A South-Central Los Angeles fast-food establishment constituted a public nuisance that merited additional restrictions on its operations, the Second District Court of Appeal has ruled. The City of Los Angeles determined that Tam's Burgers No. 6 - located at Figueroa and 101st Street - constituted a public nuisance even though the burger stand's owners claimed most of the problems arose from the fact that the burger stand was located in a high-crime neighborhood. Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Robert O'Brien ruled in favor of the city and the Second District, Division Five, upheld O'Brien's decision. The City of Los Angeles Zoning Administrator declared Tam's No. 6 a public nuisance in 2012, after the Los Angeles Police Department determined that Tam's had been the subject of an inordinate number of police calls. The city required Tam's to add a wide variety of operational restrictions, including limiting hours of operation, establishing a complaint hot line, and installing a six-foot wrought-iron fence. An appeal to the Los Angeles City Council failed, and then Judge O'Brien ruled against Tam's. On appeal, Tam's argued that the trial court should have reviewed the matter de-novo, using its independent judgment. Tam's also argued that the nuisance ruling should be overturned because "the City failed to establish a causal connection between their operations and the nuisance activity of third parties."   Writing for a three-judge panel of the Fifth Division, Justice Richard Mosk concliuded that, no matter what standard of review the trial court uses, the appellate court must use a substantial evidence standard of review.  Once that had been established, he wrote: "The trial court properly found that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate that the cost of operating conditions would force Tam's out of business.  Mosk also wrote that the substantial evidence found that Tam's did operate in a manner that constituted a nuisance. Even though Tam's No. 6 argued that ambient crime in the neighborhood was the problem, the appellate court noted that another Tam's 20 blocks away did not have similar problems. "Plaintiffs assert that they should not be responsible legally for the problems that occur in a high crime area. But there was substantial evidence that the plaintiffs failed to take steeps to ameliorate the problem," Mosk wrote. The Case: Jack Benetatos v. City of Los Angeles , No. B253491  The Lawyers:  For Benetatos: Benjamin Reznik, Jeffer Mangels Butler & Mitchell, MR@jmbm.com  For City of Los Angeles, Amy Brothers, Deputy City Attorney, amy.brothers@lacity.org

Back in the early days of email, before Facebook and Buzzfeed, people used to send jokes around as chain messages. "Forwards" we sometimes called them. My favorite of these forwards was "Ways to Confuse Your Roommate" (here's a version of it). My favorite way: "Go to the gym. Use the multipurpose room. For just one purpose." I've often thought about streets the same way. We usually use them for just one purpose, especially in California. And yet, no one is ever baffled.  The complete streets movement is changing this attitude. As most planners know, complete streets have been gaining popularity for the past few years, as the infrastructural equivalent of smart growth. Inspired by the Dutch woonerf and, before that, by the simple reality of multi-use, pre-automobile streets, complete streets seek to accommodate a diverse array of transportation modes all in the same space. The movement contends that feet and cars can peacefully coexist, and that streets can be places that people inhabit rather than pass through.  As with so many new urban interventions, converting existing streets into something more "complete" takes a lot longer than building them in the first place. Expanding sidewalks, installing traffic-calming structures, replanting, and repaving comprise a complex task. But that's easy compared to the planning and approvals process that any such project has to endure.  We can chart the progress of complete streets in Southern California by the UCLA Lewis Center's Downtown Los Angeles Forum on Transportation, Land Use and the Environment , the eighth edition of which takes place May 14. The conference first focused on complete streets in 2011, back when the idea was fresh, exciting, and largely untested. This year's rendition, entitled "Complete Streets, Competing Priorities" comes at moment when complete streets are catching on and when cities are transitioning from pilot projects to more widespread adoption of the complete streets ethos. Complete streets have become so prominent that none other than U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx will be giving a keynote at the conference.  CP&DR spoke with conference organizer Madeline Brozen, of UCLA's Luskin School of Public Affairs, and panelist Stephanie Seskin, deputy director of the National Complete Streets Coalition  (a project of Smart Growth America, for which CP&DR publisher Bill Fulton formerly worked), about the state of complete streets in America and California today. Its advocates hope that it won't be too much longer until a single-purpose street is a source of confusion.  