By Kerry Cavanaugh Staff Writer So me 200 politicians, business and civic leaders met Thursday to figure out how metropolitan Los Angeles will cram 6 million more people over the next 25 years into an area already notorious for traffic jams, housing shortages and sprawl. Think neighborhoods built around light rail and express bus stops. Think new cities sprouting in the Antelope Valley and Inland Empire. Think more high-rises in urban areas and more subdivisions on the rolling hills of Ventura County. The plans are simply marks on maps now. But organizers of the daylong workshop at the University of Southern California hope the brain-storming session is the beginning of a coherent regional strategy to handle the booming growth expected in the metropolitan area. Current planning is essentially "every community for itself," explained Jim Bickhart, policy director for the Southern California Transportation and Land Use Coalition. "That works at the local level but not at the regional level," he said. Organizers hope leaders will think beyond their city limits and about the Los Angeles region as a whole when approving residential developments and economic ventures. Next year, the Southern California Council of Governments will conduct more sessions with the specific goal of changing zoning policies. In the meantime, participants chewed over the numbers. L.A.'s population will grow by about 33 percent by 2025, according to estimates compiled by event organizers. Childbirth will fuel the increase, but foreign immigration will continue to swell the Southland head count. And new Angelenos will need some 2.4 million jobs. "This is something that's going to happen. We can't wish it away," said Raphael Bostic, director of the USC Casden Real Estate Economics Forecast. So he invited elected officials, civic planners and land developers to the task of placing those new arrivals in homes and offices somewhere in the 20,000-square-mile region. Individuals were assigned to teams, each of which were given a huge color-coded map that showed the concentration of homes and jobs in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside, Ventura and San Bernardino counties. The maps showed some areas are more capable of handling the influx than others. Downtown L.A. is chock full of jobs and homes. The San Fernando Valley has its share of high-density development, especially east of the San Diego Freeway. The West Valley, though, is a patchwork of low- and medium-density developments. Some groups saw potential for transit centers, shops and high-rise apartment complexes around the North Hollywood Metrolink stop and the planned east-west busway through the Valley. Most participants agreed that infill -- building on vacant lots or redeveloping existing commercial and residential zones -- makes sense to reduce commute times and revitalize urban centers. But the demand for suburban housing is still strong. "You can't put everyone in infill. The rest you're going to have to put them in some other location," said Greg Medeiros with Centennial Founders, which is proposing a 23,000-home city on the northwest edge of Los Angeles County. Thursday, he and his fellow planners decided to house some of those 6 million incoming Angelenos in brand-new 80,000- to 90,000-population self-contained communities in the Antelope Valley. Workshop participants were free to plan without having to answer to angry residents and homeowners associations, but in practice, new city developments have been fought in Santa Clarita and Ventura County. Westlake Village Mayor Betty DeSantis said residents in her area typically like things just as they are and oppose new housing developments. That's not realistic, she said. "We have to educate our voters to the need to have more houses and then to show them that density is not a bad thing." For her part, she'd like to see a corridor of landscaped town houses and condominiums built alongside the Ventura Freeway through the Conejo Valley into Ventura County. The daylong session was organized by the USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and the Urban Land Institute.
October 10, 2002