LA Weekly

Santa Monica real estate developer Dan Palmer faced a daunting task three years ago when he announced plans to build 5,800 homes in the Newhall Pass, a mountainous stretch that connects the northeast edge of the San Fernando Valley with the Santa Clarita Valley. After all, the project was certain to draw the ire of homeowner groups, open-space advocates and the city of Santa Clarita.

Palmer, an experienced hand at subdividing land in Santa Clarita, sharpened his sales pitch for the project, dubbed “Las Lomas.” He promised to make his new homes environmentally green. He vowed to include 2.3 million square feet of office space — job sites for the new inhabitants of Las Lomas. And in March 2005, he told business leaders the 550-acre site would become “the region’s first smart-growth community,” a pedestrian-oriented place near a Metrolink commuter-rail station.

“Built on the human scale of a small town, it is intended to be an antidote to urban sprawl, with jobs, schools, parks, museums, shops, restaurants and community activities all within walking distance of each other, reducing the need for car trips,” said Palmer, in remarks reprinted in The Planning Report newsletter.

Smart growth emerged in Colorado and in Maryland as a way of protecting open space and curbing Southern California–type sprawl. Yet here was a developer using smart growth to advance a plan to build thousands of homes on hillsides near Santa Clarita, one of L.A. County’s most suburban locales.

In just a short decade, smart growth has become the chameleon of urban planning, changing its appearance depending on the need of the lobbyist, real estate developer or investor. Politicians use the phrase to quiet angry neighborhood leaders, even arguing that new development will fight congestion, not increase it. Developers insist they are pursuing smart growth simply by adding stores and restaurants to residential projects.

Smart growth is not just being used to secure public support for mega-projects. It is also helping investment-fund managers to secure hundreds of millions of dollars in public-pension money — funds invested on behalf of retired California teachers, police officers, firefighters and thousands of other retired government workers.

Smart growth is supposed to help make neighborhoods walkable, put jobs and homes close together, and deliver new housing for a wide range of income levels, not just the rich. But some of the public-pension funds — entities with the words “smart growth” in the name — are investing in projects that perpetuate rather than limit the sprawl.

“There’s kind of an ‘ooh and ahh’ factor about smart growth,” says Michael Milroy, a planning consultant who scrutinized the Las Lomas project as a volunteer with the Sierra Club. “It’s a desirable image for developers to have associated with their projects. Whether the image matches the reality . . . that’s another question.”

The money being pushed at such projects is huge. Two public-employee investment funds — one called Southern California Smart Growth Fund and the other known as California Smart Growth Fund IV — together secured $70 million from L.A. city employees’ pension funds. They are pursuing projects in Pacoima, San Diego and even far-off Alameda County that meet few — or even none — of the objectives of smart growth.

“[Smart growth] is nice, in that it’s a short term that captures a lot of principles,” says Beth Steckler, a policy director with the nonprofit group Livable Places, which advocates for affordable housing and transit-oriented development. “But people are not always very familiar with the principles, and that makes it easy to exploit.”

The first major project to wear the mantle of smart growth in Los Angeles was Playa Vista, the biggest housing project in city history, made up of multistory condominiums and apartments and built over the course of a decade. Not far from Marina del Rey, it gobbled up a portion of the Ballona Wetlands but was billed as smart growth — largely because it combines homes, workplaces, shops and restaurants. The backers of Playa Vista promised to reduce car trips in and out of the new community.

Playa Vista won Los Angeles City Council approval for its 2,600-home second phase in 2004, with Councilwoman Cindy Miscikowski — then representing L.A.’s coastal neighborhoods — calling the project “reasonable and smart growth.” While the city of Santa Monica sharply disagreed, the image was established. Now, Playa Vista uses the phrase “smart growth” in its promotional materials.

Even as Playa Vista’s second phase was being approved, Palmer began using the phrase “smart growth” to discuss Las Lomas, to be located where the Golden State (5) Freeway meets the Antelope Valley (14) Freeway. Planning gurus like David Abel, publisher of The Planning Report, gave the project legitimacy, calling it progressive, ambitious and thoughtful.

Environmentalists weren’t quite so welcoming, describing Las Lomas as sprawl “dressed up with faux smart-growth features.” Bart Reed, an activist from nearby Sylmar who specializes in transportation issues, calls Las Lomas an environmental disaster.

“It’s taking virgin land that’s always been virgin land, and trying to connect two urban areas that are disconnected by three to five miles of mountain range,” Reed says.

Palmer is still pushing Las Lomas, which has been scaled back slightly to 5,500 homes, along with stores, a hotel, a Metrolink station and a charter school. Attorney R.J. Comer, the lobbyist for Las Lomas, promised that an environmental-impact report will explain, point by point, why the project is smart growth, citing features like its 750 affordable units and its increased density.

“Sprawl would be a project that takes a lot of open space and puts single-family homes on it,” Comer says. “A project like ours, which has an average of 26.4 dwelling units per acre, that is not sprawl.”

Comer, who teaches smart-growth classes, contends that Las Lomas should be categorized as “infill” — jargon for a development that simply fills the remaining gaps in an urbanized area. “When you look at this project site on a regional basis, you’ve got the dense urban environment of north Los Angeles, the dense environment of Santa Clarita,” he says. “They may say they’re rural, but they’re not. On a map, they’re a dense urban environment. So from a regional perspective, it is infill.”