Culver City Revitalization Planning Benefits More Than Downtown

Over more than a decade, Culver City has thoughtfully planned and invested to revitalize its downtown. Could you share the city vision that instructs your community development and planning responsibilities?

The overriding vision has been to revitalize the downtown and other commercial areas and to preserve the character of the city's residential neighborhoods. The downtown revitalization is well underway, but over the last 11 months, the city has been wrestling with development's impact on abutting residential neighborhoods, which is basically an issue in every community. During this period, we've revised the city's Mixed Use Development Ordinance to make it more neighborhood-friendly. The ordinance has been revised to trade off building height for building setback where a mixed use project abuts a residential area. That ordinance was adopted in December 2007, and it included not only new development standards but also a new component that deals with community benefits.

The notion behind community benefits is that all development brings with it impacts that may need to be mitigated. We hope to get community buy-in for mixed use projects with approval of community benefits funded by the project developer through this process. We have established several areas that would be eligible for incentive zoning through community benefits. The community benefits are examined by the local community and then approved by resolution by the City Council. That system provides advance knowledge to the developer that their development projects will be required to provide community benefits and they'll have a sense of what those benefits are. It gives assurance to the community that the proposed project will help resolve certain issues or problems that need to be resolved in the neighborhood.

Community benefits are available to a developer under the Mixed Use Ordinance when there is a request to exceed the base density that is prescribed in this revised ordinance. The city has revised the mixed-use standards to reduce density to 35 units per acre, except that they can increase to up to 50 units per acre with community benefits, and up to 65 units per acre in our transit-oriented development area.

This revision to the Mixed Use Ordinance, and this system of creating benefits, is reflective of the direction the city is taking to try to manage growth and development and to make sure that development is more responsive to the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

What are Culver City's land use assets and redevelopment challenges?

The city has had a very ambitious redevelopment program. It has revitalized its downtown. It has worked carefully with its large employers to try to ensure economic vitality, understanding the important asset that a large employment base brings. We regularly get comments by residents that they love and value the downtown. If you drop by Culver City at lunchtime or you're here in the evening, you'll see that all the restaurants are full, and the streets and sidewalks have a tremendous amount of pedestrian activity.

The city developed a streetscape plan, spent a significant amount of money building public parking, created a beautiful pedestrian plaza, and built some theaters. The outcome has been to create a vital downtown. The city is enjoying better tax revenue and better economic vitality because the downtown has been revitalized. The funds that were expended to redevelop the downtown have paid off, creating a downtown that is a tremendous asset to the city.

Culver City appears to have followed much the same track as cities like Pasadena, focusing on parking and streetscape and generating small-scale development. Is Pasadena the model, or are there other jurisdictions that have influenced Culver City's planning? Has Culver City now become a model for other cities?

A lot of the improvements are formulaic. For example, the city did a streetscape program-widened sidewalks, put in special landscaping and street furniture-and built public parking. Those types of improvements really lay the groundwork for revitalizing a city. Then it worked closely with area businesses to encourage them to make business improvements. It also conducted business attraction programs to try to attract new businesses.

Those components of the downtown revitalization are similar to the kind of improvements you see elsewhere, and they work. The city has been very successful in attracting new businesses, and we continue, almost on a weekly basis, to open new restaurants in the downtown area.

We're trying to move beyond the downtown. We have two very exciting programs that we're trying to put together for the west end of the city. These are demonstration projects called "Area Improvement Plans." They are an effort to try to seed improvements in a way that's slightly different than what was done in the downtown. While we're proposing to do streetscape work and to provide public parking, we're hoping to make that public parking a component of private development by reconfiguring the depth of ground level retail development and providing the residual area for metered public parking. We are hoping to ensure, in our own agency-sponsored redevelopment projects, that metered public parking will be made available as a product of the project, exceeding the parking requirement under the code.

In other words, some of the projects that are going to be redeveloped will include public parking. The parking will provide an immediate benefit to the neighborhood. That parking will have signs on the building frontage and along the street so that it will be clear to customers in the West Washington area where these new parking areas are located. We're also moving forward with an assessment district for lighting and landscaping. While the city will fund the cost of some of these streetscape improvements, we want to ensure that we get the cooperation and the assistance of local property owners to help fund some of the maintenance effort.

We're also doing some very localized planning. We're doing that on an inter-departmental basis, using our Planning Division to assist with some of the land use planning to help support some of the redevelopment activity that's going on along West Washington.

We're also using code enforcement as a tool to help improve the area, and we're offering a commercial rehabilitation program funded by the agency to assist businesses with small-scale improvements to improve the area and local businesses. Through this layered effort, which involves code enforcement, planning and redevelopment, commercial rehabilitation, and parking and public improvements, we hope to make a major impact in these two demonstration areas in a very short period of time.

