Posted: May 11th, 2005

Updated May 11, 2005

Preamble: a Vision for the City

In the face of the myriad of challenges confronting Los Angeles are a great many opportunities to create healthy communities. Our vision of a healthy community is one that has enough affordable homes for our growing workforce, as well as homeless people; viable alternatives to driving alone, jobs that pay a living wage, streets that are pedestrian and bicycle friendly; and parks and plazas in every neighborhood. Over the next several years, millions of public and private dollars will be invested in the city in building new schools, parks, affordable and market-priced homes, expanded public transit and improved infrastructure. Los Angeles needs a vision for creating healthy communities to guide this new investment.

Promote Healthy Communities
The General Plan of the City of Los Angles includes positive guidelines for creating healthy communities, including encouraging transit oriented development, mixed-use projects, and walkable and bikeable neighborhoods. The Planning Department needs to work with other city departments to ensure their policies and activities do not undermine efforts to create walkable neighborhoods and other planning efforts aimed at creating a healthy and more sustainable city.

General Plans and Community Planning
The Planning Department needs to ensure that the General Plan goals are pursued at the Community Plan, Specific Plan and project levels. Though better than earlier periods, the development of Community Plans still suffer significant delays. Half of the City’s Community Plans haven’t been updated for six years or longer. The absence of a current Plan can demoralize communities who sense that decisions are made ad hoc, without community input. In addition, the Planning Department needs to establish a more pro-active community planning process that is inclusive, participatory and gives voice to the concerns of diverse neighborhoods while meeting citywide goals. Finally, given the wealth of ethnic diversity in Los Angeles, the Planning Department needs to address the specific cultural needs of ethnic communities in planning efforts.

Explore Innovative Planning Approaches
The next Planning Director needs to have experience with innovative planning successes from other urban areas. For example, the City of San Diego has embarked upon a visionary planning process for its future growth, strongly grounded in a commitment to public involvement in all levels of decision-making. Started in 1999, the ambitious effort by the City to update its General Plan has yielded the “City of Villages” plan with support from diverse communities throughout San Diego. Such wide support could not have been gained without meaningful public involvement in every step along the way. Much can be learned from this success and other innovative community planning initiatives, and we urge the future Planning Director to look to these examples for guidance in moving forward with similar efforts here in Los Angeles.

Expand Affordable Housing
Los Angeles lacks enough affordable housing. The creation of a Housing Trust Fund was an important step forward, but still remains under-funded. The City needs additional policy tools to ensure that more affordable units are built and that the issues of homelessness and substandard housing are directly addressed. The Planning Department should support an Inclusionary Zoning ordinance and other affordable housing strategies to insure that new housing developments incorporate units affordable to low and middle-income residents.

Planning for a More Just Los Angeles
There is an enormous divide between low income and higher income people and communities in Los Angeles, which needs to be addressed directly in planning for the City’s future. On the one hand, it is essential that in creating and preserving mixed-income communities we improve rather than lose precious affordable housing, local jobs, and tight-knit working class communities. On the other hand, it is equally essential that new development provide the broadest benefit to the larger community as possible: living wage jobs, local hiring, affordable housing, and neighborhood services. Planning policies must facilitate this kind of high-road development to support a healthy economy for Los Angeles.

Examine Land Use Implications of Big Box Retail
Los Angeles and several neighboring jurisdictions have recently engaged in spirited debates about the appropriateness of “big box” retail stores. The City recently adopted an ordinance to require independent economic assessments of certain categories of new, large retail establishments. The Planning Department needs to implement the new ordinance and require design strategies to minimize the impacts of these giant stores.

Transit-Friendly City
Los Angeles needs a Planning Director who is able to think creatively about how we can break our transportation logjam by focusing on moving people instead of moving cars. A key element is to encourage development along key rail, Metro Rapid and other major transportation routes and to facilitate the development of non-motorized forms of transportation such as bicycles and walking. It is essential for the Planning Director to recognize that most transit dependent residents of Los Angeles are low-income people who travel far to get to their jobs and schools, and need to rely on affordable, efficient and clean transit service for their livelihoods. We need to implement the policy shift outlined in Los Angeles’ General Plan away from trying to build our way out of congestion problems and toward putting new homes and jobs in areas that are well-served by public transit.

Green Building and Renewable Energy
The City of Los Angeles has made advances in the development of green buildings and renewable energy. The new Planning Director should take the next step by exploring additional next level strategies such as offering density bonuses, expedited permitting, fee waivers, and other incentives for developments that use green building practices or include clean energy technologies.

