Distinguished Panel Advises New L.A. City Planning Director Michael LoGrande

Jane Blumenfeld, former principal city planner, L.A. City Planning Dept.: Invest departmental resources efficiently and effectively so that when the recession ends, we'll have in place robust and meaningful community plans, regulations, and rules to clearly guide developers to do what we all want done-which is to make great places and spaces-and to make it difficult to do what we don't want done in our neighborhoods and the city. These are doable things.

Bill Boyarsky, columnist for Truthdig and LA Observed; Former L.A. Times city editor and columnist: The planning director should first spend a huge amount of time going out into the community. Not to one constituency-go out all over the city, new places night after night, and attend community meetings to build communication and friendship. Take crap with good faith and listen. That will build up a relationship with people in the city, not that the planning director will be able to use it to threaten the mayor or the council, but it will be a strong relationship that the planning director can use.

Secondly, it's extremely important to be on the same page with the mayor. We do not have a weak mayor system...We have a strong mayor system. The public doesn't fully understand what the new charter did: it empowered the mayor. It's important for the new planning director to be on the same wavelength as the mayor. If they're not on the same wavelength, then the person should go somewhere else.

Vaughan Davies, principal, director of urban design, AECOM Design + Planning: I want to reiterate the value of coalition building. There are agencies that are ready to be action oriented, like the groundwork that CRA/LA has done in neighborhoods, building relationships, and the work Metro is doing. This is a time to act and to seek out those who are action-oriented and can deliver.

The thing not to do is to not leave us until we've got some great streets.

Ventura Mayor Bill Fulton: When I first ran for office in the city of Ventura, my position on planning, very simply, was to decide what you want, decide what you don't want, and make it easy for developers to build what you want and hard for them to build what you don't want. Seven years later, I cannot tell you how much I underestimated the complete impossibility of accomplishing that goal. But I still try to stick to it.

Michael, if you do one thing, you should do one plan that sticks. I don't think it has to be a community plan, it could be more of a specific plan. I thought the plan that CRA/LA and the Planning Department was thinking about for Old Town Reseda was a great idea. That was at the Community Plan level, working together, using CRA resources, and using somebody else's money, to do planning in a way that is meaningful to people. The Cornfields was the same thing. If you do the plan at a scale that is meaningful to people-and in many cases you'll have to find other money for that; send it to a council member who understands it-and you make that stick, it will increase everybody's stake in the plan-making process in the city of L.A.

The thing that you don't want to do is cave when the first powerful developer challenges that kind of community planning. If you cave on the first one, they're going to roll you forever. Before then you might want to talk to the mayor about not caving. You might want to talk to the mayor about how it is going to look like he's being rolled too. You have to make your cause his cause.

Emily Gabel Luddy, former director, Urban Design Studio, L.A. City Planning Dept.: The mayor has three more years, so you better get started. I would advise and encourage you to be absolutely strategic. The most obvious one for Antonio's legacy, and the thing he's most interested in, is transit. That leads to transit oriented development.

Jane talked about having 50 opportunities and 20 TODs, but the vision is nothing unless it's implemented. So far there have been, as near as I can tell, no written words to actually implement these wonderful developments around future transit stations. That needs to be done, and it needs to engage other city departments that deal with the public realm, over which we have tremendous influence. They're ready to be partners. Be strategic.

The second thing I would suggest is-and you've already shown great capability to do this-to appeal to everybody else's enlightened self-interests. That goes for the councilmen, the mayor and his desires for a complete legacy, and the communities, which are looking for affirmation that the Planning Department is not about approving every project that comes along; they are also about conserving neighborhoods that have a great deal of character.

Within the Housing Element, there's a little program that talks about those rare and wonderful 1920s multi-family neighborhoods-they're in Wilshire, West Adams, Hollywood. The policy says, "Let's down-zone those areas so that those lovely two- and three-story Spanish with balcony architecture of the '20s and '30s don't get wiped out by some new mega-project that is only required to comply with the zoning code because it's already zoned to that density." Implementation of that policy is a balancing act between encouraging new development, TOD, and conserving the character of neighborhoods.And it's already there. If you rely on the community plan revision program to do that, you'll be retiring by the time the last plan cycle comes through again. Be strategic, pull out those strings, and help balance the equation.