I should point out that each of these demonstration areas contains an agency-sponsored redevelopment project. One of the areas includes our Baldwin project, a wonderful, environmentally friendly green building of office and retail uses being developed by Jim Suhr and Wally Marks that will include this public parking component. Our second demonstration area is at Washington and Centinela, which includes a wonderful project called the Market Hall, which will include office space, a gourmet market, retail, residential, substantial at grade and subterranean parking, and restaurant uses in what will become landmark architecture for that area. These projects replace blighted uses and will be used by residents and visitors.

It's hard to think of Culver City in its current situation having much blight that requires the powers of a redevelopment agency. Where is the blight, and how do you get the powers to put these projects in place?

Its important to remember that redevelopment takes years and that, by now, many blighted properties have been successfully redeveloped. We are now seeing the fruits of that long labor. The city has had four component areas in its redevelopment effort. In the West Washington area, there were properties that met the traditional criteria under redevelopment law as blighted. For example, at the Washington/Centinela site, there was a derelict gas station that required site remediation and clean-up. There was a blighted commercial building, a liquor store and a non-conforming residential property in a commercial zone. That area comprised several acres that are being redeveloped. It certainly fit the criteria under redevelopment law for condemnation and redevelopment.

The Baldwin property was the site of a derelict hotel and also met the criteria for redevelopment. Redevelopment of those properties provides good examples of how the city has comported with redevelopment law-developing plans and stringently following the redevelopment process from condemnation through property disposition to develop projects that are consistent with the city's goals to revitalize its commercial corridors.

Elaborate on how the city is mixing housing into your area redevelopment planning and investments.

Our Mixed-Use Ordinance allows mixed-use development along all of the city's commercial corridors, which includes, of course, the commercial corridors in the city's downtown.

Housing is a major component of the city's planning efforts, and at this point, there are a few mixed-use projects that are moving through the development process within the city's commercial corridor areas. Those projects will come online over the next few years.

In addition, the city has a transit-oriented development at Washington/National, which includes a horizontally- and vertically-integrated mixed-use project, which will potentially include hotel, office, retail and residential uses, and a significant amount of open space, in addition to major pedestrian areas and public plazas. That project includes a significant residential component.

In addition, there are other projects proposed around the TOD site at Washington and National that have been referred to as "catalytic" projects since they will spur new transit oriented development that includes a mix of commercial and residential uses.

The Expo Line will arrive in Culver City soon. How are you integrating transit into the city's economic and planning efforts?

We've spent quite a bit of time over the past few months trying to reconfigure the Washington/National plan to maximize the benefit of transit oriented development for the community. The city had a couple of false starts in that planning effort. We presented a new proposal in March to the agency and the City Council, which included several significant changes to that plan. One of the major changes includes an intermodal component that would incorporate rapid bus service or additional bus service on Venice Blvd. as part of the Washington/National site. The city is very interested in trying to tie together and integrate transit into its development planning.

In addition, we hope to connect some of the adjacent areas to Washington/National. Our intent is to try to connect these TOD sites to the downtown and to the Helms area immediately to the east.

We have a wonderful development area known as the Hayden Tract that we'd like to connect, and we would also like to create a transit connection to Fox Hills. That would mean integrating a shuttle service that would tie in directly to our triangle site. So creating citywide transit connections is really emerging as part of our planning effort at Washington/National.

Culver City sits in the middle of metropolitan L.A. How do you go about your planning and economic development efforts as part of a metropolis? How do you create identity while linking and leveraging what's around you?

There are a couple of issues that the city has to address in that regard. One of our initiatives in the Community Development Department is to try to work more effectively on an inter-departmental basis, trying to knit together building, planning, and redevelopment, and also to work more closely with other departments like Public Works and Transportation.

There are a number of forces that affect the design of the city, and to simply say that we can solve the city's problems without knitting together these various departments is problematic.

What we need to do is make sure that the various departments in the city aren't working in isolation and that there is a common design and planning purpose. That effort to work collaboratively also has to occur at the sub-regional level, so we're starting to reach out to the Westside Council district offices and L.A. city departments in some of our planning.

We are working closely with the city of Los Angeles, trying to work out design and planning issues with respect to Washington/National. We are working with Westside Council Districts and the county on sub-regional traffic issues. The city has to make that effort in order to be effective in planning and carrying out long-range programs.

We're getting some good traction on our Washington/National project, and we're starting to look at regional traffic solutions that we can put into motion in a relatively straight forward manner to make a difference locally and regionally.