UCLA's Smart Growth Conference: A Revolution? Or More Hot Air?

This interview takes place at the UCLA Extension-Smart Growth Conference in Los Angeles. What, in your opinion, is the significance of both this conference and it's timing?

This could be a watershed event in the history of Southern California land use. Today, it appears that this community may be almost ready for an era of smart growth. UCLA and Hilary Norton Orozco of Fleishman Hillard deserve great credit for organizing this conference.

When the term "smart growth" is used, what ought our readers be imagining? And why do you suggest that the timing of this conference is significant?

Smart Growth is a polite way to say "stop sprawl;" it's a euphemism for well-managed land use. Force growth back towards the center of the community and all kinds of good things will follow.

What's different today is Southern California. This region attracts highly talented and ambitious people from all over the world. They come here to succeed as individuals, not necessarily to act as a community. As a result, we haven't had a history of long range planning like, for example, Portland, Oregon. That's where smart growth began. Now it's moving in our direction. We've seen it migrate from Oregon into Northern California, to communities like Petaluma and Santa Rosa, then to Marin and, more recently, to Ventura County. With the hundreds of people in attendance at this conference, and the very distinguished real estate professionals supporting the concept, perhaps smart growth has finally arrived in LA.

Given that the topic is not new, why do you suppose that the real estate industry is here today in such numbers?

Over the last 20 years, Los Angles has undergone a fundamental transition in its physical and psychological characters. Once, this was a land of limitless dreams. People came here for opportunity. Mobility, both physical and social, seemed almost infinite. The image of driving in an open convertible, over palm-lined boulevards, under a shining sun, day after day, really was the California dream. And our city grew, as a result, into a vast sprawling collection of low-density neighborhoods. Hence, the long-standing joke of Los Angeles as 80 villages in search of a center.

But that has begun to change. Gradually, the city has matured into a major urban metropolis and, to some extent, as a result, it has begun to choke on its own success. Those "dreamy" tract neighborhoods began to experience crime and social problems. Freeways and avenues became congested with traffic, and the general mobility that people craved has been reduced. The city is now forced by its own unmanaged growth to face a transition in character. It is no longer a set of paradisiacal, isolated suburbs, but a major, sometimes rough, tough and crowded urban place.

Are the right conditions/incentives in place today-economic, cultural, political and governmental-to encourage a smart growth movement?

Not quite. And that, of course, is part of the challenge of living in Southern California. If we wanted well-managed urbanism, we'd move to Portland, where a number of factors, which we can study in retrospect, came into play.

In Oregon, the growth management movement started on a statewide level. Individual local communities do not have the political will to manage their own development machines. There is simply too much inbreeding between the real estate and political industries for a small town to place growth limits on itself. Once the State of Oregon stepped in, and required every community to have a 20-year growth plan and an Urban Growth Boundary, then individual communities could embrace the plan-and because of it, they have prospered ever since.

Such a plan must be metropolitan in scale. The Portland Plan, for example, involves half dozen cities in three counties in two states. Emulating this level of planning in Los Angeles must involve about 100 sprawling jurisdictions and a diversity of communities. It is going to be a great challenge. If we succeed, so can other large cities around the world. We can be an example of good planning in a 21st century, highly diversified, megalopolis.

How does Urban Partners, your firm, implement such principles in your development projects? What succeeds, and what fails?

Our projects are bit players on a very big stage. We pursue the consumer who seeks a better urban environment. The suburban sprawl of the last five or six decades was really an historical anomaly. The single family house, with a small backyard and barbeque and a lemon tree had its attractions, particularly to people who grew up in crowded, older eastern cities. But, their children are finding that the suburbs can be boring, isolated and even lonely. People are craving a greater amount of social contact. Hence, the worldwide rediscovery of cities.

Our business capitalizes on this trend back to the centers of traditional urban communities. We build multifamily housing at infill sites in dense and sometimes very complicated urban neighborhoods.

Talk about the tensions within your own firm when you take on a high profile, complicated and cutting edge project like the Del Mar Station development in Pasadena. Surely being innovative and cutting edge comes with a price?

We like projects with a strong public-private interface. We enjoy working with communities. We also seem to enjoy working with trains. Transit-served properties will have unique and significant long-term value. And, we enjoy working with high quality architects like Stefanos Polyzoides, all of which we've done at Del Mar Station in Pasadena.

