As school districts across the densely populated Southland have embarked on the enormous task of building hundreds of new schools, conflicts over land and community services have been inevitable. New Schools Better Neighborhoods (www.nsbn.org), a nonprofit organization funded by First 5 LA, is one group trying to broker agreements between school interests and other community needs. The following article, written by journalist Howard Blume for TPR, tells the story of a conflict between housing and a new school in one community that was resolved with compounded benefits for all.
An impoverished, tightly crowded neighborhood near Downtown Los Angeles was bracing for a collision of powerful, opposing forces that wanted the same small piece of land. On one side was a builder of affordable housing – and housing is desperately needed in this area. On the other side was the Los Angeles Unified School District, which wanted to build a school, one of 160 planned throughout the district to relieve unconscionable overcrowding.
These six adjacent parcels became hotly contested because there just isn't much available space in the Westlake portion of Los Angeles, located just west of Downtown's skyscrapers. Although the developer got this land first, the district has the authority to seize private property. The conflict seemed destined to get ugly, time-consuming and expensive. In the end, the community would have gotten one thing it needs, while losing one thing it also needs.
But that's not how the story unfolded.
A timely and difficult intervention by a community organization ultimately changed the equation. The result is that Westlake will get 54 units of new housing and the Gratts New Primary School, as well as park space accessible to the public and a child-care center, a total of $45 million worth of investment. The organization that entered the fray is New Schools/Better Neighborhoods (NSBN), a Los Angeles-based nonprofit that was created to deal with dilemmas just like this-where the needs are daunting, but the space and money is limited.
"At the beginning of this project, it was zero-sum," said David Abel, the head of NSBN. "Either the school district built its project, or [the developer] stopped them. Through negotiation, it has evolved into a school with housing, early education programs, and some open space."
L.A. City Councilman Ed Reyes sees the Westlake project as a necessary harbinger. "We are between a rock and a hard place," said Reyes in an interview with The Planning Report. "We need a school, but we also need housing. So, we need people who focus on housing to start thinking about how educational needs and school development policies are their problem, and people who are developing schools to see housing issues as their problem."
At a celebratory news conference in March 2003, the Westlake saga was hailed as a hopeful foreshadowing of other projects. But underlying the genial backslapping among the mayor, the school superintendent and other city leaders was a process fraught with difficulty, one that could have fallen apart at a dozen different junctures. That's because of the way projects get built in Los Angeles – a dense urban center where various leaders can be astonishingly disconnected from each other.
"We're all in this for different reasons," said Dora Leong Gallo, chief executive of A Community of Friends, the nonprofit developer of the housing. "The school district's job is to build schools. Our job is to build affordable housing. As much as we agree on a vision for the community, it is very hard to implement given the pressures on each of us." Because the two once-opposed entities worked together, she said, the end result is "a lot of positives," but housing developers looking at future, similar projects "need to walk in with your eyes wide open and be prepared for the negatives."
Getting all parties to work together was no easy sell. The school district needed particular persuasion because it has the legal wherewithal to go it alone at any time. Through its eminent domain powers, the school district can take land to build schools after paying a court-determined or negotiated "fair" price. Community opposition to this go-it-alone process has sometimes held up school construction for years and driven up costs astronomically. And the completed projects are not always best suited for their communities.
Still, it's hard to get a player to the table who doesn't have to be there, especially because school district officials, who are in the midst of a $13 billion, 160-school building program, will be judged mostly on how many classroom seats they can build and whether these seats are delivered on time and on budget. Add-ons such as child-care centers, housing, and parks can be regarded as expensive, time-consuming distractions.
"We are in the midst of one of the largest public-works programs in the country," said LAUSD School Board President Jose Huizar, "building 160 new schools in the next eight years." But public entities' focus on their own missions may inculcate a narrower perspective that means that they "need someone else to get us all together and illuminate the possibilities."
Abel credits the school board and district administrators for entering negotiations in the first place. But that doesn't mean these planning sessions went seamlessly. At one point, Abel publicly criticized the school district when it withdrew from the joint-planning process and unilaterally favored a design that would put the school's playground on the roof of a parking structure. The design was clever and cost-effective, but would have resulted in a less appealing, less accessible recreation space.
For its part, the school district said that it chalked up $1 million in additional costs – even with its money-saving rooftop playground. By this time, it had already shifted the placement of the school on the property to accommodate the housing. Officials were reluctant to add further to these costs with a redesign. The district finally yielded to community persistence and pressure, and Abel praises them profusely for doing so. The open space ended up being green, not concrete – and at ground level.
The process also embodied pitfalls for the developer, A Community of Friends, which had to sit on its property during the joint planning process. "For us to do nothing with this property [during the delay] has cost us tremendously financially," said Gallo.
In fact, the delay could have killed the housing entirely. Builders of affordable housing typically cobble together dollars from various government and private sources. With the money come deadlines and accountability requirements. And if one piece of funding falls out for any reason – such as a time delay – the entire project could collapse. All of which makes it harder to work with a school district not equipped to move at the speed of financing. Gallo hopes elected officials can amend this equation.
"What would be helpful locally would be more flexibility of deadlines," said Gallo. "The city and the state both have funding deadlines when we have to be in construction or lose the money... When we sit on a property for four years, we are still paying interest, property taxes, maintenance, and insurance. We have had to scramble to come up with sources to pay for these holding costs – we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars."
A Community of Friends supports NSBN's process, but the complexity and cost make these collaborations challenging. "We learned on the Westlake project that the players at the table were committed, but we all had to answer to other, outside requirements," said John Wolter, a project manager for the nonprofit. "The timing was very complicated." At the same time, "we came out of the process with an enhanced housing project. The opportunity to include a Boys & Girls Club arose because the public schoolyard space is shared between the housing and the new schools."
More broadly, Wolter and others involved realize that something of this sort has to happen for limited resources to create the most community good – even if everyone at the time feels individually that they are paying too much. "I absolutely think that joint development is worth doing the right way," said Gallo, "even with the extra time and financial costs. What is at stake is Los Angeles growing in a haphazard way in which we have been growing. You will have little neighborhoods that really aren't neighborhoods, where people are isolated and never come together. If it doesn't happen at a neighborhood level, how can we expect it at the city or the national levels?"
Board President Huizar noted that the new schools will be going up in some of the nation's densest and most underserved communities, which also need parks, child-care centers and police stations. In that light, he said, the Westlake model becomes more of a necessity than a luxury. And a third-party negotiator like NSBN may be crucial to the process as well. Because public bureaucracies concentrate on their own particular mission, "you almost need a third party, a non-government entity, to help bring all of these agencies together." At Westlake, the dollars to pay for NSBN's participation came mostly from First Five L.A., a commission funded by the state tobacco tax. Westlake's child-care center is exactly in line with First Five's mission of promoting early childhood education.
Even if schools were to be treated as an isolated need, the isolation of school construction wouldn't make sense, said Councilman Reyes. "The schools are there for the kids and their families. But the irony is, what good will they be if the kids can't live in the area anymore because the housing is gone?"
- Log in to post comments