How has the discussion in L.A. evolved since 2011? Madeline Brozen: In 2011 we brought in people from outside regions. In 2012 we were trying to get a little more explicit about what this means for California. We had a couple different presentations from agencies in the Bay Area. The conversation was getting a little more advanced. We were hearing about more involvement from public health departments and there was more discussion about how this integrates with other planning efforts. In 2013 we were starting to expand more into how Complete Streets has become more integrated into everyday planning. For example, we had someone from Seattle talked about one of their complete streets worksheets. We heard from one of our local champions, Pasadena, about travel times and networks. We were starting to hear an elevated discussions from municipalities in the area, but there was still a lot to learn. There weren't necessarily as many projects on the ground. Two years later, there's huge leaps and bounds. One of the big legislative changes we're talking about was SB 743 and making sure we're not just talking about transportation impacts by vehicle impacts alone. We're also starting to hear how this isn't just planning for walking and biking....but really becoming more integrated into everyday transportation and mobility planning. Where does the complete streets movement stand nationwide, and how does the L.A. area rank among other places? Stephanie Seskin: I think the way that Madeline has gone through their previous forums…is kind of similar to what is happening at the national level over the last 8-10 years. The attitude has been, "here's a really great idea that we've seen implemented in very few places....but we know that it is beneficial. " We've seen research come out from different sectors. We're building year over year. Now we have 700 jurisdictions with a complete streets policy. We're asking: How does this really work? What are people doing? How does this play into the larger conversation about how we manage our cities and create places to people to access the services they need and the goods they need and just to be around each other? We're talking about how you need to be innovative and try new things. How prevalent are complete streets in these 700 jurisdictions? Are they pilot projects? Have any implemented complete streets all over the place? Seskin: The idea is that it's not just one project but it is an overall approach that you use for the project development and delivery process, starting from the biggest picture of long-range transportation plans down to the intersection design in a specific neighborhood. I think a lot of cities have really grabbed on to this as the way they are moving forward. Any of the major cities that you can think of – New York, Boston, Seattle, Chicago, Austin, Charlotte -- they're all moving in this direction. A lot of the midsize cities and smaller communities have adopted policies. In the most rural and small towns they probably haven't seen much happen yet just because they probably have a longer timeframe between projects. It really is a mix from places that have done a lot to places that are still waiting but ready. The National Complete Streets Coalition recently released " Safer Streets, Stronger Economies ." What does this report conclude? Seskin :  "Safer Streets, Stronger Economies," is based on before-and-after data from about 37 projects from around the country. The number is limited because we struggled to find enough places that collected before and after data on even the most basic things like mode share, crashes…..oddly, those aren't collected all the time or in a consistent way that made them useful for a metaanalysis. We really need to have something more concrete about what we're looking for and they were happy to support this project. We don't expect everyone to measure everything. But we're putting out some tips and best practices will help spark more agencies to undertake this project evaluation. What does a complete street look like circa 2015? Seskin : I think the movement has struggled in thinking about complete streets as a standard that you apply. So you end up with 6-lane arterials that have a four-foot bike like and a sidewalk. While the elements are there, I would not say that that fulfills the complete streets mission. We really want to focus on making sure that we're not just accommodating transit users or bicycles or people who are walking but really try to create places where those modes are as safe, comfortable, and convenient as it is to drive. In California, we have a lot of enormous arterial streets. Should planners worry about those streets, or should planers focus on smaller streets that they can really transform? Seskin : I think you want to have a network approach. I don't think it's helpful to think about specific streets only as needing to be changed. Once you've looked at the network you can prioritize corridors for upgrades. In some places it does mean rethinking those arterials in a fairly dramatic way. It's a culture issue a lot of times, not just in California but everywhere. It starts with the network and understanding that are relatively workable with small changes and then balancing those bit bigger arterials like Figueroa, for example. If you're a planner in an agency and you want to get into complete streets, what's your best advice for them? Seskin : The first is making friends with your local community groups, whether they're transportation-specific or not. These kinds of changes have to be coming from residents and they need to be communicated to the political leadership as well as the appointed leadership. You need to have that partnership. I think it can be difficult being a young professional trying to do right and now getting much support from your superiors. Having the advocacy coming from outside can be very helpful. I think the other piece with agencies is there's a lot of worrying, and understandably so. The way to make it happen is to be willing to just try things and be willing to do the before and after. A lot of times you can try it with just paint and inexpensive planters. Doing open Streets events helps get people thinking about what public space means and what access means. Brozen : One of the things that I have started thinking about is to really attach people to the idea of neighborhoods and get them to think about how they use their neighborhoods and think about what they like about them: What do neighborhoods look like? What are people attracted to? Do you want to drive everywhere? Try to listen to that and see if you can approach transportation through other livability principles.