Watershed Planning and Protection
Los Angeles faces a number of challenges in the areas of water supply, storm water management and wastewater treatment. The Planning Department needs to ensure that catalyst projects for the basin’s watershed, particularly those along the Los Angeles River and Ballona Creek and any of the projects to be funded through the recent adoption of Prop O, are integrated into the City’s overall land use plan and streamlined through the permitting process. Moreover, the City has an historic opportunity to increase recreational opportunities, achieve environmental goals, and build community by revitalizing the Los Angeles River.

Re-envision the L.A. River
Sixty five years after being encased in concrete, the Los Angeles river is springing back to life. New parks, bike paths, and walkways are re-greening the river and helping revitalize the neighborhoods it flows through. An impressive array of community groups, environmental organizations, and public agencies have contributed to the river’s rebirth. An historic opportunity is also now available to create those trails, bikeways, riparian habitat and a pedestrian-friendly promenade along the River between the Cornfield state park north of downtown through Chinatown and Olvera Street. These kinds of planning innovations would create the visual bridges that attract people and draw them from one location to another. Such planning innovations further demonstrate how the River could be managed differently, by applying new strategies that can both remove the concrete, restore bird, plant and other kinds of wildlife, and still effectively protect against floods. The new planning director can help coordinate and attract funding and facilitate the land use mechanisms for these efforts, so as to ensure that the River becomes a living symbol of L.A.’s natural beauty and rich cultures.

Community Planning for Safe and Livable Neighborhoods
The City needs to explore community planning tools such as zoning to reduce the number of liquor stores that can help reduce crime, converting trash-strewn alleys and vacant lots into community gardens, and planting trees in and around school yards for shade and energy savings. These in turn are important strategies in helping make neighborhoods safe and more livable.

Planning for Food Justice
More than a dozen years after the 1992 civil unrest drew attention to the need for grocery stores in low income neighborhoods, many parts of Los Angeles still suffer from a ‘grocery gap’ that prevents residents from conveniently accessing fresh, healthy food. This disparity in fresh food access, combined with a lack of open space and safe places to walk and play, has contributed to a rise in obesity and diabetes. The new planning director should improve fresh food access by, among other policies, attracting full service food stores, reducing minimum parking requirements for supermarkets in transit dependent neighborhoods, encouraging food stores to offer shuttles and other innovative transportation options, waiving street use fees for farmer’s markets, identifying vacant lots for community gardens, and developing zoning tools to reduce the over-concentration of fast food establishments in low income neighborhoods.

Create Green Space and Multiple Street Functions
The planning director should work with the Recreation and Parks Department to ensure that there is accessible green space in all parts of the city, whether small neighborhood parks of the size of a building lot, greened alleyways and parking medians, trees that produce a canopy that shade the earth and the asphalt, or shared school facilities. The Planning Department needs to create a dialogue about the function of streets in the city, beyond just moving cars as fast as possible. In residential neighborhoods, often the street is the biggest common open space — these streets should begin to serve multiple functions, including their function as linear parks, better pedestrian corridors, and to provide urban shade to reduce the urban heat island. With the Dept of Sanitation Integrated Regional Plan, there is a need on the part of the Planning Department to think about the effects of regulations on urban run-off, to facilitate a pro-active tree planting policy, and to use planning regulations to assist in the recapture of stormwater, wet and dry. We need a planning director who is willing to reach out to the other departments in the city and develop more integrated approaches to our urban fabric.

Create and Implement Bicycle and Pedestrian Master Plans
The Planning Department has taken too long to prepare an update to the Bicycle Master Plan and its first Pedestrian Master Plan. Bicycling and walking are often overlooked transportation modes that are critical to public health, air quality, and the City’s future as a center of smart growth and mixed use development. The City’s Bicycle Plan needs updating to add more projects and to incorporate the latest thinking. By not having an up-to-date Bicycle Master Plan, we are not eligible for some important funding. Years ago, the City Council directed the Planning Department to develop a Pedestrian Master Plan, yet this has not been developed. Without a vision for improving pedestrian access and safety, new sidewalks are put in with only the most basic standard, while utility boxes and lampposts are placed in the middle and sidewalks often have no buffer from traffic. Grass roots efforts around the country have begun to identify innovative use of sidewalks and street intersections, such as Portland’s city repair movement that has developed its famous mural, street corner trellises, planters, and a solar-powered fountain within an actual intersection, for community building and traffic calming purposes. We also miss out on economic development activities because we are not making enough pedestrian improvements that can help spur the development of walkable shopping districts and urban plazas.

