MasterPlanning!: What It Will Take, Part 2
by Tony Chavira
What will it take to begin the construction of a ten-story building in downtown Los Angeles?
This is going to sound exactly as bad as it probably is: Downtown Los Angeles, boxed in by the 110, 10, 101 and 5 freeways, is so dense with planning programs that Los Angeles bureaucracy might as well be a gun focused at each development. In many ways, planning is a very reactionary profession. Most planners are not trained in planning or architecture school to think politically, and they’re certainly not trained to be economists or entrepreneurs. But being a successful planner means being placed in situations where you will have to make decisions that will ultimately affect the political or economic landscape in ways you could never expect or imagine.
That’s why planners rely so heavily on “General Plans,” “Redevelopment Plans,” or “Master Plans.” These plans provide a timeline and general design framework for what has to happen to achieve the things that a community wants. If, after some surveying, the CRA finds that residents want your community to be walkable and bustling, then the redevelopment plan will focus on transforming your neighborhood into the walkable, bustling environment of your dreams. Some neighborhoods, like Villa Park, don’t want that at all and greatly enjoy the (generally) homogenized surburban pace and lifestyle. That’s fine too.
But the threshold has been crossed in downtown Los Angeles. This must be emphasized: Downtown Los Angeles is a convoluted puzzlescape of overlapped, overreaching planning efforts. Paved in good intentions, the CRA-LA, planning department, and zoning and Mayor’s offices have slowly but surely spent the past 50 years over-planning the downtown area. What will it take to begin the construction of your theoretical building? To be honest: it may never happen, no matter where in downtown Los Angeles you want to build it.
We got into this situation in three ways:
1. A Change in Political Leadership
Bunker Hill as seen from City Hall
Beginning with the Bunker Hill Urban Renewal Project, produced at the request of Norris Poulson and adopted officially by Tom Yorty, the mayor has set the agenda for development throughout the city of Los Angeles. When Federal money arrived for the redevelopment of Historic South Central Los Angeles, Mayor Tom Bradley spent it on Bunker Hill. When Bradley was replaced by Richard Riordan, almost all of the Community Redevelopment Agency’s management was overhauled. The new managers, many of whom were political appointees, had to do the best they could with what they had to balance the city’s planning needs, the requests of developers, the redevelopment plans designed by a previous administration, and the anger and upheaval the community stirred at every with each administration’s shift in goal. Career planners would spend their entire lives focused on plans that would systematically be developed and then amended, changed or halted based on the development ambitions of the new mayoral administration, city council, or head of planning or the CRA. Mayor Villaraigosa is no different, but the principles of urban design have changed through the ages, and research has finally caught up with the bureaucracy. Rules are becoming more steadfast, codes that work are becoming more rigid, and new urbanism design principles are finally starting to show their benefits, whether they’ve received enough political attention or not.
2. A Change in Economic Landscape
The current Obama stimulus package isn’t the first infusion of cash that the city of Los Angeles received from the federal government. Millions of dollars were sent to Los Angeles in the late 1800s to finance the construction of the Port of Los Angeles in San Pedro. In the late 1940s, the federal government almost singlehandedly financed a boom in Los Angeles’s construction sector through a bill passed to construct thousands of tract homes. A similar amount of money was given to the city in the ’70s for the redevelopment of blighted neighborhoods and again in the 1990s in the post-Reagan recession.
Each time this happened it caused a significant change in the landscape of Los Angeles: a movement of the downtown population into south L.A. County in the late 1800s; low-income government housing developed outside of downtown during the late ’40s; the burst of movement away from density and toward major suburban sprawl in the ’60s and ’70s; the influx of immigrant and blue collar industrial workers into the downtown area throughout the ’80s and ’90s. And now a focus on the revitalization of downtown Los Angeles, in some ways to the detriment of the poorer residents and neighborhoods that have been using it actively for the past 20-30 years. When planners refer to gentrification in a negative way, this is what they mean: pushing out the less-wealthy to make room for Urban Outfitters and Applebees. A whitewashing. But, as I said in the first article, maybe that’s just the price you pay. And it’s usually for the better anyway, right?
