Taking Stock of the City of Angels

New Angelenos, including planners, have a feel for their city, says city planning director Con Howe.

Not just their neighborhoods--the city of which those neighborhoods are a part.

To help Angelenos understand what is here and help them plan for the future, the City Planning Department has released its first inventory of facilities, a sort of snapshot of the city.

Compiled for just under $250,000, the report, officially called the “Annual Report on Growth and Infrastructure,” covered 1990 to 1994, the last year for which statistics were available. It is the first of a planned annual series.

Some of what was uncovered was surprising; some less so. All of it, however, gave a more textured view of the city as well as a look at Los Angeles County as a whole.

Among the highlights:

* The city’s population declined by 1% over the four years, even while Los Angeles County residents increased by 4%. Excluding the city, the rest of the county’s population grew by 7.5%.

* West Los Angeles was the city’s most significant growth area, while the northwest and southwest valleys lost the most population.

* The county’s fastest growing ethic group, percentage wise, was Asian. For the city, it was Latino, which is also the most populous group in both city and county.

* The population of both blacks and whites declined in the city.

* Despite being one of the most ethnically diverse cities in the country, Los Angeles remained highly segregated, with residents’ race or ethnic groups highly predictive of where they lived.

* The city lost jobs at twice the rate of the Southern California region, which in the report included Orange, Riverside, Ventura, San Bernardino and Imperial counties.

* Most retail space growth occurred on the Westside, and much of that growth was in mega-stores such as Best Buy and Target. Citywide, mom-and-pop stores continued to be squeezed out.

* The greatest growth in industrial space was in Venice.

* Public schools continued to be most overcrowded in the metropolitan center, which also had an influx of Latino families. The West Valley, where the population has aged, had the most excess capacity.

* Office space grew most quickly in narrow corridors in the northern and eastern edges of the city, as well as in the harbor area.

* Water use bottomed out at just over 550,000 acre feet per year amid the drought of 1991-92. It has since gone back up. At the same time, more water had to be imported, as the city’s supply of local well water steadily declined.

* More than 13% of city land consisted of “open space” recreational use.

* The city allocated substantially more of its capital improvement budget to cleaning up Santa Monica Bay than to all other capital projects combined. Eighty-six percent of the city’s capital improvement budget went to upgrading the Hyperion Wastewater Treatment Plant and related facilities, which discharge effluent into the bay. That upgrading is expected to end by 2000, freeing the capital budget for other uses.

* Multiple-family homes grew at over five times the rate as single-family homes.

* Most single-family units were clustered on the Westside, as well as the northern and eastern edges of the city. Most multifamily units were in South-Central.

* Even as rail came on line, Angelenos were not using mass transit more frequently. Bus boardings declined at roughly the same rate as rail ridership increased. The combined ridership remained steady at nearly 400 million boardings a year.

* The city’s bikeway system remained a series of disconnected parts searching for a whole. Although a comprehensive bikeway system could provide a pollution-free, healthy alternative for shorter commutes, the city was still a long way from putting one in place.

The report will be used to guide the city’s future, Howe said. The city Planning Department is examining how to reconfigure streets to maximize traffic flow, with some streets earmarked predominantly for pedestrian use, mass transit or vehicular use. The information in the inventory will help guide such planning.

Robert Scott, president of the City Planning Commission, which oversees the Planning Department, said the report is important in documenting “population shifts, as well as the balance of industrial, residential and commercial properties.”

“When planning takes place in a vacuum, it’s easy to get out of balance. You take each project without looking at it in the context of the city. Then it’s easy to have too much housing in one place, and too much commercial in another,” Scott said.

“So it’s very helpful to have a report like this. . . . That ability means people in the planning process or on the Board of Zoning Appeals will have an easily understandable document to help them with political decisions.”

Mostly, Scott said, the report, which takes into account the impact of the Northridge earthquake, underlines the fact that Los Angeles is no longer a new city expanding boundlessly, but an aging one that needs to rehabilitate existing structures.

“We will become a denser city, in which the goal will be to maintain neighborhood character,” Howe said. “So we’re going to have to work on reinventing neighborhoods, upgrading what’s already there, including the parks.”

Development, he said, will increasingly cluster around mass transportation corridors.

“My biggest fear,” Howe said, “is that the city will be broken up into areas with little recognition as parts of the whole. Then we’ll be like fiefdoms of 15th-century Italy or be seen as an unwieldy context similar to the former Soviet Union.”

Instead, said Howe, the city needs to be viewed in a more balanced perspective--as neighborhoods interacting with one another, helping shape the city as a whole.