Planning for Disaster

An obscure group gets millions to make L.A. work, but �SCAG� is a flop

Comments (0) By Zuma Dogg Wednesday, Feb 14 2007

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High-density housing is not a desirable goal for space-loving Southern Californians, Vasishth says, arguing that room to breathe is one of the few pluses still on offer here: “All this new infrastructure, whether it comes from state bonds or from SCAG’s dreamy projections, would simply create more density.” Kotkin is even more dismissive, saying, “Density is a push by big developers to create very expensive housing with some pieces included for the poor — and nothing at all included for the middle class.”

On L.A.’s crowded Eastside, community activist Jose Aguilar, who served for two years on the Adelante Project Committee, an advisory group to the city’s Community Redevelopment Agency, criticizes local planners as seeing “everything in the inner city as ‘underutilized.’ If there is a one- or two-story apartment complex, it ‘should be’ a 10-story complex.”

Are you ready for 40 million neighbors?

Aging badly: Mark Pisano has run SCAG since 1976 � the year Steve Jobs launched Apple Computer.

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Alvin Parra, a former Eastside field deputy for City Councilman Jose Huizar, now running for office against his former boss, complains, “SCAG says that we need to get ready for 40 million people moving to the area, so they make all the recommendations to build more housing, based on these predictions. Well, are we building the housing to prepare for the predicted influx of people? Or are we allowing for the influx by building these high-density units?”

Asks Parra: “How will all these new high-density buildings affect the roads, traffic, parking, schools, police, water and all the additional demand these people will place on the already overcrowded infrastructure?”

One former SCAG employee says the planners who dominate SCAG “are terrible people persons” who don’t seem to connect with what average people would like to see. He thinks Pisano has been in the job too long: “Since one guy is making all the decisions, you only have one idea on the table . . . He’s a stone wall. One guy calling all the shots, and not calling good shots.”

Pisano responds to the Weekly, “I’ve never been accused of that before. Just the opposite, if anything.”

But the bottom line is that Southern California is in position to get its butt kicked in the global economy, and the beast is this: 187 cities in six counties, with different needs and agendas, being asked to unite in the planning and execution of long-term projects that go against their residents’ very grain. On the other side is a group of planning nerds trying — and failing — to devise answers that work.

Zuma Dogg blogs at http://mayorsam.blogspot.com and http://zumadogg.blogspot.com.