Christopher Hawthorne, L.A. Times architecture critic: I want to say a few words about, and on behalf of, architecture. This is a city that has been, for much of its history, honored with innovative and risk-taking architecture, most of all in the private realm and the realm of the single family house and residential architecture. For a number of reasons, that is no longer the case. We're losing that reputation, and opportunities for architects to be forward-looking work are shrinking. One of the reasons is, of course, that we have run out of room. One of the disappointments of the boom here, if we compare L.A. to other great American cities, New York and Chicago, is that those cities have a legacy of very interesting, innovative, and inspiring projects that came out of the boom years. They somehow marshaled that money and energy and turned it into civic minded projects. L.A. lacks that legacy from the last ten years.

I would encourage you to think about why that is. We talked a lot about transit-oriented development and these transit corridors-there seems to be a kind of political bargain, maybe it is a fragile one, maybe it is a Faustian one. That's the one place we can talk about density in the city because developers are happy talking about it there, and more progressive-minded planners and people who think about the future of the city can talk about it there too.

That has meant a frenzy of development along those corridors, most of it being not very good architecture. A lot of the rest of the city, the single family neighborhoods, have kind of been frozen in amber, with no development at all happening.

I would encourage you to, even though this is kind of the third rail of politics, look at the R1 neighborhoods. People who have moved into those neighborhoods-I live in one-really want that change. You'll hear the opposite from a lot of very vocal people. But there are a lot of people in this city who really see innovative work in those neighborhoods as the key and the path to recapturing some of that architectural innovation. Going back to that kind of density that we did really well in the '20s and '30s, that kind of mid-level density that took advantage of the climate here and the architectural history. One of the ways that's possible is taking the cap off a little bit in those R1 neighborhoods and allowing some reasonable density. A lot of architects would have a lot of really smart ideas about what to do in those neighborhoods.

John Kaliski, AIA: principal, Urban Studio-LA; past president, AIA|LA: The one thing I would do if I was in your shoes is to visualize Los Angeles. I mean draw. While they're much more sophisticated in map-making than they certainly were ten or 15 years ago, the Planning Department does not draw the future of the city. The one thing I would draw-and I would draw it all the time, and I would have tons of drawings-would be how the single family units in this city can be conserved and coexist simultaneously next to the intensified corridors and intensified transit. Part of the reason there's no credibility in Los Angeles is because we, more so than some cities, have not visualized what the future can look like.

I would not ignore the neighborhood councils. The neighborhood council process got off to a little bit of a bumpy start, but it's a fantastic tool. Somebody talked about the fact that there are a lot of neighborhoods where people don't know the language of planning. There aren't a lot of resources to go around. There were a small number of resources that could be directed toward the neighborhood councils to make them better partners in the development process. That is the way I would go, precisely because they are in the charter and ignoring them is simply going to perpetuate a type of negative conversation that shouldn't occur in Los Angeles.

Renata Simril, V.P., Forest City: Don't forget the L.A. River Master Plan. That 32-mile spine that runs down the center of Los Angeles connects the northernmost part of the city to the Port of L.A. It has inspired tremendous vision. The work of the River Revitalization Corporation and the city departments that have been involved in that, most notably led by Councilmember Ed Reyes, have done a phenomenal job. That has the opportunity to really create a great 21st century city.

Martha Welborne, chief planning officer, Metro: Yes, vision is needed for the river. We at Metro could partner. I would also emphasize something that Jane Blumenfeld said earlier that I thought was key: Don't start a project by counting votes. Doing professional planning is important, and it is your charge. I feel the same where I am. I know how hard that is, but that's key to remember. The last thing I'd say is, because the mayor just has three years remaining on his last term, maybe you can convince him that you should have a goal to use some of his political capital on whatever it is that is your priority. It might work out.

Elva Yanez, policy coordinator, Los Angeles Collaborative for Environmental Health and Justice: I'd like to ask Michael to work with some of the communities I work in to develop an initiative that links municipal planning policies with economic development strategies and green technologies to protect public health, improve quality of life, revitalize low income neighborhoods, and create more safety.

The last thing I'd like to offer is that five years ago a letter was written about the need for a planning director who would share the vision that was laid out today and a plan for a livable city. The letter was signed by community activists, academics, and researchers, and I urge you to take a look at it. There's a new letter that's going to be coming out, and if you want to sign on to it, I urge you to go to Occidental College's UEPI website and take a look at it.