The Antonio to Eric
Handoff: LA’s Quality of Life Disaster — Deregulating Planning, Zoning and
Building Code Enforcement
Posted June 3, 2013 on Ron Kaye’s LA
EDITOR’S NOTE: Former LA City
Planner Dick Platkin, now Adjunct Instructor of City Planning at USC’s Price
School of Social Policy, originally wrote this article on the devastating
impact of the merger of LA Planning and Building and Safety Department for
KCET. This is the most far-reaching issue threatening the quality of life in
every neighborhood, yet it is being rushed forward by the current mayor and the
mayor-elect, with the unanimous support of the City Council and without the
massive citywide protests from residents that it deserves.
By Dick Platkin (rhplatkin@yahoo.com)
Before the election the Wall Street Journal described Eric Garcetti as a
business-friendly centrist Democrat. After the
election, the same newspaper described the Mayor-elect as a business-friendly liberal Democrat.
Does either political label actually
mean anything when it is now applied to municipal politics – especially when
they are applied to the core issues of planning and zoning regulations and
their enforcement, and building code regulations and their enforcement? Since
the new mayor is one of the architects of the city planning culture and
legislative structure that he will inherit, we can assume that these policies
and practices will seamlessly continue from the Villaraigosa Administration to
the Garcetti Administration.
Here’s your hint as to what is the most
accurate political label to describe this planning legacy: The deregulation of
land use is well on its way at City Hall, albeit obscured by such misleading
phrases as “elegant density” or “transit-oriented districts.” In some policy
circles government regulations are considered to be the bane of economic
prosperity. In fact, this was this outlook that gave rise to the
deregulation of the telecommunications and aviation sectors under Ronald Reagan
and the financial sector under Bill Clinton.
At the local level this
siren song of deregulation is now focused on zoning, an administrative approach
to regulate land uses approved by the United States Supreme Court in 1926 (Village of Euclid, Ohio v. Ambler Realty Co.). Under
zoning, local governments have the legal authority to control public and
private land, including land use categories, as well as building use, size,
height, parking requirements, and setbacks.
Zoning also means that speculators
cannot easily and quickly move into and out of real estate projects based on
rapidly changing market conditions.
To put it bluntly, rigorous zoning is a
barrier to real estate bubbles, such as the Great Recession that began in
2008. It cannot stop the business cycle, but cities with strong zoning
ordinances and procedures can smooth out the bumps.
In Los Angeles, a city whose economy
has been stagnant for over two decades, advocates of deregulation are now
focused on the city’s elaborate zoning code, including its regulatory expansion
through the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA).
Put simply, these advocates of
deregulation – in and out of City Hall — believe that Los Angeles will flourish
if its regulatory “impediments” to speculative investment are eliminated.
But all that glitters is not
gold. Zoning deregulation is already underway in Los Angeles, but it will
not prove to be the economic cure-all proclaimed by its boosters for several
reasons.
Most of Los Angeles is not
privately owned land
Only about 20 percent of the entire
land area of Los Angeles is privately owned. The remainder is
freeways, railroad rights-of-way, streets, parkways, sidewalks, parks, schools,
power lines, horse trails, and many other public and quasi-public land
uses. Therefore, these areas are neglected when planning is reduced
to zoning, and zoning is abridged through deregulation.
Furthermore, zoning deregulation is not
capable of rectifying the slow deterioration of the city’s public
infrastructure and public services.
It can’t sweep streets, pick-up
garbage, fill potholes, repave crumbling sidewalks, or construct ADA-required
curb cuts. It can’t plant an urban forest or implement the City’s bicycle
master plan. It can’t maintain public parks and revive cancelled
recreation programs. It can’t install streetlights on dark streets
or sweep them during the day.
Zoning deregulation can’t address a
complaint heard throughout the entire city: Los Angeles is filled with
zoning and building code violations that undercut the quality of life in neighborhood
after neighborhood, problems that are seldom addressed through code enforcement
and prosecution, even when residents submit multiple complaints.
But what about the city’s private owned
parcels? It is technically correct that many of these lots are overlaid
with special zoning conditions (i.e., T’s, Q’s, and D’s imposed by prior
legislative actions).
They give the appearance of a tough
zoning regime, but the Department of City Planning administratively clears
these conditions as part of the building permit process. For better or
worse, the public seldom knows about these conditions, their internal
ministerial (administrative) approvals, and the resulting building permits.
This means that the city’s Department
of Building and Safety approves most, certainly over 80 percent, of the city’s
building permit applications “by-right”. Among the remaining 20
percent of cases that need relief from the zoning code, the Department of City
Planning quickly handles most of them behind closed doors.
While these cases technically require a
formal decision, and the public could, in theory, appeal these actions, this
seldom happens. The primary reason is that no one is mailed a notice
about these cases, and the written approval letters are only sent to immediately
adjacent property owners. This means that the first inkling that most
neighbors have of a project’s official approval is the sound of bulldozers and
hammers when construction begins.
Discretionary Actions
In contrast to these by-right and
easily administrated cases, only a small percentage of building permits need
formal relief from the city’s zoning code through major discretionary actions
handled by the Department of City Planning.
