The 17 million people of the Los Angeles Basin -- a region embracing five counties (Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, San Bernardino and Riverside) and 88 cities -- have traditionally been bound more by a shared geography than a common vision. “We are together but separate,” said Dan Garcia, former president of the Los Angeles city planning commission and a speaker at the “Reality Check on Growth” conference held Oct. 10 at the USC Campus.
Presented by the Lusk Center for Real Estatecolor> and the Los Angeles District Council of the Urban Land Institute, the conference brought together traditional developers, builders, public officials, environmentalists, urban planners and others for a day-long “growth visioning” exercise. It’s a new planning approach designed to bring people in a neighborhood, city or an entire region together to get beyond polarized positions, work out differences and agree on a growth plan. It’s based on the idea that a compelling, unifying vision, not narrow parochial interests, should drive land use decisions.
Under the guidance of the Southern California Association of Government, more visioning exercises will be held across the Los Angeles region over the next two years for a crosssection of community and business leaders and citizens. The goal is to establish visioning as the new standard for local and regional planning. “This is an enormously important project,” said Felicia Marcus, chief operating officer of the Trust for Public Land. “We need to help people feel connected to something larger than themselves.” A similar visioning exercise was tried with great success in Salt Lake City and resulted in an innovative growth plan for the area.
At the USC conference, chaired by Stuart Mork, senior vice president of the Newhall Land and Farming Company, the question was how to plan for the most rapid growth in the history of the state and region. Stuart Gabriel, director of the Lusk Center, noted that between 1990 and 2020, California’s population is expected to increase by 15 million, equal to the population of Florida. The Los Angeles region’s population is expected to increase by 6 million, equal to the population of Chicago. Raphael Bostic, director of the Lusk Center’s Casden Real Estate Forecast, said that to keep up with a 40% population increase, the region will have to create about 2.5 million new jobs by 2025.
Neither the state nor the region is prepared for such growth. Gabriel said California ranks dead-last in spending on infrastructure. In Los Angeles and Orange counties, only about a third of the housing necessary to meet current demand is being built. In Ventura County, a worker needs to earn $22 an hour – more than three times the minimum wage – to rent a two-bedroom apartment. School construction lags demand for classrooms. James McCormack Jr., director of facilities for the Los Angeles Unified School District, one of the nation’s largest with 77,000 students, said that “only a handful of schools have been built in the last 30 years.” The district currently is building 80 new schools and “we’ll need 40 more after that to get kids off the buses and into neighborhood schools,” McCormack said.
Participants at the USC conference were challenged to create a vision for the region. “Imagine what might be – what ought to be – for our children and our children’s children,” said Daniel Mazmanian, dean of USC’s School of Policy, Planning and Development. “You are going to have to think outside the box,” Bostic advised.
That became evident when the participants were divided into small teams, assigned to tables with large maps of existing land uses in the Los Angeles region, and instructed on the exercise by Mork and Katherine Perez, executive director of the Southern California Transportation and Land Use Coalition. Each team was given 582 stickers or “chips” representing the land that would be needed (about 956 square miles) to provide housing, jobs, public infrastructure and community services for 6 million more people over the next 25 years. The chips were divided into seven categories: low-, medium- and high-rise residential ranging from three to 48 units per acre; low- and high-rise office buildings and single-story manufacturing/warehousing ranging from seven to 35 jobs an acre , and a category for other uses such as agriculture or mining for which space wasn’t allocated. Each team was asked to place chips on the maps where it thought growth should go.
Early in the exercise, some of the teams began to think of how to make more efficient use of land by increasing housing density in specific parts of the region, and they traded in some of their low-density housing chips for medium- and high-rise chips. They also used their commercial chips to locate job-creating commercial uses in areas of housing concentration. This resulted in areas that were more self-contained, with a better balance of jobs and housing. But the teams didn’t stop there. Some suggested transportation system improvements such as a high-speed rail link from Ventura to downtown Los Angeles along U.S. 101, with concentrations of housing and commercial development near transit stations. Some team members proposed more parks and open space for a growing population.
As would be expected of teams in which developers, environmentalists and other traditional antagonists were represented, agreements were reached only after much discussion and debate. At one table, a proposal of two developers to increase housing in Palmdale was opposed by a representative of a housing group who said it would encourage sprawl and traffic congestion. They settled on putting more commercial uses in the city so more people could work near where they live.
Following the visioning exercise, the recommendations of each of the teams were compiled by USC students under the direction of John Wilson, director of the USC GIS Research Laboratory, and a summary was presented to conference participants. More medium and high-density housing and commercial development was proposed for a number of areas such as downtown Los Angeles, Pasadena, Glendale, Ventura, Riverside, San Bernardino and parts of Orange County and near transit stops along with more green space and more community services like day care. Specific uses such as more manufacturing/industrial were suggested in places like the San Gabriel Valley. One group proposed an entirely new master-planned community in the Antelope Valley.
Eventually, all of these ideas will have to be tested against reality. But for a day at least, the conference participants had a chance to suspend disbelief and dream of possibilities for the Los Angeles region. From such dreams will come a vision. It is a vision that will guide land use decisions affecting the lives of millions of people. As Garcia noted, “we and our children will be bound by our decisions.”