PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

My views are that the most immediate planning issue in Los Angeles is the inadequacy of the DEIR for the update of the Hollywoood Community plan since its comment period closes on June 3, 2011. 1) The plan's policy language is irrelevant. No decision makers ever look at it in making budget or land use decisions. 2) The focus should be opposition to sections of the DEIR which sanction broad increases in density through general plan amendments and zone changes because: -- They will become a template for dramatic increases in permitted densities in the remaining 34 community plans. -- There is no planning rationale for this up-planning and up-zoning based on the "growth neutrality" intent of the Genera Plan Framework Element. The city, according to the Framework, has enormous untapped potential for population and housing expansion based on established plan designations and zones. -- In fact, in the Hollywood Community Plan's implementation program up-zoning and up-...

LA NEIGHBORHOODS Dick Platkin The Mayor recently signed a new ordinance adopted by the Los Angeles City Council to halt the construction of McMansions on small hillside lots. These elected officials vow that this ordinance will stop the mansionization process in hillside areas. But will it? If the Hillside McMansion ordinance is filled with loopholes similar to those of the Baseline McMansion ordinance enacted several years ago for non-hillside areas, hillside residents should be very wary. This is because the Baseline ordinance still allowed McMansions to be constructed -- as long as they were less than about 4,500 square feet. Since this p rovision effectively green-lighted nearly all McMansions, especially in the R1-1 zone, the Mansionization process has continued unabated in Los Angeles. To begin, McMansions are those boxy, massively oversized, suburban-style spec houses appearing in older neighborhoods, such as Beverly Grove, where I live. They are all two stories and built by ...

A website covering the Infrastructure Coalition's lawsuit against the City of Los Angeles relating to the Annual Report on Growth and Infrastructure Home SATURDAY, APRIL 16, 2011 Infrastructure Lawsuit Appeal Filed Thursday, April 14, 2011 Infrastructure Lawsuit Appeal Filed FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Contact : Sabrina Venskus April 14, 2011 (213) 482-4200 venskus@lawsv.com Infrastructure Lawsuit Moves to Next Phase An appeal was filed today by several Los Angeles community groups to overturn a Los Angeles Superior Court judge’s denial of their landmark lawsuit to force the city to produce and implement its Annual Report on Growth and Infrastructure . Superior Court Judge John Torribio ruled the City of Los Angeles need not follow mandatory duties and mitigation measures set out in its General Plan Framework Element, the City’s “land use constitution”. The appeal requesting review of the decision was filed in the Second District Court by group attorneys Sabrina Venskus and Doug Carstens...

Commentary on article: In the decade of the 1980's, LA's annual growth rate was about 2 % per year, the basis for the General Plan Framework Element, which is based on extrapolations of 1990 census data. The city's growth rate has now slowed to .25 % per year over the past decade, and in most of Hollywood, there was actual population decline. Yet, the proposed Hollywood Community Plan Update assumes that LA's former growth rates from 30 and more years ago will return and continue ad infinitum in the Hollywood Community Plan area. This is what is called bad city planning in which local zoning is ramped up to serve this imaginary population, while the city's infrastructure and services have been so decimated that they cannot even serve the existing or even declining population.

Big cities' population boom slows to a trickle, census data show Some of California's largest cities, including Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Diego, saw their populations plateau or even decline from 2000 to 2010, ending a decades-long trend of expansion. By Ari Bloomekatz, Los Angeles Times , Sunday, April 24, 2011 http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-old-cities-20110424,0,5154235.story Growth has altered the skyline of downtown Long Beach over the last decade. New high-rise condo towers dot Ocean Boulevard . Older buildings have been converted into lofts, and a new shopping center and entertainment complex rose on the site of the long-shuttered Pike amusement park. But when the U.S. Census Bureau released population data earlier this year, some in Long Beach were shocked to learn that between 2000 and 2010, the state's seventh-largest city added only 735 residents — a growth rate of 0.2% and far below the national average of 9.7%. Long Beach is one of...

ASK THE PLANNER: By Dick Platkin* In response to several recent questions on how Los Angeles can fix its dysfunctional planning process, these are my suggestions. It all begins with the State of California ’s legal requirement that cities must have legally adopted current, comprehensive, an internally consistent General Plans. So far so good. The Los Angeles City Planning Department has uploaded and posted the city’s seven legally required General Plan Elements on its website, including its 35 local Community Plans and the discretionary General Plan Framework Element. But, a careful look at these adopted policy documents reveals that they are a facade. To begin, they have no monitoring program, an act of negligence which has landed the city in court. Furthermore, in addition to the failure to monitor these plans, many of them are older than the city planners in charge of them . Their update is long overdue, and the ball is clearly in the court of City Hall to br...

The Department of City Planning is undertaking a series of workshops on development reform throughout Los Angeles , which they also call zoning code streamlining, zoning code simplification, and zoning code amendments. This is my effort to untangle the maze of what is proposed under these confusing titles. Furthermore, some of the promotional materials for these planning workshops reference extraneous issues, including alleged problems faced by home owners whose home improvement projects must be cleared by City Planning, and efforts to implement 12-2, a failed program promoted by the Central City Association to have all building permits cleared by two city departments, Building and Safety and City Planning. The current proposals include the review and adoption of between six and 24 separate zoning code amendments, inventoried below. They are intended, according to their city sponsors, to simplify and streamline the Los Angeles Muncipal Code (LAMC). The numbers range so ...