Critics Describe Growth Plan for L.A. as ‘Blueprint for Disaster’

A long-term strategy to guide growth in Los Angeles was blasted Thursday as a “blueprint for disaster” that will destroy quiet neighborhoods, clog roads, drive away businesses and overwhelm sewers and other utilities.

Dozens of Los Angeles residents from Woodland Hills to South-Central complained to the City Planning Commission that the General Plan Framework is not so much a careful plan to guide the city into the next century as a blank check to developers.

“Its whole purpose is to facilitate development,” Jack Allen of Pacific Palisades said outside the City Hall hearing.

“Life in Los Angeles will become even more unlivable.”

The General Plan acts as a long-term blueprint for growth and determines in large part how the city will develop over the next two decades. Required by state law, the plan is supposed to ensure that the city can house and employ hundreds of thousands of new residents without sacrificing the jobs or quality of life of those who live here now.

The city is in the process of updating its plan, which was adopted in 1974, to meet federal and state regulations.

Current versions of the plan envision a city much as it is. Most new development would be directed into so-called “targeted growth areas,” dense neighborhoods of shops and apartments connected by the emerging mass transit network. Planners hope these areas will ease development pressure on existing single-family neighborhoods and allow more efficient use of costly infrastructure such as sewer pipes and power lines.

But critics complain that although the plan contains many good ideas, the city cannot grow much more. They told commissioners that the plan encourages large-scale development that they claim will ruin their neighborhoods. Many feared what they called the “Manhattanization” of Los Angeles.

A second hearing will be held Thursday at the Airtel Plaza Hotel in Van Nuys, after which the planning commission is expected to adopt the plan and send it on to the City Council, which is scheduled to consider the plan later this year.