In fact, fewer than a quarter of L.A.’s housing units are single-family dwellings, which raises the question of what, exactly, the mayor is suggesting, and why.
Back in March 2008, when Villaraigosa was trying to light a fire under the many stalled construction projects stemming from the housing market collapse, he launched his “12-to-2” initiative, to be executed by Deputy Mayor Beutner.
Illustration by Matt Mahurin
Alan Bell, L.A.’s deputy director of planning
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Targeting the widely hated, byzantine process developers endure in order to get a building project approved in the city, Villaraigosa’s seemingly simple plan was to streamline the process by having only two city departments check off a building permit, rather than 12.
But the complexity of City Hall’s administrative structure, combined with interdepartmental politics, resulted in the collapse of 12-to-2 in September; it also hastened the departure of some department heads, including Goldberg, who was said to have been forced out by Villaraigosa.
The mayor’s impatience with impediments to developers was clear at the annual Sustainable Housing and Transportation Summit, sponsored by the Los Angeles Business Council at UCLA.
“What we want to do is do it now,” said the mayor. “So we remake what L.A. looks like.”
That’s what many critics of Villaraigosa are afraid of.
Also at the Nov. 17 summit, he said: “You’ve got to connect transportation and housing and jobs. This city, more than any other city in the world, has been most resistant to that.”
But some Angelenos believe that vision too often has little bearing on what actually appears on the streets, once money has changed hands.
One example is the sudden bait-and-switch last August at the Village at Westfield Topanga, where a long-planned upscale, state-of-the-art, mixed-use village of condos, apartments and businesses — just steps from Metro’s popular Orange Line dedicated busway — had been promised.
The plan, hammered out over months, was embraced by the pro-development Warner Center Neighborhood Council. But global mall operator Westfield abruptly declared five months ago that it is instead putting a massive parking lot and a Costco on the choice land, which faces a Saks Fifth Avenue and a Nordstrom. There is another Costco a couple of miles north of the site.
Unlike in Portland, which voted on its key growth plan at the ballot box, there has been no endorsement by the public, no ballot initiative and no effort by City Hall to discern the popular consensus on how to “remake what L.A. looks like.”
The last time that happened, in fact, was in 1986, when 69 percent of Los Angeles voters backed Proposition U, a vote against office towers and other commercial high-rises that down-zoned almost all of the city’s commercial districts, chopping in half allowable levels of density.
Voters made clear that they supported such density only in the parts of Los Angeles where it already existed. Proposition U thus exempted from the down-zoning downtown, Century City, the Wilshire Corridor and the Hollywood Redevelopment Area.
“What a bunch of whining old grannies,” says Jonathan Voorstadt of the Proposition U slow-growthers and their descendants today. A transplant from Queens, N.Y., and a resident of the transit-oriented development at the Mid-City Wilshire/Vermont Red Line station, Voorstadt is a freelance video game designer and lives on a trust fund.
He owns no car and doesn’t want one, using L.A.’s transit system to get where he needs to be. “When are they going to realize we can’t live in 1950 anymore? A city that doesn’t evolve is a dying city,” he says.
“Since when did politicians ever do what they said? Is that a reason to choke back progress?”
The truth is, nobody knows which side in this debate would win if a vote, or even a series of widely advertised public outreach hearings, were held on what Angelenos want their city to be.
Watch exclusive, in-person video interviews with Cary Brazeman and Deputy Planning Director Alan Bell here.