3. A Change in Population Density
Downtown Los Angeles was a largely Mexican-Californian-heavy population until the 1910s. The financial boom, industrialization, sudden access to water reserves in the north, and onset of the movie industry brought a huge influx of white Americans, and up until the 1940s the whole of Downtown was “white only.” As it became fashionable (and affordable) to own your own home, the urban life became antiquated, and racist rules gave way to a free-for-all population influx. Mexican immigrants moved into East Los Angeles (pushing out the predominantly Jewish communities of Boyle Heights and City Terrace) and the burst of construction jobs and industrialization brought an enormous population of black Americans into South L.A. (pushing out the predominantly white communities from Adams to Crenshaw down to Inglewood). When the economy crashed again in the late ’80s, the availability of very low-income jobs brought in a burst of competitive immigrants from many countries, with those from Mexico and China setting in the San Gabriel and San Fernando Valleys.
Race aside, the planning initiatives of years past have also been based on the collective goals of each respective generation: World War Two-era residents grew up in high density, thereby preferring spacious suburban sprawl; Baby Boomers grew up in disjointed rigidity, thereby preferring dynamic density; General X grew up in separated, sterile communities, thereby preferring community closeness and walkability, etc.
As demographics change, the planning goals of downtown Los Angeles must change also. This is particularly daunting when you, as a planner, are forced to think ahead to the betterment of the Los Angeles community in thirty years. Thirty years ago it was 1980, and so much of Los Angeles was still undeveloped.
It almost seems like a joke, but until 1990 the city of Los Angeles used something they called the Silver Book, a plan issued to all departments by city officials in 1972 to guide downtown development. It might’ve been polished on the outside, but inside the Silver Book didn’t seem to care about infrastructure growth, the integration of public works for the welfare of residents and patrons, or any public space issues that arose with developing on the fly.
But there are plenty of dramatic plans for downtown Los Angeles now. The Long-Range Transportation Plan that Los Angeles County MTA has a 30-year agenda. The Urban Design Studio has “The Greening of 21st Century City of Los Angeles,” which sets up design principlesa that are ultimately meant for all of Los Angeles. The city Zoning Department has used historical development and trends in the city to break downtown L.A. into industrial zones, residential zones, commercial zones, etc. Based on these, Downtown has seven separate redevelopment plans: Bunker Hill, the Central Business District, the Central Industrial District, Chinatown, City Center, Little Tokyo, and Council District 9, just south of the 10 Freeway.
Naturally, it all depends on what part of Downtown we’re talking about building up. If you want to build over an area of the Los Angeles River, you’ll have to attend to the River Improvement Overlay. The Business Improvement District (BID) also has a plan for growth that focuses on the upper Figueroa Corridor from Bunker Hill to South Park. There are several other BIDs in Central City East, including a Central City East Task Force with their own interpretation of the Downtown Strategic Plan. Further, huge project areas require their own master plans. L.A. Live did, Grand Avenue does, and so does “Bringing Back Broadway.”
Although most of their goals align, they are separate plans with separate goals in mind. Different departments in the city of Los Angeles defer to different plans (they’re all available on the Internet, in case you’re curious). In fact, ask someone in the Planning Department which plan is more important: the River Improvement Overlay or the Central Business Redevelopment Plan. They will tell you that they do completely different things. But sit for a moment and actually read the plans, and their goals begin to sound vaguely similar; maybe one will have a bit more detail than the other, one will be slightly more builder-focused, and the other will be slightly more public works-focused.
One thing’s for sure: when you start developing your property, both are going to matter equally, so they better not conflict. God forbid you get delayed a few more months while the city clears up the bureaucratic fog. The mind-boggling, stress-inducing process of navigating through, collaborating with, planning for and paying into Los Angeles bureaucracy is the price you pay to develop your dream building.
www.racaia.com | tony@fourstory.org
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