WUF Explores Westside Cities' Slow-Growth Ballot Initiative Trend-Is Ballot Box Planning Reasonable?

Woodie Tescher, principal and director of Planning and Urban Design, PBS&J: On November 4, the voters in Santa Monica will be...considering an initiative that will limit the amount of potential future developments in the city, within the calendar year, at about 75,000 square feet, as a strategy in response to the changes in traffic that have been experienced recently. On the same day, the city of Beverly Hills will consider a measure that will uphold, or possibly reject, the approval of a project for the redevelopment of the Beverly Hilton site-a project that incorporate a new hotel and a number of condominium projects.

There is a growing brushfire of initiatives that basically take the approval authority away from the elected decision makers, placing the approval authority for development of our communities in the hands of the electorate. There are several ballot measures this November in Redondo Beach-one by local community groups and another counter zoning measure placed on the ballot by the City Council. That initiative is even more restrictive. That initiative basically would eliminate every non-residential project in the city to 40,000 square feet and housing developments to 25 additional units. Most importantly, for those of us who believe in mixed-use and transit-orientated development, the initiative would limit any residential development in a mixed-use project, in a non-residential district, to 8.8 units per acre. Again, the genesis of this in Redondo Beach is traffic, and the change of community character.

In Oxnard, there is a ballot initiative that will require ballot approval for any commercial or industrial development of 10,000 square feet and housing of more than five homes, unless all intersections within five miles of the proposed project demonstrate within the preceding year that will have a level of service "C" or better.

...Why are these kinds of things happening out there in the world? Well first, all of us realize that development patterns in Southern California are changing. We thought we had inexhaustible land and resources on the edge that we could move out to. As we've exhausted land, we've been thinking for the last few years about refocusing our growth because we're continuing to grow even though we have exhausted that land. We're rethinking about population. We're beginning to realize that we need to overlay somehow that growth into the fabric of our existing communities. At the same time, those transportation systems that accommodated that original sprawling growth were never realistically designed to accommodate that amount of growth. It's sort of a chicken and egg situation. We're adding development to a city transportation system that is accounting for a sprawl while we're battling density.

Because of all of this change, the visibility of the traffic and the change of communities is what we see in all of these initiatives. In some cases the voter initiatives have been precipitated by the fact that many of the development entitlement decisions made by electeds have been inconsistent with the rules and regulations that the city has already set in place. For example, the issue in Beverly Hills is a General Plan Amendment. The project deviates from the rules the community bought into. There was community ownership of those rules. In other cases, some of the issues and the challenges to growth have been in reaction to projects that have been approved consistent with the policy, general, and zoning plans already in place. In Redondo Beach the reaction against mixed-use and approval of mixed-use projects is contrary to the General Plan, which emphasizes mixed-use along commercial corridors and transit lines.

This raises questions: What are the causes of that? Did people ever believe in the General Plan? Did people understand the General Plan when they originally gave approval? Have those conditions in the community changed so much that the General Plan no longer has validity? Or is it that we're now hearing in that community from people who were never there to say previously, but who are now in positions of power to affect the decision?

Concurrent with all of this, we are faced in our communities with a growing set of national, state, and regional legislation to foster infill and greater densities. AB 32 requirements foster the reduction of our greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2010, to 1990 levels, and even below that. Beyond that, we have had an activist Attorney General's Office that has been extensively involved in looking at the EIRs and General Plans throughout the community, and they're directly engaged and involved in a number of these. They are actually requesting, and making sure, that changes are made to these General Plans to accommodate infill. But at the same time, we have the community saying, "No. We don't want that infill development." So we have this incredible confrontation going on, which will be manifested further by implementation of SB 375, which was just signed by the Governor a few weeks ago.

We're going to be talking about these issues here today: Is ballot box planning reasonable?

Darrell Clark, former Santa Monica planning commissioner: To set the stage in Santa Monica, there is a decades-long tension between visions of where the development in Santa Monica is going and the fondness remembered by those who grew up there-of that small little beach town with older buildings at a pedestrian scale.

...The good news is that we have downtown mixed-use development. But what quality of development did we get? Is it really pedestrian friendly? Does it rise to the ideals that we've seen in all of these different conferences about smart growth? I've coined a power term "dumb density." This is dense, but is it really transit orientated? Is the plan really walkable? Does it provide the amenities that we want?

...There has been a lot of talk for the last two years about how we need a new traffic measurement methodology, because traffic seems to be getting worse. We've gotten a huge amount of new commercial office space. What was projected to happen in 20 years in the 1980s General Plan ended up happening in about six. Between the Water Garden, which is now called the Yahoo Center, and the Arboretum, they finally drew the line when there was talk about redeveloping a lot of the city-owned land next to the airport-a business park-which was stopped by a citizen revolt. The residential population of Santa Monica is 90,000 people. The daytime population is alleged to be over 200,000. If you are in Santa Monica trying to get out of town, if you're not on the freeway heading East, North, or South by 2:30 in the afternoon, you're too late. These are the problems of success.

We have had things that have come out of that: the Land Use and Circulation Element process (LUCE). Our new planning director, Eileen Fogarty, has done a wonderful job of involving the community from a smart growth perspective. We've held a lot of public meetings as an opportunity to talk about smart growth, and to discuss moving people rather than moving vehicles. How can we provide mobility without necessarily moving vehicles?

I come from a strong smart growth perspective, which left me in a quandary regarding the RIFT measure. I know the folks that got together out of concern about development both downtown and across the city...There was this feeling that the City Council could not be reigned in because the majority of the City Council was pro-development. The majority tends to be pro-development versus anti-development, which is a bit of a stereotype. Diana Gordon decided a year ago that an initiative was the way to go, and then proceeded in that direction. She concluded that the biggest impact is from commercial development-it has been in the past. She recognized that no, this wouldn't reduce the impact that was already there, but would at least reduce additional future impact.

