PLANNING WATCH / PLAN-IT LOS ANGELES

WHY THE UPDATE OF THE HOLLYWOOD COMMUNITY PLAN WILL FAIL By Dick Platkin (East Hollywood Neighborhood Council Planning Entitlement Committee and City Planning Consultant). Please send comments to rhplatkin@yahoo.com . On Tuesday, March 27, 2012, the LA City Council Planning and Land Use Committee (PLUM) held its first public hearing on the proposed Update of the Hollywood Community Plan. This hearing confirmed what the Plan’s skeptics have maintained for years – this planning process is dedicated to real estate investment. Its only implementation program is dramatic increases in permitted heights and densities. It does not offer funded programs to advance Hollywood through far-reaching improvements to public infrastructure and services. This is why the reports and testimony supporting the proposed plan focused on real estate matters. To be fair, several backers mentioned parks and streetscape, but these only referred to c...

LA’s Vanished History of Population and Economic Expansion : In lieu of updating the General Plan Framework Element, the legally adopted citywide plan for the entire city of Los Angeles, based on the latest 2010 census data, the Department of City Planning is slowly updating 35 local community plans on a scattershot basis, based on old census data. While this a methodologically shoddy approach to planning Los Angeles in an era of economic hard times, budget cutbacks, certain natural disasters, peak oil, and climate change, this choice does not result from politicians who snuck out of workshops on municipal governance or planners who skipped a critical lecture on urban general plans. In both cases, sloppy planning should not be confused with lack of knowledge. The real reason for this piecemeal approach to planning Los Angeles for the early 21 st Century is that the old data still depicts Los Angeles as a young, growing metropolis. These data portray a city that has d...

WHAT HOLLYWOOD REALLY NEEDS IN LIEU OF THE PROPOSED UPDATE (As published on City Watch) By Dick Platkin rhplatkin@yahoo.com, 213-308-6354 The Update of the Hollywood Community Plan is not only opposed by nearly every neighborhood council and resident group in Hollywood, but also by city planning professionals like myself. Community groups, in fact, understand Los Angeles’s legally adopted plans and the planning process better than LA’s elected officials and departmental managers. Local residents know that claims from City Hall that the Hollywood Community Plan Update faithfully implements the General Plan are bogus. They also know that any revival of Hollywood will turn on high quality public infrastructure and services, careful project reviews, reliable code enforcement, and annual monitoring. Why? Because the Update totally conflicts with LA's General Plan Framework Element (1996), the backbone of the city’s General Plan. The Update is nothing more than the city planning ver...

The Update of the Hollywood Community Plan is not only opposed by every neighborhood council and resident group in Hollywood, but also by city planning professionals like myself. I was part of the team of Los Angeles city planners who prepared the General Plan Framework in the mid-1990's, the adopted citywide plan which public officials, like Mayor Villaraigosa and Councilmembers Garcetti and LeBonge, claim the Update implements. In fact, the Update totally conflicts with LA's General Plan. It is nothing more than the city planning version of the fantasy film, Field of Dreams, in which an Iowa farmer built a baseball diamond that magically materialized high caliber baseball teams and games. The politicians promoting this "plan" believe that a slew of mega-projects in Hollywood will propel economic growth. Nothing could be further from the truth, which is why the General Plan Framework is strongly opposed to such real estate bubbles. First, Hollywood's public i...

After 18 years of work, LA’s Department of City Planning has finally unveiled a draft update for the 1988 Hollywood Community Plan, including 105 pages of detailed amendments to increase permitted building densities in Hollywood , as well as a Draft Environmental Impact Report (DEIR). If or when this update is eventually adopted, it will then become a template for similar updates of LA’s 34 other community plans. In theory, it also could become a model for Specific Plan amendments to permitting greater densities. Because of the Hollywood plan’s importance to potentially alter private land use patters all throughout Los Angeles , many analysts have carefully scrutinized the draft, especially its DEIR, and submitted their analyses to the Department of City Planning. Among these many submissions, one theme stands out; the Draft Environmental Impact Report does not present a credible planning rationale for the proposed Community Plan update. The following six points summarize muc...

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