Form-Based Zoning
Progressive cities have recently replaced outdated use-based zoning codes with form-based codes. Form-based zoning specifies the size and bulk of buildings, as well as some design features. It creates urban form that develops appropriate density, coordinates well with transportation and relates to neighborhoods. Form-based codes contain use components, like restricting inappropriate land uses from residential areas, but allow much greater choice as to what land uses are built on land parcels. They are much smaller, simpler and easier to understand than complex use-based codes that list every permitted land use. In practice, form-based zoning codes take time to develop, but are often favored by both developers and residential communities because they tend to create more predictability.

Innovative Parking Approaches
We need a new approach to parking in Los Angeles. In many locations, the City should replace parking codes that require a set amount of parking in each new building, with a requirement to pay in lieu parking fees that contribute to shared parking structures. Shared parking takes advantage of the fact that different land uses have varied peak demand periods. Commercial uses often experience peaks in the daytime, whereas residential buildings need more parking at night. By sharing, less parking overall is needed. This allows for less consumption of space and significantly reduces the cost of new buildings. Shared parking is also more equitable than dedicated parking in every building, as people who walk, bike, and use transit are no longer required to subsidize drivers through higher rents and prices. Shared parking enlivens streets by putting people on sidewalks, making our streets safer and more commercially viable. It also improves the architecture of buildings since most can be built without the burden of fitting parking onto the site. Shared parking also offers an opportunity to construct new parking in older neighborhoods that were built without parking.

A New Mission Statement
The Planning Department’s current mission statement is: “To provide sound professional Land Use guidance and the highest level of technical service to achieve safe and healthy residential neighborhoods and a secure business climate which fosters sustained economic growth.” We need a new mission statement embracing the goals of a healthy and sustainable city for the Department and for the City itself.

Lois Arkin, Cooperative Resources & Services Project/Los Angeles Eco-Village
Erica Baltodano, Center for Law and the Public Interest
Matt Benjamin, Los Angeles County Bike Coalition
Kenneth A. Breisch, USC School of Architecture
Malcolm Carson, Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles (LAFLA)
Darrell Clarke, Friends 4 Transit Expo
Helen Colman, Hyde Park Organizational Partnership for Empowerment
John R. Dale, Fields Devereaux Architects and Engineers
Marqueece Dawson, Community Coalition
Peter Dreier, Urban and Environmental Policy Program - Occidental College
Bob Erlenbusch, Los Angeles Coalition to End Hunger & Homelessness
Robert Garcia, Center for Law in the Public Interest
Carol Goldstein, UCLA Department of Urban Planning
Robert Gottlieb, Urban and Environmental Policy Institute - Occidental College
Ann Gray, L.A. Architect Magazine
Tim Grabiel, Natural Resources Defense Council
Larry Gross, Coalition for Economic Survival (CES)
Gilda Haas, Strategic Alliance for a Just Economy (SAJE)
Alvivon Hurd, Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN)
Rufina Juarez, South Central Farmers
Clare Marter Kenyon, Mt. Washington Homeowners Alliance
Alan Loomis, Moule & Polyzoides Architects and Urbanists
Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris, UCLA Department of Urban Planning
Elizabeth McClellan, Quality of Life Enhancements Committee - Empowerment Congress Southeast Area Neighborhood Development Council
Jerilyn López Mendoza, Environmental Justice Project Office - Environmental Defense
Alexis Moreno, Latino Urban Forum
Deborah Murphy, LA Walks
Mary Nichols, Institute for the Environment - UCLA
Gloria Ohland, Reconnecting America and the Center for Transit-Oriented Development
Stephanie Pincetl, Institute of the Environment, UCLA
Katherine Perez, Transportation and Land Use Collaborative
Lara Regus, UCLA Urban Planning Student
Stephanie Reich, AIA
Joel Reynolds, Natural Resources Defense Council
Neil Richman, UCLA Department of Urban Planning
James Rojas, Latino Urban Forum
Amanda Shaffer, Urban and Environmental Policy Institute
Ryan Snyder, Urban Planner - Member of the Mid City WEST Community Council
Roxana Tynan, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy
Scott Wilson, North East Trees
Elva Yañez, Northeast Los Angeles Open Space Coalition
Mark Vallianatos, Urban and Environmental Policy Institute