Article by Patricia Kirk
WHAT HAPPENS when 200 developers, planners, environmentalists, academics, city officials, civic leaders and community activists are thrown into a room together, given the task of planning growth for 7.5 million additional people and told they have to agree on it? That's just what the Urban Land Institute and USC Lusk Center for Real Estatecolor> did in October, during "Reality Check on Growth."color>
Held in collaboration with the Southern California Association of Governments, this workshop was the first in a series of exercises that SCAG plans to sponsor in the coming months that will focus on growth issues, including energy, infrastructure, water resources and transportation. These sessions will be used as a training tool for a new growth planning process that community leaders will be encouraged to adopt, according to Donald H. Brackenbush, chair of ULI Los Angeles. Based on the principle that people must understand the dynamics of growth to grapple with its challenges, the exercise encourages leaders to face the changes that are necessary to address issues presented by growth that is expected double the SoCal population over the next 20 years. The five-county region was divided into 40 cells. Twenty-five teams, composed of individuals from a cross-section of interests, were given chips equal to a certain number of low-, mediumand high-density dwellings, as well as chips representing commercial development. Each team decided how many additional people should go in each cell, the retail development needed to provide services and where the employment centers should be located. The results were then tabulated by a team of graduate students under the leadership of John Wilson, USC GIS lab director. They multiplied the number of chips by the number of households represented in a chip by the average number of people living in an average household.
Interestingly, notes Wilson, 65% of the low-density chips were traded in for medium- and high-density chips, as participants realized that the region's predominately low-density pattern of growth would not accommodate the population increase. Overall, participants recommended a 2.8-million population increase for Los Angeles County, 757,000 for Orange County, 1.2 million for Riverside County, 655,000 for San Bernardino County and 510,000 for Ventura County. The greatest number of new dwellings were placed in Downtown Los Angeles, Glendale, Pasadena and East Los Angeles, but major density increases were also recommended for the San Fernando Valley, South Los Angeles and parts of Orange and Riverside counties. Wilson notes that this shows that people were serious about spreading density from the San Fernando Valley and Glendale/Pasadena area all the way to the South Bay.
The participants also wanted to grow substantial new communities in outlying areas, north of the Angeles National Forest and Riverside County. But when job growth was added to the picture, the results might suggest that participants envision a reverse commute, with more people living in established residential centers and working further out in the Inland Empire, Palmdale and Lancaster.