PUSHING BACK AGAINST CITY HALL’S CHEATERS
-->
By Dick
Platkin, City Watch LA, January 18, 2018
Platkin
on Planning: City
Planning has developed a host of ways to assist real estate developers building
for the high end of the real estate market.
Their helping hand, though, is based on cheating, and it also hides
behind several totally spurious claims. While
they don’t yet concede their bait-and-switch approach, their friends, like Senator
Scott Wiener, unabashedly support real estate speculators
with many outlandish predictions.
According to Wiener and friends, the new market housing will boost transit
ridership, reduce residential segregation, slow down gentrification, and meet the
housing needs of the homeless, the overcrowded, and the rent-stressed. Since I debunked most of these claims in last
week’s CityWatchLA
column, this week I will zero in on the cheating.
City Hall’s first cheating tactic is
to rely on inflated population forecasts from the Southern California
Association of Governments (SCAG) for the plan horizon years of 2035 or 2040. With these inflated numbers in place, the media
and the public are then told that Los Angeles will soon experience another
population boom. It must, therefore,
loosen up its planning, zoning, and environmental regulations to make sure there
is enough housing for these newcomers.
One of the best-known cases of these
inflated SCAG population numbers was the General
Plan Framework Element, an otherwise exemplary planning document. Based on SCAG’s extrapolation of prior
decennial census data, SCAG’s 2010 population forecast for Los Angeles was 4,300,000
people. But, when the Bureau of the
Census released its 2010 data, Los Angeles, only had 3,790,000 people. Without any explanation, 500,000 people never
materialized.
Despite SCAG’s subsequent silence, it is
not hard to figure out why the 2010 numbers were so incorrect, and why SCAG’s 2040
forecasts will suffer the same fate. SCAG’s
methodology relies on historical trend data.
Since Los Angeles was once a boomtown, it is easy to extend long-term historical
trends into the future and predict enormous population growth. Then, when the inevitable mistakes become
apparent, there is too much resistance from local municipalities, especially
Los Angeles, to make mid-course corrections, explain why the forecast
methodology was so flawed, and to detail how it will be corrected in the future.
Given this uncertainty and the
prominent role of the urban
growth machine in local politics, the political winds
invariably blow in the direction of inflated population numbers. Boosterism, not sound social science,
prevails.
The truth is that is impossible to make accurate
long-term population forecasts. This is why
State law and professional city planning standards call for rigorous annual plan
monitoring, including demographic assumptions, followed by comprehensive plan updates
every 10 years. As for local plans, such
as LA’s 35 Community Plans, they should be updated every five years, not every
20 years!
(Since City Hall avoids this heavy
lifting, the Coalition to Preserve LA has hired a demographic consult to
uncover and analyze the missing and much more reliable [i.e., less inflated]
short-term population data.)
As for the long-term forecasts, they invariably
fail because they are unable to accurately predict the following population
variables:
·
Global economic booms and busts, such as
the Great
Recession of 2008-9,
sabotage any trend line population projections.
·
New
technologies, such as streaming video, rapidly change local
economies, hiring patterns, and population trends.
·
The growth of foreign competition forces
American companies to relocate or shut down factories and businesses, creating
job loss.
·
Changes in laws governing immigration to
the United States and forced deportations during the Obama and Trump
administrations.
·
Revisions to financial regulations in
other countries, such as China.
·
Political upheavals and war in other
countries, especially Africa and the Middle East, force millions of
refugees and political asylum seekers to other countries in
search of personal safety.
·
Climate change.
·
Shifting tax and wage laws in different
American states.
·
Changing urban programs, such as the
massive cuts in the US’s social safety net and public housing programs over the
past 40 years.
·
Fluctuating housing costs in Southern
California and in other states.
·
Erratic hiring patterns in other states,
such as sudden swings in the Bakken
fracking areas of North Dakota and Montana.
·
Amendments to local plans, zoning laws,
and environmental regulations.
·
Reduced amounts of and rising costs of
raw land, forcing developers to ignore adopted plans and turn to suburban areas
and infill development.
Since there is no way to overcome these
barriers, local government’s only recourse is to rigorously monitor plans on an
annual basis, make mid-course corrections, and then fully update their plans
when new decennial census data becomes available. But since this approach to planning conflicts
with the business model of real estate speculators, it rarely takes place in
Los Angeles.
City Hall’s second cheating tactic is
repeated claims that LA’s existing zones and plan designations are not sufficient
to meet the housing needs of either current or future residents. But,
since City Planning has not prepared any zoning build-out calculations since
the early 1990s, this is pure bluster. Their
claim also contradicts these early 1990 studies, which concluded that Los
Angeles could reach a population of 8,000,000 people based on existing
zoning.
These studies, for the AB 283 Zoning
Consistency Project and for the General Plan Framework, also indicated that Los
Angeles has enough commercially zoned land for all growth scenarios during the
next 100 years. The city does not,
however, have enough supportive infrastructure and services for this level
of development. The barrier to growth, therefore,
is insufficient infrastructure and public services, not zoning capacity.
