“If this city had a history of doing things in a more environmentally sustainable way,” Alpern says, “I wouldn’t be so worried. To my understanding, mass transit is supposed to help us improve our quality of life, but not as a Trojan horse for uncontrolled development.” The city’s abuse of the transit-oriented development theory “is obviously going to lead to overdevelopment. Anybody who doesn’t see this has blinders on.”
The ideas of a new urban, ecologically friendly city abound on the website of CityLAB, a housing-policy think tank in the UCLA School of Architecture, where former city planning director Gail Goldberg and an aide participated in workshops.
Illustration by Matt Mahurin
Alan Bell, L.A.’s deputy director of planning
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The website alludes to antiquated 20th-century notions of id, self-expression, privacy rights, oil dependence, cars and single-family neighborhoods. These are depicted in visual images of single-family neighborhoods in decay, and descriptions of nomads and wild animals feeding off their detritus.
One summary in a report on the CityLAB site urges urbanites to live in “re-energized forms of collective identification and association,” which requires “hijacking and pushing to extremes their contemporary opposite — the seemingly endless quest for individual expression and privacy.”
But people have historically refused to behave the way planners want them to. The 4,000 or so Hollywood residents who have packed into the 2,686 fashionable new housing units built by the time of the market crash in 2008 — many of them located above retail spaces — have jammed the narrow streets and freeway ramps with cars. Only a small minority use Hollywood’s subway and bus lines, despite City Hall’s glowing talk about “transit-oriented development.”
Mark Fina and Leonard Shabman, writing in the William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review, say: “In one study of commuting habits ... Los Angeles’ transit-oriented neighborhoods with access to highways were found to have the same amount of car use as neighborhoods not served by transit.”
Research at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore., found a similar result in that increasingly congested city.
CityLAB’s co-director, Roger Sherman, calls for small-scale pilot projects to test the impact of new project designs, rather than accommodating them with sweeping legislation, as the city is doing now.
Others are beginning to address the importance of low-slung, less dense communities. Galina Tachieva, a director of town planning at a Miami architecture firm, in her piece on the Planetizen blog, “Sprawl Repair: What It Is and Why We Need It,” writes about a number of nuanced strategies to revitalize suburbs, subtly accommodating population inflows, rather than disparaging neighborhoods, abandoning or exploiting them.
No studies yet exist to say whether tightly packed apartment dwellers create less global warming than L.A. residents who commute farther from their houses with yards; it’s expected to take years to fund and design those studies. Yet the belief that density is good for the environment underpins the current push to weaken already fragile zoning protections in L.A. neighborhoods.
Dr. Konstantin Vinnikov, senior research scientist at the University of Maryland, tells the Weekly that the environmental debate over apartment complexes versus single-family homes “is a very interesting question, but nobody knows any answers. Government and private business will not fund such research. If agencies fund you to research something, it is really clear what you have to conclude. You cannot be free if an agency requires a specific result.”
That warning is echoed in the behavior of the developer-friendly Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG). In 1990, its exaggerated projections said that by 2010, L.A. County’s population would hit 10,868,900. SCAG overshot the U.S. Census projection by more than 1 million people, yet California state law forced Los Angeles to approve housing construction policies as if all those people were on an incoming bus.
In the last 25 years, suburban development has accounted for more than 80 percent of all new jobs and more than 80 percent of all new office, industrial and retail construction, Fina and Shabman write in their article “Some Unconventional Thoughts on Sprawl.”
An array of studies shows that suburban areas are not only a job engine but offer other benefits. For example, the quality of schools plummets in high-density neighborhoods — a weighty topic that Los Angeles city planners don’t wade into.
Moreover, the 1.6 million population San Fernando Valley consistently beats the “other side of the hill” in school test scores, low-crime data, housing affordability — and the percentage of taxes its residents pour into city coffers to pay for the needs of residents living in far denser areas on the city side.
During the Valley secession movement from 1997-2002, Mayors Richard Riordan and James Hahn worked together with many others in fighting the loss of the Valley and its huge tax base. During the height of secession angst, a raft of top city leaders openly admitted L.A. could not live without the Valley.
“The city has got to change its ways,” Mayor Villaraigosa said in November at a housing summit at UCLA. “It’s nice to be a city of sprawl, where you have a percentage of people that have a three-bedroom house and a tennis court, but you know most people don’t live like that — and we’re not going to be able to sustain that on a scale that they did maybe in another era.”