In these cases, nearby property owners
are mailed an official notice of such actions as a zone variance, a zone
change, or a conditional use permit. Depending on the type of discretionary
action, these reviews also allow public access to building plans, as well as
public hearings, public testimony, environmental assessments, and the right of
appeal to an Area Planning Commission, and in some cases all the way to the
City Council.
Needless to say, investors,
contractors, and realtors want to either avoid these requirements or make sure
that they can quickly navigate through them. They have little to worry about,
however, because decision makers approve nearly every application for relief
from the zoning code, usually by tacking on a long list of supplementary zoning
conditions.
But since the Department of City
Planning has no enforcement authority and the Department of Building Safety
does not undertake proactive code enforcement and only sporadically responds to
complaints about code violations, most of these zoning conditions are simply
decorative.
Their real purpose is to offset public
objections to proposed discretionary actions with conditions that sound great,
but are not reliably adhered to by contractors, building owners, tenants, and
building inspectors.
The means that increasingly the real
zoning and planning process that the new Los Angeles Mayor will inherit is
market forces.
It is not the layers of zoning
requirements and special zoning conditions that apply to most private parcels
and that are imagined to hamper private investment.
When the City’s Department of Building
and Safety, which will be fused with the Department of City Planning on January
1, 2014, (http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-city-merge-departments-20130529,0,5216560.story)
cannot grant a building permit outright, developers and their “expediters” can
almost always obtain these additional approvals with minimal effort.
The zoning rules and the official city
plans that are alleged to hamstring their projects are, in fact, just
perfunctory technical barriers that are nearly always skirted with few changes
to the market-preferred project. At most, these requirements slow down a small
minority of cases and occasionally require modifications in scale or design.
Casting Aside Zoning Restrictions
But, don’t worry; City Hall is casting
aside even these modest barriers to unimpeded market forces, with all pols and
department managers on board, at least publicly.
All of the deregulatory schemes begun
in the Villaraigosa years will continue, and the new mayoral Administration
will undoubtedly unveil additional forms of land use deregulation once the
Departments of City Planning and Building and Safety are under one roof.
At present the Department of City
Planning is revising LA’s traditional zoning code through a five-year process
to institute form-based zoning. This means that the revamped zoning code will
control a building’s “envelope,” but have little to say about its uses.
The real impact, however, of these
changes is to eliminate the need for variances to allow formerly restricted
uses.
Voila! Market forces will face even
fewer barriers to the latest speculative investment fads. This is what is meant
by the Wall Street Journal’s euphemistic term “business friendly.”
Likewise, other recent ordinances to
“streamline” LA’s zoning code will have a similar impact. They cumulatively
reduce zoning requirements faced by investors as they quickly move in and out
or properties and projects based on the business cycle and the changing
profitability of different real estate categories.
And, let’s not forget the contribution
that the Updates of Los Angeles’s 35 community plans make to deregulation.
Their slow but steady preparation and adoption is always accompanied by
implementation ordinances amending the General Plan’s land use designations and
their closely related zoning categories.
Since most of these General Plan and zoning code amendments will increase permitted, by-right densities, future investors will be able to obtain up-front administrative and legislative relief from the zoning code.
Since most of these General Plan and zoning code amendments will increase permitted, by-right densities, future investors will be able to obtain up-front administrative and legislative relief from the zoning code.
Environmental Review
Finally, we need to factor in the
California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). Adopted 40 years ago, it requires
decision makers to be informed of and consider the environmental impacts of
proposed projects. But CEQA only applies to discretionary actions, and many of
those, such as design review, are exempted from an environmental assessment. By
amending, updating, and streamlining the city’s zoning code, investors and
developers will also be able to evade CEQA for most of their projects because
they will no longer require discretionary actions. They, therefore, won’t need
to determine their projects’ environmental impacts, and decision makers will, therefore,
no longer be provided this environmental information.
Unfortunately, environmental impacts do
not go away because they are no longer measured or studies of them no longer
provided to Zoning Administrators, the City Planning Commission, and the City
Council.
As a result, the public will pay the
price for this array of ploys to minimize the role of CEQA in future land use
decisions. This is because CEQA requires mitigation of environmental impacts
and occasionally leads to the denial or major modification of potentially
harmful projects.
Conclusion
These programs of deregulation are the
zoning and planning legacy that successive Mayors and the City Councils have
incrementally developed over the past two decades. They have already been
handed off to the Mayor-elect. Since he has already walked in those shoes,
especially through the Hollywood Community Plan Update, the transition should
be seamless.
If there is a conclusion to this
examination of the real impact of Los Angeles’s vast array of zoning overlays
and local zoning conditions, it is that they make little difference in actual
land use decisions and investments. What appear to be enormous hurdles are, in
fact, little more than minor administrative requirements than can be quickly
complied with.
This is exactly the opposite of what
the public needs (and what I would expect a truly liberal city government to
pursue).
Building permits and land use decisions
should be transparent. Neighbors should be notified of projects that are built
in their neighborhood and that would affect their quality of life.
They should have full access to
architectural plans and project details reviewed by the Department of Building
and Safety. Similarly, decision makes need to know the environmental impacts of
the projected presented them, so they can make truly informed decisions when
they approve, approve with conditions, or reject a project.
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