PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

When investors are sitting on $2 trillion in cash in the United States and foreign investors have even more, when market conditions are highly volatile, and when potential profitability quickly moves from one estate category to another, speculation runs rampant. Can "we" get a quick zone change and flip a property while it is still hot? Can "we" quickly build a project and extract some serious profits before it heads south? If the answer is yes, then adopted city plans and the zoning ordinances which implement them can and often do stand in the way of the speculators. And, since the speculators have no real concerns about Los Angeles or the vast array of their projects' impacts, their preferred solution is to simply bulldoze plans, zoning requirements, and environmental review out of the way so they can rapidly move in and out of their local real estate schemes. This, in a nutshell, explains the following article from the Los Angeles Business Journa l on prop...

On Wednesday, November 10, 2010 , the Los Angeles City Council adopted the new Community Plan Implementation Overlay District Ordinance (CPIO) -- without hearing any public testimony . This new ordinance is enabling legislation which allows the City of Los Angeles to ostensibly implement a Community Plan through an overlay zoning ordinance covering an entire Community Plan area. In addition, a CPIO can have sub-areas as small as a single lot (i.e., spot zoning). But would such local zoning ordinances actually implement a Community Plan? The answer is: hardly at all. The title of this new legislation misleads the public, in particular because, in practice, CPIO’s could usher in many zoning and environmental changes to local communities which conflict with Community Plans. This is because the nexus between a CPIO and the Community Plan it purports to implement is tenuous. In fact, the Council’s enabling legislation contains no criteria to determine if a C...

The Los Angeles Department of City Planning is currently preparing three related sets of detailed urban design guidelines. They separately address future residential, commercial, and industrial projects. Once approved by the City Planning Commission, these guidelines will become an appendix to the General Plan Framework Element, the backbone of the Los Angeles General Plan. These guidelines are not binding, but would be advisory for discretionary actions (e.g., plan amendments, zone changes) for which there are no approved or adopted design guidelines otherwise available to decision makers. Full copies of these guidelines, including background information, can found at City Planning’s web-site: http://cityplanning.lacity.org/code_studies/CDOGuidelines/CDG_FAQ.pdf As I explain below, the preparation and on-going public information campaign to promote these Design Guidelines is baffling for at least three reasons, and I have little doubt that readers will find additional wrinkles regar...

Get Informed and Involved: The Failure to implement LA's Community Plans By Ron Kaye on November 9, 2010 10:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0) Editor's Note: The assault on planning rules that protect neighborhoods and require processes that give the public a voice is in his gear. The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday will vote on a proposed ordinance that will fundamentally change how Community Plans are updated. It would enable the city to effectively upzone and change zoning within Community Plan areas without a formal Community Plan update, to spot-zone individual sites with only adjustments and exceptions without requriing variances, potentially override existing Community Design Overlay Districts, Pedestrian Oriented Districts and Q conditions and undermine the new Baseline Hillside Ordinance, according to LA Neighbors United. This article by former city planner, Dick Platkin, now a planning consultant, helps explain the issue. By Dick Platkin (r...

By Paul Weber, LA Daily News , August 29, 2010 Posted: RECENTLY many opportunistic politicians around the state have been on rant against public employee pensions and calling for draconian "reform." A more accurate description of would be: "It's about time public employees joined the race to the bottom." While many of the people, including the Daily News, calling for reform are acknowledging that private-sector workers have lost tremendous value on their retirement plans, incredibly they present that as a model for public-sector employees! Very rarely do those calling for change take the time to honestly discuss how a 401(k)-style plan would provide for a secure and dignified retirement for employees. That is not a surprise; the 401(k) approach to retirement savings is, and will continue to be, an absolute disaster for this country - leaving the workers who retire under its auspices with the choice of being penniless in retirement or working until they die. Some...

I have quickly looked over the three sets of design guidelines and have several reactions. First, the Framework already has a design chapter, Chapter 5, which is quite good. If these three sets of design guidelines are to augment and update the Framework as appendices, then why is there is no effort to connect these new guidelines with the existing, adopted guidelines? There are obviously many points of connection, yet at no point is there any effort to amend the existing document's design section. Second, I cannot think of any situations since 1995 where the Framework's Chapter 5 was ever used or invoked to modify a project's design or to make legal findings. So, why should the Framework now be implicitly updated, if it design role has been continually ignored? Third, just as the original design chapter was flushed down the memory hole, I would expect the same for these three new appendices. The guidelines can't be used for most buildings because they are b...

Although it is hard for the general public to fathom what takes place at City Hall, we know this much about recent changes imposed on LA’s Department of City Planning. Gail Goldberg, the Director of Planning, recently quit her job. One week after her last day at work, the Mayor nominated the Chief Zoning Administrator, Michael LoGrande, to become the new Director of Planning. Many others have written about this management change, with plenty of ink and tears spilled over the new Planning Director’s level of knowledge, seniority, and servility to real estate developers. But, I don’t think the real question is the new planning director's history and style, but why the Mayor and his consigliere, Austin Beutner, decided they wanted a City Hall backroom player to take over the Planning Department. Some turn to personal scheming for an explanation, but I think the deeper answer is the poor state of the local, regional, and national economies. As they continue to decli...

Although it is hard for the general public to fathom what takes place at City Hall, we know this much about recent changes imposed on LA’s Department of City Planning. Gail Goldberg, the Director of Planning, recently quit her job. One week after her last day at work, the Mayor nominated the Chief Zoning Administrator, Michael LoGrande, to become the new Director of Planning. Many others have written about this management change, with plenty of ink and tears spilled over the new Planning Director’s level of knowledge, seniority, and servility to real estate developers. But, I don’t think the real question is the new planning director's history and style, but why the Mayor and his consigliere, Austin Beutner, decided they wanted a City Hall backroom player to take over the Planning Department. Some turn to personal scheming for an explanation, but I think the deeper answer is the poor state of the local, regional, and national economies. As they continue to dec...

Why is former LA Mayor Richard Riordan, according to Rick Orlov in the Daily New s, trying to persuade local municipal unions to accept wage and benefit cuts? It is his contribution to business efforts to recover from the recession through wage and benefit cuts. Not only will it not work, but it is part of a larger process which several astute analysts, such as Paul Krugman, argue is leading to another depression. See highlighted explanation below. I remain skeptical, however, that the author's solution, essentially a second New Deal, will work. After all, it took WWII to resolve the economic crisis of 1929-1945. More Red Flags for the Economy By Mike Whitney http://www.informat ionclearinghouse .info/article258 79.htm July 05, 2010 " Information Clearing House " -- Bonds are signaling that the recovery is in trouble. The yield on the 10-year Treasury (2.97 percent) has fallen to levels not seen since the peak of the crisis while the yield on the two-year note h...