This week, Gov. Jerry Brown announced an  executive order to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% from 1990 levels by 2030. It's being hailed as the most aggressive climate change policy pursued by any government in North America – but will it put the squeeze on California's metropolitan planning organizations and their sustainable communities strategies? Brown's order has drawn attention for its combination of ambition and immediacy. But it does not come out of thin air. Brown's 2030 targets fit, substantively and chronologically, between those of Fran Pavley's 2006 law Assembly Bill 32, which mandates lowering GHG emissions to 1990 levels by 2010, and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger's goals of 80 percent reduction by 2050, also established by executive order. Meeting them means that, in relatively short order, California will look, drive, and power itself far differently than it does today — especially as its population continues to rise.  The order requires all state agencies with jurisdiction over sources of greenhouse gas emissions to participate. Agencies must prepare implementation plans by September 2015, with guidance from a technical advisory group that will be set up by the Governor's Office of Planning and Research.  The governor's order does not explicitly mention Senate Bill 375, the companion legislation to AB 32 that promotes reduction of GHG emissions through changes in land use. But it could have a profound impact on the regional Sustainable Communities Strategies that are at the heart of SB 375.  Sustainable Communities Strategies are at the heart of SB 375, outlining regions' land use plans and ways that localities can promote walking, biking, and use of public transit. Though the spirit of SB 375 is in keeping with the Brown's goals, SCS's have a fraught relationship with executive orders.  In 2013, the environmental impact report for the 2011 Regional Transportation Plan — a crucial component of the SCS adopted by the San Diego Association of Governments (SANDAG) — was invalidated by a 2013 superior court ruling, which was upheld in November by the Fourth District Court of Appeals. The courts reasoned that Schwarzenegger's executive order effectively made 2050 greenhouse gas emissions analysis mandatory under the California Environmental Quality Act. While the RTP was found to meet 2020 goals, it fell woefully short of 2050 goals and therefore was in violation of CEQA.  In March the California Supreme Court granted SANDAG's request for review. With Brown's order, all SCS's — not just San Diego's — may find themselves in limbo.  If the Supreme Court sides with the lower courts, the question becomes: Does any executive order on greenhouse gas emissions become part of CEQA, and will all of the state's 20 SCS's have to be updated accordingly? If so, the ruling would create a major conflict between two well intentioned policies that should, by all accounts, complement each other. And it could set back years of work that have been intended to put California's metro areas on the path to smart growth.  Shortly after Brown made his announcement, CP&DR 's Josh Stephens posed these questions to OPR director Ken Alex, who was also speaking at the NACW conference. Alex said that he does not expect Brown's order to require any changes in SCS's regardless of the Supreme Court's decision.  Alex said that the court was focused on the science behind the executive orders — and not on the orders per se. Essentially, he felt that the court struck down the RTP not because it failed to conform with an executive order but because, by leading to increased carbon emissions post-2020, it violated just about everything that SB 375 and AB 32 stand for. Alex said that because Brown's new targets are reasonable and necessary steps on the way to Schwarzenegger's targets, they should essentially be a non-issue for SCS's and the metropolitan planning organizations that are drafting them. (Meanwhile, Pavley has introduced Senate Bill 32, which would codify Schwarzenegger's 2050 goals.) Clearly, California's MPO's are going to hope that Alex is right. But Alex may be focusing more on outcomes than on process. Unfortunately for the MPO's, CEQA is all about process, and a ruling against SANDAG that effectively makes Brown's executive order part of CEQA, could add a major step in what is already a long process. 2020 is only five years away. 2030 will be here before we know it.