Del Mar Station is a poster child for complicated modern urbanism. It has a bit of everything: housing, including affordable housing, retail, transit access, adaptive reuse of an historic train depot from the 1920s, and a city park that's being improved across the street. And it's two blocks from Colorado Boulevard, one of the coolest retail streets in Southern California. The fact that we have been able to address each of these agendas and to pursue the project profitably shows that it can be done. The city of Pasadena has been very supportive of this project, as have the Gold Line Authority and the MTA. When completed, Del Mar Station will provide a model for transit-oriented development in Southern California. The train literally goes through the buildings and stops in the middle of the project.

The ultimate profitability of the project therefore depends upon one fascinating question: will people rent apartments over, under and around a light-rail stop? That question will be answered in the next 12 months.

How would you define your role with LAUSD and the Ambassador Hotel project? What are the planning challenges of that mid-Wilshire project?

We are advisors to the Los Angeles Unified School District on redevelopment alternatives for the historic Ambassador Hotel site.

The tragedy of that project, and therefore the challenge, is that two extremely important public policy goals appear to be in direct conflict. One is the compelling need to provide quality public education. And the other equally legitimate desire is to preserve the cultural and social legacy of our past.

On point, for the Caltrans building in downtown Los Angeles, what is Urban Partners' most proud of re this development?

We have the honor of serving as development manager for a building that will accommodate the organizations tackling the defining issue of Southern California-mobility. It is challenging to express motion-physical and social mobility-through the static medium of architecture. Yet, Thom Mayne, Morphosis and Gruen have done just that.

On the other hand, what is most amazing about the Caltrans building are the speed and quality of the delivery process. The trust, cooperation and efficiency of the relationship that formed between the client, contractor, architect and development team produced the fastest, most affordable, and most innovative public building ever constructed in California. The design-build process, with the right client and the right private sector team, in this case led by Clark Construction, has the potential to produce top quality public architecture faster and for less cost than we ever believed possible.

Since, in a prior life, you were the asset manager for both the state and the city of L.A., address the role of the public client re the CalTrans project. Former Secretary Aileen Adams, from Gray Davis' administration, and the State Architect Steve Castellanos, along with CalTrans were, by all accounts, your boss. What is your evaluation of the public sector's ability, in general, to be a good client-to make this design-build process work well?

You are absolutely right.They were phenomenally good clients and they'll receive a phenomenally good building in return. To achieve this success Aileen, Steve, Maria Contreras-Sweet, Jorge Jackson, Doug Failing, and our entire client team were very clear about their goals of architectural excellence, energy efficiency, speed, and cost control. Clark is an exceptional contractor and the team worked together flawlessly. The whole damn thing took only 35 months from start to finish and cost $250 a foot, all in.

Without the benefit of an asset manager to coordinate and optimize the impact of a public building program, how good of a client for design-build is the city of LA or LAUSD?

Every public entity is different. The federal government, for example, does a very admirable job of managing an immense real estate portfolio. And notice that federal buildings always look good. The State has evolved into an excellent real estate manager. The County has other priorities and the City has a facilities master plan, but hasn't followed it recently. Just as with private real estate, location is by far the most important and difficult decision for a public project. The unresolved debates regarding the Police and Public Works Departments' future homes-both of which do need a new and permanent home-reveal the absence of clear criteria for selecting public building sites.

The school district has a clear and ambitious master plan. We should give them nothing but the highest marks for succeeding with the extremely difficult tasks of assembling sites and accommodating exponentially growing classroom needs. They have put together a very professional team. They have a job that is mind-numbingly difficult, to build several hundred new schools in dense urban areas, yet they will be opening over 200 new school projects in the next few years. Believe it or not, they are going to meet those goals. It's awesome. They are up to the challenge and they're doing it.

In their driving need to build classrooms, the District has not, however, devoted as much time to addressing broader urban planning agendas, like shared-uses with other public assets such as parks and libraries, certainly not as much as some, including you David, would like. In a perfect world, it would have been nice for LAUSD to solve all of the world's problems using school bonds. But the fact is, they are going to get the seats and the chalkboards we need built on time.

So let's return to the subject of this UCLA Smart Growth Conference. What are the possible take-aways?

Everyone here realizes that something new is happening, that this is not just another conference. There is a snowball rolling here, with momentum building around public demand for better growth management policies. The fact that this movement is being led by the real estate industry itself is also very significant. We all concur that this is not the end of the discussion, but merely a beginning. Thanks, Hilary.