L.A. Council President Garcetti Would ‘Plan by Neighborhood'

You're working on a proposal you call the "12 to 2" plan for the city of L.A. What is the context for this reform plan? How it will change the city of L.A.'s development process, and why is it necessary to reform the planning process?

Los Angeles has done a lousy job of welcoming businesses and entrepreneurs to locate or to grow business in Los Angeles. The "12 to 2" program will make planning more effective and efficient, improve accountability and responsiveness to the applicant and to the neighborhood in project review, and incent planning by neighborhood instead of on a case-by-case basis.

I've talked to so many developers who need to stop at up to 12 different departments, and this is often after we've agreed that the development should happen. I'd like to see that boiled down to two stops. For instance, why send somebody to the counter at Street Trees, when I want to see Street Trees focus on planting and trimming trees? Somebody from the Planning Department or the Department of Building Safety should be knowledgeable enough to check the project's tree plan. If we can boil down those 12 stops to two stops, at the Planning Department and the Department of Building and Safety, we will have a city that I believe will not only pro-business, but also pro-neighborhoods, that doesn't leave great things behind because we killed them by attrition, and that won't discourage the very best developments from helping to build the city we want to see. Each project would be assigned a City Planning Case Manager within the Planning Department who would be involved with the project early in the process, would facilitate public intake, and would be responsible for gathering approval from all the departments and reconciling any inconsistencies. And then, once it's approved, the oversight will be provided by the Department of Building and Safety. This is "12 to 2"-essentially having one-stop planning to locate representatives of both of those departments in one location.

Change is difficult in any institution, especially one the size of Los Angeles. What are the obstacles? Developers, builders, planners, and designers certainly aren't resisting this idea. Where is the opposition-where is the inertia that you must overcome to implement this idea?

There are always turf battles; people feel the need to hang onto the power they've had in the past. But I say to the departments, "Wouldn't you like to have an additional staff member back working on the core issues in your department?" If it's the Fire Department, shouldn't you be working on fire safety, fire prevention, or firefighting and emergency services? If it were Street Trees, wouldn't you love to have an extra body out there planting or trimming trees? We have a good case to take to departments: this will actually give you the resources back for your core job, and let Planning and Building and Safety do their core job. Employees are just as frustrated as the developers with the back-and-forth, and our communities need good planning.

Before David Zahniser moved from L.A. Weekly to the L.A. Times, he wrote a strong indictment of the language and hype around smart growth in L.A. What is your reaction to his analysis of the evolution of the term "smart growth"?

I don't disagree with Zahniser that smart growth has, in many cases, become all things to all people-that it is too broadly and too loosely used. In reaction, we can confirm that what we've had in the last two decades has really been, in many cases, dumb growth. We've added people to the region without planning for it, and we've pretended that if we didn't build anything, folks wouldn't come. We know, however, that over the next two decades, most of our growth will be indigenous. Two-thirds of our population increase in the region will be from people who are already here having children.

I try to focus on the content of good, neighborhood-oriented development, because the average person doesn't know what smart growth means, nor should they because it's been used in so many different ways. They do know that they need a dry cleaner down the street. They know that they need a store that they can walk to instead of having to get into the car and be stuck in traffic. They do know it would be nice to make friends by riding a bike to a local café where they can sit on a sidewalk that is pedestrian-friendly and safe.

There was also a piece by Sharon Bernstein in the Los Angeles Times about transit-oriented development and how not enough people who live near public transit actually use it. We do need to reach a tipping point where people will continue to embrace transit options. But it's not just about people discarding their car. The car is too much a part of Los Angeles' culture and too much of what we need to navigate the very complex terrain here. But when you look at the car trips we take, only one out of three of them is for our commute to and from work. What we have to do as a city is provide options to people for the other two trips, whether that is meeting up with friends at a movie or a trip to visit somebody for a lunch meeting-that people can actually take a couple car trips off of the street each week because they have such options as walking, the subway, the bus, neighborhood circulators like our DASH buses, or bicycles.

In my office, every employee has to carpool, take public transit, walk, or bike to work once a week. It's not a big sacrifice, but in doing so we can quantify how many hundreds of miles of trips we're taking off the street each week and how many pounds of carbon we take out of the air. Those are the sorts of good planning responses that I would say are needed for a reaction to "smart growth."

Do you support the Clarett Group's Blvd6200 project, which is in your district? What are your aspirations for it, and will it capture the spirit of Hollywood?

