking distance of subways or buses, thus reducing the need for automobiles.

* Mixing different types of development, such as putting apartments or condominiums on top of retail shops or commercial offices. That way, shopkeepers or office workers could live and work in the same area. Even if they did drive to work, most of their daily errands--such as trips to the grocery, the cleaners or picking up the kids at day care--could be done on foot.

* Converting flood control channels and utility rights of way into greenbelts that connect regional parks together, thus opening up recreational areas in communities where vacant land is scarce. If bike paths are built, planners speculate that more people might be willing to commute by bicycle.

* Directing growth into those areas where streets and utility lines can handle it and discouraging it in areas that are already overbuilt. For example, manufacturing centers might be proposed off a railroad freight line, but not in the middle of a residential neighborhood.

* Preserving neighborhoods of single-family homes. Wherever denser areas are proposed, planners suggest buffering them from existing neighborhoods with duplexes or townhouses.

* Streamlining the complicated and costly permit process that precedes new development projects. By creating a master environmental impact report and establishing firm guidelines, planners hope developers will have more time and money to devote to building better projects.

Recognizing the diversity of the city’s neighborhoods, planners are drawing preliminary sketches to detail how the broad guidelines might be applied in different communities. Sherman Oaks, for instance, might develop with a different “feel” than, say, Pico-Union, but both communities would be subject to the same rules.

The community meetings are a chance for residents to make changes before the ideas are fine-tuned and more formally presented later this year. Planners hope to present the plans to the city Planning Commission in November.

Many of the ideas actually were contained in the city’s last General Plan, adopted in 1974. That plan called for major urban hubs such as Downtown, Los Angeles International Airport and Warner Center to be connected by a network of transit lines.

Except the rail lines never got built. And many elements of the plan were never followed. Now the plan is out of date. Some of the centers envisioned in the plan developed. Others did not.

Aware of that, many in the city are doubtful that a new General Plan will be any more useful than the old one. “What’s going on here is politics,” said one man who attended a recent community meeting in Venice. “This is really a waste of time.”

But much has changed since 1974. Growth has slowed down. The luster of the Golden State has faded. Employers are leaving. The federal government is leaning on Southern California to clean up its air and its water and to bring its sewer systems up to par.

All of those factors combine to force Los Angeles to abide by the plan it ultimately adopts.

Toward that goal, planners have been meeting with political leaders to build support for the plan and its goals. In addition, hundreds of community members and business leaders--from big developers to Neighborhood Watch captains--have shared their ideas about what sort of city they want their children to inherit.

General Plan Meetings

Over the next several weeks, planners will meet with Los Angeles residents to talk about the future of their communities. Information gathered in the meetings will be used to plot long-term growth in the city’s General Plan, which is the blueprint for future development.

Here are the meetings planned in the San Fernando Valley and the areas that will be discussed at each:

* Southeast Valley

Wednesday, 6:30 p.m.

Van Nuys/Sherman Oaks Senior Center main auditorium, 5056 Van Nuys Blvd., Sherman Oaks

* Southwest Valley

March 24, 6:30 p.m.

Encino Community Center auditorium, 4935 Balboa Blvd.

* Northeast Valley

March 26, 9 a.m.

Sunland-Tujunga Municipal Center auditorium, 7747 Foothill Blvd., Tujunga

* Northwest Valley

March 28, 6:30 p.m.

Granada Hills High School gymnasium, 10535 Zelzah Ave.