RIFT sets a limit of 75,000 square feet of net commercial office space in the city within the next 15 years. There are a number of exceptions of how existing floor area can be credited if it's demolished and redone. There are several exemptions: Administrative projects are exempted, hospital space is one of those exceptions, but the general idea is 75,000 square feet.

...A few weeks ago I named myself the best-informed undecided person in Santa Monica on this issue. In looking at the arguments for and against it I decided that because of the imbalance that I would go with "yes" on RIFT.

The new statement on the website says, "It would dramatically reduce growth of traffic in our streets by reducing future commercial development by half." Commercial development typically causes three to four times the amount of traffic as residential. Among the City Council, two members have come out in favor of it, Kevin LaFleur and Bobby Schriver. Kevin LaFleur wrote an op-ed, which said, "Proposition T puts a reasonable annual cap on commercial development in our city, helps to slow the growth of traffic congestion and curbs the erosion of our quality of life." Again, the focus is on preventing the situation from getting that much worse.

Some people think of it as "what is in the LUCE, as opposed to the RIFT initiative." I see it as "LUCE by itself, versus RIFT plus LUCE." What can still happen under the proposed LUCE in terms of transit orientated development around future Exposition Line stations and other main bus corridor locations? I feel reasonably comfortable that the ground retail can still happen, and that residential can still happen. But that we are still jobs rich and housing poor. I don't see it as a major impediment to develop just one.

Gwynne Pugh, Santa Monica Planning Commission chair: We have about 90,000 people in the city-55,000 that work. Of those 55,000 people, about 80 percent leave the city to work. That leaves us with about 10,000 people that remain in the city on a daily basis that live and work in the city. We have something close to 75,000 jobs. You can see that we have about 65,000 plus people coming into our city. We have people coming into the city for business meetings, we have quite a large tourist industry, and we have Santa Monica College, which draws close to 30,000 people. That's how the number of about 150,000 comes about.

That obviously generates a significant amount of traffic. In addition to that, we are a flow-through city. We have people coming from Malibu, going to West L.A., and going from North to South. We have a freeway. We have State Route 1. We have an incredible amount of traffic moving through our city. Some of it is generated by the city; some of it is going through into the city-for the reason that we have been quite successful as a city over the last 20 years.

We've gone through this Land Use and Circulation Element update, which looks very closely at these issues. This has been a highly participatory process. Well over 6,000 people have gone to about 15-20 public meetings. There has been outreach; there have been surveys; there has been all of this kind of stuff going on. This is, in many ways, a plan that has been generated and crafted to really look at the quality of the city. And it is also about neighborhood preservation. The neighborhoods are not changing in any way whatsoever. There are selected areas that we feel we really need to look at the way in which we could develop them in a more effective manner. The idea is that we can live and work and shop all within that neighborhood, generally within about a quarter mile radius so that we can walk to most of the things we need for our daily activities. We might not be able to walk to work, but at least we can shop, go to the coffee shops, and do all of those kinds of things.

In addition to that, we are looking at public transit stations-the Expo Line. One of the things we have is Bergamot Station. We have our preexisting industrial areas-the Light Manufacturing Studio District and the M1 Manufacturing District. These are fundamental underdeveloped areas at the moment, and there is the opportunity to really start to correct the imbalance between jobs and housing. Housing doesn't just happen of its own accord. We need a certain kind of housing, too. One of the reasons why so many people are leaving and so many are coming in is that the affordability of the housing is a real problem. The hospitals, RAND, the city, etc., can't pay enough so that employees can actually afford to live in the city.

Part of what we must generate is the right kind of housing: affordable housing and work force housing. The LUCE is specifically generated to look at and correct that problem. How is that happening? Part of what we are looking to do is to adjust the housing equation. It might include creating more commercial space, but there are very specific things that have to be in place for that to happen. For example, Bergamot Station, which would be a transit stop, and other transportation corridors along Wilshire are an opportunity for redeveloping the ground floor and putting housing above it.

The problem with the RIFT initiative is that it does not make the connection between reducing the commercial development and, in fact, reducing traffic. That has not been proven, and in fact, it may well increase traffic. For example, if Bergamot Station is only developed as a residential establishment, which, by the way, would most likely be high-end, making it very difficult to generate workforce housing. Inevitably there would be some affordable housing, but we will have a gap in there. What do people do when they come back in the evenings from having worked all day downtown? They need to go buy some eggs, or they want to go out and meet with friends, or go to a coffee shop. They are going to have to get into their cars and drive some place. That is a real issue. RIFT doesn't deal with the issues of the completeness of the neighborhood and the fabric of the city.

With regard to small-scale development: The problem that we have here is that, while 4,000 square feet of retail, for instance, along the boulevard seems like it falls within the context, it does not. If we are going to put the residential in as well, it will become a project that is not a "by-right" development, which is what the city is looking to do. If it's just a replacement of 4,000 square feet that's fine, but it doesn't address the issue of the housing that we really need to deal with here. It's going to make this a difficult project to generate.

Part of the problem is the uncertainty. Are we going to go through the first two years of development process only to discover that we can't build the project because it doesn't fall within the 75,000? I think it's going to stop all commercial development and the other benefits that we were looking to achieve by this. So I think that is the real jeopardy here-a complex, nuanced city process that looks at the quality of the city, that preserves over 90 percent of the city in its existing form, and is only changing it in very selected areas-is a real problem. It will eviscerate the fine-tuning quality that the LUCE achieves. It will not achieve what it has set out to achieve.