BEVERLY HILLS -This week's  Milken Institute Global Conference  brought together more CEO's, heads of state, hedge fund managers, and industrialists than, I reckon, any other annual gathering in the United States. It's a strange event at which to be an urbanist - and not just because it takes place in one of our most unusual cities, Beverly Hills.  Planners, developers, and sundry folk love and believe in our cities. Many of us love our cities, and we are inspired daily by their dynamism and, in some case, their enormity. Los Angeles has 4 million people. And it functions (sort of). Amazing, right?! I think so. But then you pass the Splenda to a CEO in the coffee line and realize that the annual revenue of his or her company might exceed that of a city's budget, or even its gross metropolitan product. That's humbling. It's more humbling when you consider that some of these companies, from Twitter to Google to all the finance companies, hardly exist in physical space. They might employ a handful of people and deliver all of their products online.  As global capital becomes more powerful, more autonomous, and more placeless, it's crucial to consider how the capitalists feel about cities. One version holds that global capital has colonized a few cities, or parts thereof, that serve the business and lifestyle demands of the ultra-wealthy. They offer hotels where meetings can take place, airports where they can land private jets, free-trade office parks where they can avoid taxes, and overpriced real estate that they can collect when they need some shut-eye. The capitalists don't care about these cities' fortunes as such, and they are happy to displace and exploit local populations. These are the  "boutique" or "luxury" cities  of Manhattan, Moscow, Dubai, London, Paris, Hong Kong, and Beverly Hills. That's the dark, Mike Davis version.  The more sanguine version holds that the world's financial leaders appreciate cities for many of the same reasons that planners do. They bring people together and embrace diversity. They foster innovation and development of new knowledge. When designed well and not crushed by debt, they are great places for everyone to "live, work, and play" (to cite my least-favorite reduction). They hold the key to environmental sustainability. They drive national economies and create wealth for countless people. Sentiment aside, the economic data backs up all of these claims: a full 60 percent of the $77 trillion of the gross planetary product is produced in the  top 600 cities . Funny that many of the same American politicians and parties that are pro-business are also vehemently anti-urban. A handful of panels focused explicitly on urban and urban-related issues. Here are a few highlights from the sessions I attended, from the local to the global: "Why L.A. is Working": This may be news to San Francisco, but the rivalry between Los Angeles and the Bay Area lives on. By most accounts, Los Angeles is doing all right. The cluster of tech startups known as "Silicon Beach," located in Santa Monica and Venice, solidifies by the day and a diverse, diffuse array of tech firms makes Los Angeles County the leading manufacturing county in the country. Of course, all of that activity pushes up office rents and cost of living for the employees of Silicon Beach. It makes you wonder where those companies were when the Santa Monica City Council  voted  to down-zone the city last week. I guess they were too busy Snapchatting each other to go to the city council meeting.  Detroit: A Case Study in Rebuilding a City's Fortunes: Some of the leaders of Detroit's bankruptcy settlement and recovery shared some lessons for how to deal with a crisis - and how not to. The consensus was that the only thing worse than declaring bankruptcy today is declaring bankruptcy tomorrow. They said that, despite the depths to which Detroit had sunk, the past two years have brought back a semblance of stability, and the private sector is responding. (I covered this session at length  here .) Conversation with U.S. Governors: Democratic Governors Hickenlooper (CO) and McAuliffe (VA) have their differences with Republican Governors McCrory (NC), and Ricketts (NE) have their political differences. But they expressed clear consensuses on the need to improve education - including vocational training and two-year colleges - and to invest in infrastructure. McCrory and Ricketts did not explain how they intended to convince their fellow GOP'ers in Washington to adopt their sense of urgency. "The Urban 6 Billion:" There's a strange comfort in hearing facts and concepts that you already know - and a surreal feeling to realize that other people in the audience don't know the same. For the record, half the people in the world live in cities, and the urban population is indeed hurtling towards six billion. Of all the panels I saw, this one touted most strongly the benefits of urban agglomeration and made me believe that capital and cities can get along. There was consensus that stolid "anchor institutions," such as universities and medical centers, are important, but possibly not as important as the helter-skelter of today's startups in the innovation economy (see my Q&A with innovation sage Enrico Moretti). The lesson for developers: reject the dogma of asset classes. It's not about investing in "office space" or "residential." Connections matter more than typologies, and diversity matters more than comparative advantage does. Planners have known this for a long time. The future is about mixed-uses, placemaking, design, and neighborhoods. It's time developers and funders figured it out too.    