These are not antigrowth civic figures in Los Angeles who are saying this.
The mild-mannered, pro-development Brazeman is eager to see a green belt that stops sprawl, and he endorses targeted new building “around transit to accommodate Measure R.” He’s in the strange role now of grassroots watchdog, filing two lawsuits against the city of Los Angeles and warning, “Policymakers, and presumably their patrons, want significantly expanded development rights everywhere, which leads to more dysfunctional density.”
Cary Brazeman
CityLAB’s Roger Sherman
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Sharon Commins, vice chair of the Land Use Committee for the Mar Vista Community Council, says Brazeman is throwing light on the Planning Department’s increasing tendency toward “arbitrarily forcing excessive growth and extreme lifestyle policies on L.A.’s neighborhoods, with neither notification nor consensus, and completely without regard for amenities like open spaces, parks and ball fields.”
John Walker, president of the Studio City Neighborhood Council, says, “There’s no fairness in the process,” referring to the way City Hall is not revealing these related ordinances at one time. “These kinds of ordinances affect all of us, not just people who own homes or rent apartments. Part of the process is being forced upon us because of a crisis in the city budget. If we can’t have any input in the community, and it’s going to be dictated, why even call it a community?”
Lucille Saunders of the La Brea–Willoughby Coalition in Hollywood goes further, calling the changes to the core findings “part of a piecemeal, incoherent process meant to confuse residents. They must be disclosed in their entirety to be coherent.”
Serious City Hall watchers are furious. Jay Handal, chairman of the mayor’s Budget Advocacy Committee and chairman of the West L.A. Neighborhood Council, declares, “Like everything else the city does, they do it with great speed and little thought. These guys are like cocaine dealers who lose money. It’s worse than pathetic.”
Watch exclusive, in-person video interviews with Cary Brazeman and Deputy Planning Director Alan Bell here.
High ceilings, tile floors and an imperial austerity mark the corridors leading to the Department of City Planning, on City Hall’s fifth floor. In his office there, deputy planning director Alan Bell, in suit and tie, clutches a thick, hardbound book. Setting it gently on the large oval table, his fingers open it tenderly, as though it’s a sacred text.
“This is the zoning code,” he says softly. Bell has been with the Planning Department for 20 years. He says he comes from community service, having been a Vista volunteer straight out of college in Ohio.
He listens carefully before he responds. His replies are the embodiment of calm reason. “We’ve been using this zoning code since 1946,” he continues. “There have been many, many revisions since then.”
He adds that it’s a “one-size-fits-all” code, where the written standards for Sylmar’s horse country are the same for Silver Lake and Hollywood. The city’s numerous, distinct neighborhoods need better protection, he says.
It’s a mark of the complexity of this debate that antagonists such as this coiffed city planner and sport-shirted Cary Brazeman could sound like they espouse the same vision. But Brazeman last month filed a lawsuit against the city for the City Council’s hurried passage in November of an ordinance drafted by Bell’s Planning Department and described by Eastside City Councilman Ed Reyes as “just a planning tool.”
That “tool” is yet another ordinance, the Community Plan Implementation Overlay District Ordinance (CPIO) — a name almost certain to make anyone’s eyes glaze. Largely unknown to Angelenos, it was aired during a single public hearing in early 2009. But the plan went quiet before suddenly surfacing at the Planning Commission a year later. It then was rushed into law by the City Council 11-to-0 on Nov. 10 after Councilman Reyes, representing District 1, moved for its approval “by consent” — a parliamentary move that prevents public discussion.
Both Brazeman and Laura Lake, a Save Westwood Village activist who was instrumental in fighting for 1986’s lower-density measure Proposition U, had submitted speaker cards in order to oppose it on Nov. 10. Reyes denied them the opportunity to speak because, in his own words on the council floor that day, the ordinance “doesn’t even do anything.”
Yet Brazeman condemns the CPIO as a means to roll over L.A.’s 35 long-neglected and aging Community Plans. The CPIO ordinance gives the Planning Department dramatic new power to create “overlay” districts of any size or shape, anywhere in the city, with new zoning rules that override the city’s Community Plans.
Such overlay districts must be approved by the Planning Commission, whose members are appointed by Mayor Villaraigosa, followed by a sign-off by the City Council.
Under the new law — which Brazeman is asking a court to halt by injunction — if a Los Angeles family doesn’t want to live within an overlay district that trumps the longtime zoning but finds that its home, condo or apartment is being overlaid, there’s nothing the resident can do.
