URBAN DESIGN

It was no surprise in June when the Texas Transportation Institute ranked Los Angeles as the most congested U.S. city: It was our 15th consecutive year of capturing the dubious honor. This year even the road-building lobby couldn’t muster much optimism about the gridlock: “I wish I could say there are fixes ... but I don’t foresee that,” Larry Fisher of the Transportation California told a Los Angeles Times reporter.

There is a fix, although it’s no overnight solution. We’ve focused attention in recent years on improving public transit, which is certainly part of the equation. But the other part--still new to sprawling Los Angeles--is transit-oriented development. In a city that’s been designed and zoned to accommodate travel by car, it isn’t enough to simply build public transit--you have to make it convenient by building up the city around it.

The concept is a big deal in a lot of cities. In the San Francisco Bay Area, mixed-use developments that put jobs close to housing and shopping are now viewed as the best way to address an array of civic problems, from conserving farmland and open space to shortening commutes (and the traffic congestion and pollution that accompany them) and revitalizing low-income neighborhoods.

A Bay Area Rapid Transit spokesman estimates that 40 to 50 such mixed-use developments have been built or are under construction along the region’s six rail systems in the last few years, with double that number planned--and that doesn’t include the myriad other developments that have sprung up within a short walk of transit. Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown’s 10K Housing Initiative seeks to locate 6,000 new housing units downtown near jobs and transit, and suburban San Jose has zoned for and zealously promoted higher-density, mixed-use development around its rail system.

Outside Washington in Arlington, Va., where for 25 years county government has planned and zoned for development along the Metrorail system, the results are impressive. Once an area of low-density commercial development and declining retail sales, the county now has a vital corridor of housing and retail along transit lines. Property values have increased by 81% along the corridor in the last 10 years, and though the area is just 7.7% of county land, it provides more than 33% of real estate taxes.

Results like these are prompting other decentralized, auto-oriented cities--Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, even Dallas--to reinvent themselves. Both Atlanta and Dallas boast of having attracted $1 billion in private investment around their rail stations--even though the rail system in Dallas is only 6 years old and only 20 miles long. In Denver and San Diego, transit-adjacent neighborhoods that agree to accommodate population growth in higher-density developments around rail stations are rewarded with significant public investment in transit, street landscaping, parks and other improvements.

The good news for Los Angeles is that the man credited with popularizing rail and transit-oriented development in San Diego and Dallas is Roger Snoble, who last year was hired to head L.A.’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority. Some predict L.A. will be his Waterloo. Others say he comes here at what may be a turning point for Los Angeles.

That’s because the Gold Line from L.A. to Pasadena opens next year, and it is likely to attract major investment to the area. Two high-profile projects have already been designed by Pasadena architects Stefanos Polyzoides and Elizabeth Moule. The two of them, along with others, co-founded the Congress for the New Urbanism, a national organization of forward-thinking architects who reinvented the concept of transit-oriented development to address problems caused by ever-expanding suburbs.

Their Del Mar station project of luxury condos, apartments, stores and offices is under construction along the rail line two blocks south of Old Town Pasadena. If successful, the venture is likely to alert investors and developers to the money-making potential of such development. Another Moule and Polyzoides transit-adjacent project of high-density, but beautiful, Craftsman-style apartments, lofts and retail stores around a series of courtyards is breaking ground in South Pasadena.

A third project, the Holly Street Village housing and retail complex two blocks north of Old Town, was built on faith--on top of what would be a rail station when and if the line got built. Now that the Gold Line is a certainty--and the station is being built--this pedestrian-oriented development is likely to become premium real estate. The concept hasn’t caught on as quickly in Los Angeles. Its one completed transit-oriented development, the Hollywood & Highland project, is disappointing. A glorified shopping mall with too many parking spaces plopped on top of a rail station, it wasn’t designed to do what such developments can do: ameliorate traffic by putting housing together with jobs, shopping and entertainment to create synergy among the various uses.

The best projects are carefully integrated into the neighborhoods around them, improving life for residents by providing an array of shopping, transportation and housing choices, including both affordable and market-rate apartments, condos, lofts and live-work spaces. It’s back to the future, really, building neighborhoods the way we used to build them, with apartments on top of stores, next to the movie theater and the grocery store, all in a pleasant walking environment that’s safe and friendly, convenient to transit and surrounded by lower-density, single-family, residential neighborhoods.

There is hope that Los Angeles is beginning to attract more transit-oriented development. The same developers building the Del Mar station project--Urban Partners, which consists of Nick Patsaouras, a former MTA board member, Dan Rosenfield, a former city of Los Angeles real estate assets manager, and Ira Yellin, who restored the historic Bradbury Building and downtown’s Grand Central Market--are also building an intriguing project at the Wilshire Boulevard and Vermont Avenue subway station. It will include market-rate and affordable housing, stores and a Los Angeles Unified School District middle school.

The inclusion of affordable housing is of paramount importance. Housing production--especially of affordable and multifamily units--has fallen dangerously far behind demand in Southern California. Building of such housing along transit lines is ideal, since residents wouldn’t have to own cars and rents wouldn’t have to include the cost of parking, which can add as much as $30,000 a parking spot to the cost of construction.

A dozen other transit-oriented projects are in the planning stages, at Hollywood and Vine, in L.A.’s Chinatown, in Sierra Madre and at Metrolink stations in Riverside and Fullerton. Several projects have been proposed for an excellent site at the North Hollywood subway station, which will also serve the east-west busway, but none have been selected.

It has taken too long for transit-oriented development to happen in Los Angeles, but there were reasons for the lag. Rail lines here opened in the ‘90s, not exactly a boom time for the real estate industry in Southern California. The Blue Line to Long Beach was built along an existing right of way, making it a quick and easy way to inaugurate L.A.’s rail system. But the line runs through mostly industrial neighborhoods where few people live or work and that aren’t attractive to investors. The Green Line runs down the middle of the Century Freeway, making transit-oriented development along its route almost impossible. And the first stations to open along the Red Line (the subway) were in already heavily built-up downtown Los Angeles, and then in less affluent neighborhoods like MacArthur Park and along Vermont that were unattractive to investors.

It’s important for the region to catch up. Current trends suggest that the equivalent of another city the size of Los Angeles will be built inside L.A. County over the next 20 years. New residents can move into huge new housing developments proposed for the Santa Clarita and Antelope Valleys or out into Riverside and San Bernardino counties. But imagine what effect further sprawl would have on traffic and air quality.

L.A. can continue to grow out. Or L.A. can grow up in transit-oriented developments around the more than the 100 rail stations in the county. Once residents get a sense of how a well-designed project can simultaneously increase density and make neighborhoods more attractive, the advantages of growing up--until now anathema in Los Angeles--will become obvious.