Finally, former Greater London Authority Chief Economic Advisor Bridget Rosewell heaped on Los Angeles the highest praise I've ever heard: "Los Angeles is the only successful polycentric city I know." I'm not sure I agree, but cheers to that. Innovative Cities: It's funny to think that a half-century ago, the Modernists felt that they had the keys to the future. Many of today's visions of the future are now trying to un-do that vision of the future, now that the future has come and gone. We hear a lot about urban innovations these days: buildings are greener, transportation networks are smarter, cities are wired within an inch of their lives. The 128-story  Shanghai Tower , designed by L.A.-based Gensler, will have turbines on top and "sky gardens" at 14-story intervals. Urban accelerators like London's  Level 39  are simultaneously fueling and employing these innovations. Nonprofits like Atlanta-based  Purpose Built Communities  are addressing place-based poverty. Some technologies are baubles, and some will be crucial for cities' future health, especially amid climate change and sustainability goals. One thing is for sure about Future 2.0: cars will drive themselves. Or maybe they won't. Gov. Jerry Brown: The conference concluded with one of Gov. Jerry Brown's two announcements about his ambitious new targets for reduction of greenhouse gas emissions: 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The business community often has a fraught relationship with environmentalism, to say the least. But, if Detroit can rise from bankruptcy, Shanghai can turn into a megacity, a sexting app can be worth $19 billion, and developers can embraced mixed-use, then anything is possible. Especially in the state that, with the world's eighth largest economy, is a giant among nations.  The conference presented many reasons why urban stakeholders and global businesspeople alike should be optimistic about the state of the world's cities. Everyone has to recognize the symbiosis between healthy cities and general prosperity. While powerful people discussed all this and more at the Beverly Hilton Hotel, parts of Baltimore burned.

After 20 years, Los Angeles is on the verge of obtaining a new National Football League team. And as it turns out, the winning play for the NFL in Los Angeles may have been drawn up in a courtroom in Sacramento. In the cities of Carson and Inglewood, competing sponsors of stadium proposals are employing, simultaneously, a newly legitimized tactic to exempt their projects from review under the California Environmental Quality Act. Carson used the tactic to approve its stadium last week in record time.  Last year, the California Supreme Court decided Tuolomne Jobs & Small Business Alliance v. Superior Court of Tuolomne County  in favor of Walmart, which had proposed a ballot initiative to approve a superstore in the City of Sonora. Before the initiative went to voters, the city council adopted the language of the initiative, effectively approving the project and claiming the CEQA exception that would have been granted had voters actually approved the project. It was a clever maneuver that combined two quirks of the California initiative process – the ability of a local government to simply adopt an initiative rather than place it on the ballot and the fact that the courts have ruled, particularly in 2001's Friends of Sierra Madre v. City of Sierra Madre, that initiatives are not subject to CEQA review because the constitution trumps statute. The court ruled that the California Elections Code allowed for this maneuver.  The Tuolumne decision means that, essentially, CEQA review can be avoided not only by popular vote but also by council action – if the council is adopting an initiative that has qualified for the ballot. Members of California's environmental community have feared that the ruling opens up a huge hole in the state's defensive line against environmentally insensitive development.  "I think the decision, if you just look at the legal background and what the election code says, was correctly decided," said David Pettit, senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. "I think it's a bad decision in terms of public policy, because you're cutting out… two most important values of CEQA." Pettit described those values as public participation and the ability of opponents of a project to file lawsuits if they believe an EIR is faulty.  The Tuolumne precedent applies to any potential project that falls under CEQA jurisdiction. But the coincidence of two high-profile projects both employing the tactic of council approval of proposed ballot measures suggests that developers and public officials are eager to use the new tool to speed up some projects.  