Former Planning Commission Chair Says L.A's New Planning Director Needs To Be A Mediator

George, some of the immediate tasks for LA'S new mayor will be to select a director of planning and make appointments to the Planning Commission and the Redevelopment Commission. With the city's planning and transportation infrastructure under stress, what ought to be the qualifications of the candidates for these planning appointments?

Like any chief executive, the mayor needs to prioritize the competing, conflicting functions of the planning department and select a director according to those priorities. In selecting commissioners, he will have to reconcile a desire to fulfill any program goals he may have for those agencies by appointing commissioners qualified to fulfill those goals, with the enormous pressure he will feel to use the positions to reward those who helped elect him, with a deep nod to diversity.

In my opinion, the director of planning needs political and mediation skills because planning in Los Angeles is driven almost entirely by interest group politics, and not by a vision of an ideal urban form like the City Beautiful movement at the turn of the 20th century or the New Urbanism. The call for "smart growth"-- mixed use, high density development-- in practice, does not advance a coherent aesthetic, lacks a prescription or formula for determining optimal densities or ideal mixed use configurations, and contains inadequate guidance for securing the integrity of adjoining lower densities areas that could be badly impacted by the intrusion of high density enclaves. Zoning ordinances emerge in LA as responses to political agendas that often relate only tangentially to land use goals, like the anti-Wal Mart superstore ordinance. The energies of the Planning Department are necessarily directed to political mediation. It is best to recognize that without surrendering completely to it.

There is more to good planning, isn't there?

There can be, of course, but American municipal planning has never started with an urban vision in the way the most attractive European cities have channeled private development to serve public ends. For the most part, we reject the European notion that the government should strongly dictate the location and timing of new development. We don't yearn for a Planning Director like Moses to lead us out of the wilderness into the promised land. Most of us love southern California because we are already living in the promised land; we just want to keep it that way. It is not really the market we defer to, either, or we wouldn't experience phenomenal overbuilding from time to time. For us, planning is about reconciling the demands of specific interest groups: homeowners associations, unions, home builders, commercial developers, environmental advocates.

Considering the housing deficit in the city, it seems that there is a need for greater density. At the same time, we need adequate infrastructure to support that density if we are to have livable neighborhoods. Do you agree?

Well, of course, that's absolutely right. But we don't want to make the common error of confusing the affordability problem with a housing deficit. People living below the poverty line have a serious housing affordability problem that can't be solved with the construction of expensive new housing, regardless of the density at which it is built. (I studied whether the "trickle down" theory worked, during the administration of Richard Nixon. We found little evidence of it. Even buoyant rates of new construction didn't alleviate the housing affordability problem for people of limited means). Still, to accommodate the astonishing growth we are experiencing, we will need to keep building our heads off. Traffic congestion will reach the frustrating levels found in Manhattan. We will have to ration our woefully inadequate transportation funding carefully.

How, then, does the public sector do the requisite planning?

I think the way the Grand Avenue plan emerged is an ideal model for us, separately funded, staffed independent of existing bureaucracies, ad hoc, goal specific, and time bound. A city administration that wants to figure out the best way of using scarce public resources for housing and transportation needs to create an entity encompassing all the relevant jurisdictions, define specific targets or objectives, select a chief of staff chosen for the mission, and a board with the political muscle to give the resulting planning effort half a chance of success.

What should the incoming administration do to successfully integrate transportation, land use planning, and private sector initiatives with economic development to create livable communities in the city?

Let's start by asking honestly whether the city is in a position to command resources that are substantial enough to make a difference. If it isn't, any talk of this kind is just hot air. For example, cities that don't have access to considerable transportation funding should accept the fact that there are only two ways to allocate roadways: congestion or tolls. For the most part, we've chosen congestion as the more equitable means. Why spend scarce taxpayer dollars in planning if you can't afford to implement your plans?

Years ago, the city had a first rate group of transportation planners and let them go. They were the ones, when the valley was nothing but a sparsely settled residential outpost, who led the campaign not to widen the cross mountain roads. Their idea was the more difficult it was to cross from the valley to the basin, the more quickly the valley would develop its own urban facilities. They were right. We could use a well staffed special purpose agency to study the land use-transportation connection, and work out our options for spending scarce public funds.

If the city has the stomach for serious infrastructure and land use planning, then there needs to be a separate and distinct entity that does just that. If funded only to draw plans, though, without resources dedicated to implementation, why bother?

There is more than $11 billion in school facilities bond dollars available in this metropolitan area. In addition, Mayor-elect Villaraigosa intends to chair the MTA and to secure federal and state dollars for the region's transportation agenda. Are these resources sufficient for long term regional and city planning?

Those are very substantial resources, and it would certainly make sense to design a process around them. I'm not trying to revive the ghost of Robert Moses. But we must recognize that in the city of LA, the capacity to realize any coherent plan is stymied by the fact that our city council members are elected by district and not at large. Advocates of smart growth point to downtown Portland, Oregon, as a model. Portland's city council is elected at large. They can afford to concentrate resources in selected locales instead of having to spread them around thinly to cover every district. This also has important implications for redevelopment activity as well.

You have traveled extensively to study land use planning in cities across the world. Which cities do it well? Which cities can serve as models for Los Angeles?

Among the cities with the best new development are Stockholm, Copenhagen, Berlin and Barcelona. In all four cases, the public assumes that the role of government is to spend a lot of money intelligently on public infrastructure and define the parameters and set the locations for new private development. Planning comes easily because Socialist parties play a big part in local politics. But even conservative parties share the same urban agenda because citizens in these places possess a deep sense of place and hold government accountable for changes in the quality of public spaces between one election and the next. This isn't true in Los Angeles. As many commentators have rightly observed, people in southern California identify with their neighborhood or locality, not with an iconic regional city center as they do in European cities.

Lastly, what advice would you give the mayor-elect in terms of what he should be looking for in candidates for the Planning Commission, Redevelopment Commission and the planning director position?

My advice is to choose a planning director with no identifiable persona as pro or anti development and no particular urban "vision". What is needed is a good administrator, a tolerable public speaker though not necessarily a spell binder, a person who will be regarded as meticulously fair and honest in reconciling intense political contents, and who looks convincing on the 6 PM TV news. It would help if that person were not too parochial, if he or she had professional familiarity with planning and development in the other cities in the region, the major cities of the west where an alarming number of LA's middle class residents are headed, and world cities that are managing to become more livable despite rapid growth such as Sydney and Berlin. The reason for this is not because we are in a position to graft their planning arrangements onto our body politic but because sometimes they have found solutions to urban problems that might help us out of a local logjam.

Choosing planning and redevelopment commissioners is a challenge. There are many ways to go. Should commissioners have expertise in the underlying topic area? I would have thought this would make for a better commission. But, then, how do you reward campaign contributors who, as a group, possess only one common characteristic: robust checking accounts.

Personally, I would avoid true believers advancing some particular agenda. But a case could also be made for a Noah's ark approach, placing people on the commissions with strong opposing viewpoints representing diverse and antagonistic interests, and letting them work out their own compromises.