Since the era of AB 283 and the General
Plan Framework in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the City’s zoning capacity
has actually grown, potentially squeezing infrastructure and services even more. Since every commercially zoned piece of
property, as well as most manufacturing zones, can also be used for
apartments, and since the RAS zone, the SB 1818 Density Bonus
ordinance, and the new Value Capture Ordinance allow developers to increase the
height, mass, and number of units in by-right apartment building by 20 percent
or more, the claim that LA’s existing zoning is inadequate is even more deceptive
than before.
This is, in fact, why the General Plan
Framework, repeating housing policies that date back to the Mayor Tom Bradley
era, calls for additional housing (if and when it is needed) to be constructed
at transit hubs and on long, under-utilized transit corridors. To get a sense of how much unused zoning
potential exists at transit centers and transit corridors, the General Plan
Framework’s Chapter Two reports,
“Fewer than five percent of the commercial properties
currently allowed to develop at a floor area ratio of 1.5:1 have been developed
at this intensity.”
Anyone who
doubts this, only needs to randomly check out any long transit corridor in Los
Angeles, such as Pico Boulevard. When they
do so, they will see miles of one and two story buildings, all of which could
be replaced by three story apartment buildings.
Then, through SB 1818 or soon through the Value Capture Ordinance, developer
could build four and five story apartment buildings at these same locations
without any zoning or planning waivers.
Pico
Boulevard is a typical low-rise transportation corridor with vast untapped
zoning capacity for housing.
City Hall’s third cheating tactic is
to make sure that the City’s sporadic and superficial plan monitoring process does
not measure the public’s need for services and infrastructure, nor the City’s
ability to provide these services and infrastructure. Although the programs carefully outlined below
describe the required Framework’s monitoring program in detail, City Hall never
complied with them:
General Plan Framework Element Policy 42: Establish a Monitoring
Program to … assess the status of development
activity and supporting infrastructure and public services within the City of
Los Angeles. The data that are compiled can function as indicators of (a) the
rate of population growth, development activity, and other factors that result
in demands for transportation, infrastructure, and services; (b) location and
type of infrastructure investments and improvements; and changes to the
citywide environmental conditions and impacts documented in the Framework
Element environmental database and the Environmental Impact Report.
General Plan Framework Element
Policy 43: Prepare an Annual Report on Growth and Infrastructure
based on the results of the (General Plan) Monitoring Program, which will be
published at the end of each fiscal year and shall include information such as
population estimates and an inventory of new development. This report is
intended to provide City staff, the City Council, and service providers with
information that can facilitate the programming and funding of capital
improvements and services. Additionally, this report will inform the general
plan amendment process. Information shall be documented by relevant
geographic boundaries, such as service areas, Community Plan Areas, or City
Council Districts.
Without this monitoring information carefully
collected, assessed, and then applied to the General Plan, as well as
amendments to the General Plan and other discretionary actions, the City of Los
Angeles is flying blind. It is,
essentially, a hulking mass of thousands of separate market-driven real estate projects,
matched with siloed public agencies whose only focus is their turf of fire
stations, libraries, animal shelters, bicycle lanes, and hundreds of other
categories. There is no planning process
in place to tie this information together, to understand how it rapidly changes,
and to apply it to governance.
City Hall’s fourth cheating tactic is
to ignore legally adopted policies in the General Plan Framework regarding criteria
for granting zone changes, General Plan Amendments, and related discretionary
actions. To be consistent with the
General Plan, these applications must demonstrate that there is sufficient
public infrastructure and services for a discretionary action to be granted. This is why one purpose of the Annual
Monitoring Report is to, “…inform the
General Plan amendment process.”
With detailed population, employment,
housing, economic growth, and infrastructure and public services data in place,
City Hall decision makers could then determine which discretionary actions are
consistent with the General Plan.
Without this information, though, they have no objective measures to review
and approve several thousand applications each year for discretionary actions,
despite the Framework’s legally adopted policies, such as the following:
Policy 3.3.2.
Initiate a study to consider whether additional growth should be accommodated,
when 75 percent of the forecast of any one or more category listed in Table 2-2 (see
Chapter 2: Growth and Capacity)
is attained within a community plan area. If a study is necessary, determine
the level of growth that should be accommodated and correlate that level with
the capital, facility, or service improvements and/or transportation demand
reduction programs that are necessary to accommodate that level.
Although
the Framework’s language is opaque, this policy states that when the
population, housing, or employment levels in a Community Plan area approach the
levels forecast for 2010, the City must then determine how much additional
growth (i.e., real estate investment) should be allowed through zone changes
and plan amendments, and how much infrastructure and services must be first
upgraded to accommodate future growth.
Pushing back against the cheaters:
If you want to learn more about how these City Hall cheaters cheat, and more
importantly, how you can use this information to shape new Community Plans in
your neighborhood, clamp down on excessive planning and zoning waivers, and
upgrade public services and infrastructure in your neighborhood, please attend
the following workshop on Sunday. Here are
the details, with plenty of time for Q and A scheduled.
What: “Save Your Zip Code, Angelenos” Training
Program
When: Sunday, January 21, 10:30 – 2:30 PM
Where: 6500 Sunset Boulevard, Hollywood, CA 90028
How: Parking and lunch provided
* Dick Platkin is a former LA city planner who
reports on planning controversies in Los Angeles for CityWatch LA. Please send comments and corrections to rhplatkin@gmail.com. His blog is www.plan-itlosangeles.blogspot.com.
Comments