This is a very important development for Hollywood. It is probably the largest residential development that I'll work on in my time, and it's footsteps away from the most famous intersection in the most famous neighborhood in our town-a block away from Hollywood and Vine. We have the opportunity to fill-in some of the last chunks of empty space, those street-level parking lots that have made people in the past feel unsafe and that have discouraged people from walking along Hollywood Boulevard.

Ironically, it's where we have invested a tremendous amount of money in public transit in this area, and it has always had some of the very best attractions anywhere in Los Angeles-whether it's shows at the Palladium, a musical at the Pantages, or a movie at the ArcLight Cinema. Hollywood and Vine is the greatest place to be.

Blvd6200 tries to capture that spirit of Hollywood-something that is unique, something that is exciting, and something that speaks to tourists as well as the locals. We worked with Clarett on some great features for the project: People who move in will get a free transit pass for the first year so they can take advantage of the Red Line and the buses that go by-if they work Downtown, they can commute for free. We negotiated shared parking spaces for shared car programs like Flexcar, so that people can have a car when they need it, but don't have to pay for the upkeep of their own car and their own parking space. We encouraged more open space so the people who are spilling out of the Pantages will have a place to gather and have a drink or grab a bite to eat. We also worked with them to ensure future access to the Red Line from the north side of the street, too, because if the growth anticipated in Hollywood comes to bear, we're going to need as many entrances to the Red Line as possible.

In a difficult market, they've agreed to put in not only good market-rate housing, but they also voluntarily included ten percent moderate- and low-income housing. In addition, they committed to meeting the LEED standard at the certified level.

The mayor hosted a housing summit this week, and there's a debate going on between Supervisor Yaroslavsky and the mayor over the implementation of SB 1818. What are the priorities, as you see them, for housing and affordable housing in the city today and in the future?

I've spent much of the last six-and-a-half years focused on the issue of affordable housing. To me, it's the most critical issue in relieving traffic and creating a more just and livable city where the middle class and working class live alongside more affluent residents. My housing values and goals are centered around three concepts: one, that we need to encourage the development of housing that is affordable to people who live and work in Los Angeles, and we need to locate it near where they work; two, we need to protect the character of residential neighborhoods; three, we need to cut red tape at City Hall so that housing actually gets built. I think we've covered the three well and have reduced that development pipeline and the time that people spend in red tape. But much of the debate has recently focused on the false dichotomy of either preserving neighborhood character or building affordable housing.

I often point people to Hollywood and Western, where my district office is, which was one of the worst intersections in Los Angeles a decade ago. We now have award-winning architecture with affordable housing and mixed-use projects adjacent to the Red Line subway. We've transformed that from one of the worst parts of town to one of the most exciting, dynamic parts of town. I believe that well-planned, affordable housing can be a catalyst for neighborhood renewal, and that intelligent density around transit can help us preserve lower-density areas just a couple blocks away.

On SB 1818, I share with Supervisor Yaroslavsky the impulse to amend a couple of things to make sure that we don't have four-story buildings abutting one-story homes. And I'll be introducing some legislation to protect our historic areas. But at the same time, we'll encourage more housing to be built. I have more visits to my field office about housing than any other issue, and as we speak and as your readers are reading this, there are dozens of people who are faced with moving to Riverside or Santa Clarita and clogging up our streets or, in some cases, hitting the streets. We have to get SB 1818 implemented, and much of what the mayor was talking about-getting more affordable units built-should move forward this year, too.

It's rarely talked about in the company of prioritized subjects like housing or the environment, but without infrastructure, you can't support the new people and demands on the system. Where are the resources going to come from for building that mobility, the water systems, and the utilities, that make life bearable in a dense neighborhood?

We look too often toward infrastructure to support our current way of life before any sacrifices arise that might alter the infrastructure that we need instead of taking advantage of infrastructure we have. My favorite statistic in L.A. is that each car has, on average, 1.1 passengers. If it had 1.6 passengers, we wouldn't have traffic with our existing infrastructure. So I focus on trying to encourage the small changes in behavior that will save us tremendous amounts of money on the infrastructure side.

Where we need to spend on infrastructure is cleaning up our water throughout the city-Proposition O is a very good start. We need to build schools; we went straight to the voters on that and they embraced it. The infrastructure for our police stations and our libraries and our parks are things where people have said that we are willing to trust you and I think we delivered on that trust in those instances.

In transportation, though, we continue to fall short. That's because of our dependence on the state, and the nature of the state to take away funds and add funds depending on the year. If we don't get serious about going to the voters with bonds to build infrastructure and provide the resources to maintain and staff that infrastructure, we will only have the option of changing our behavior, and that probably won't be enough.