In Inglewood, more than 22,000 residents signed a petition to place the proposed stadium and entertainment center on the ballot. Proposed by a partnership between Stan Kroenke, the owner of the St. Louis Rams, and Stockbridge Capital, the major partner in the mixed-use redevelopment of the Hollywood Park race track site (http://www.cp-dr.com/articles/node-2337), the 80,000-seat stadium would presumably house a relocated Rams team.  Shortly after the group submitted its signatures in late January, the Inglewood City Council indicated that it would dispense with the actual vote and proceed with direct approval of the language of the ballot initiative. City officials considered the actual vote to be superfluous. Opponents of the stadium project circulated a petition to place on the ballot a referendum that would un-do council approval, but that effort appears to be waning.  "We had more people sign the initiative than had ever voted in an election in Inglewood, so we were certain that it was going to pass," said Inglewood Mayor James Butts. "We would have spent $200,000 on an election for something we knew would pass." Butts added that the Hollywood Park redevelopment has been planned since 2006. It is only now getting underway, having spent three years going through the CEQA process and weathering the 2008 recession.  A similar pattern is playing out in Carson, where a partnership between the Oakland Raiders and the San Diego Chargers has proposed a stadium that would house both teams. Backers submitted 14,000 signatures – almost double the required number – March 21. The City Council approved the project one month later. With both stadiums headed for approval the question is whether they will inspire an onslaught of similar attempts or whether they amount to two high-profile anomalies. It may turn out that the Tuolumne tactic makes sense only under specific conditions.  "I can certainly see the appeal of this tactic, if you've got a smaller city and you feel that people just want the jobs more than anything else," said Pettit. "In a place like L.A. or San Francisco, I think it's very less likely to work." Large cities pose a challenge because of political rivalries and the challenges of amassing the tens of thousands of signatures that may be required to put a question on the ballot. Conversely, projects that are not on the billion-dollar order of a football stadium may have relatively little trouble with the conventional CEQA process in the first place.  As well, competition between Inglewood and Carson may have prompted them to use the Tuolumne tactic to fast-track approvals, since it is likely that the NFL will approve a team (or teams) for only one of the two projects.  "When you have a situation like this where there are competitors that want to do what you're doing, to unnecessarily slow yourself down, it's suicidal economically for your community," said Butts. Butts said that one of the benefits of using the Tuolumne provision is that it makes the project much less susceptible to lawsuits, including, he said, lawsuits that could be filed by the competition in Carson.  "What I don't like about CEQA….you open yourself up to people outside your community suing you," said Butts. "I am certain that would occur." Supporters of the tactic insist that council approval of a would-be vote is not lacking in safeguards. And supporters have to ensure that the project that is circulated for the vote and approved by the council is essentially shovel-ready. By contrast, the EIR process gives developers the chance to introduce mitigation measures along the way.  Carson City Attorney Sunny Soltani insisted that, were the City Council to approve the language of the ballot initiative (which has not yet come before the council), it would be anything but a rubber stamp. She said that the Council reserves the right to conduct its own environmental analysis of the proposal and to reject it if it causes what they consider undue impacts.  "The council can require staff to hire consultants to look at the initiative's mitigation measures to see if they are giving due consideration to the issues that they would be concerned about," said Soltani. Butts said that the Inglewood stadium proposal amounts to a modification of the existing Hollywood Park redevelopment plan, which had a full EIR. He emphasized that it will not generate significantly more traffic than the racetrack did or than the nearby Forum does.  He said that the city would not be approving the project were it not for those existing conditions and the rigor of the review that has already been conducted.  "It wasn't like we were going to put a nuclear power plant or even a gas station," said Butts. "It was a substitute entertainment venue." Nonetheless, cities and developers are likely to explore the precedent that Tuolumne has set. Pettit said that he would "definitely" advise clients to pursue this tactic if he was representing developers and not environmental interests.  "I think the development community is watching these two stadiums with huge interest," said Petit. "If it does work, I think you're going to see...a fair amount of development projects using this instead of going through CEQA."  It remains to be seen whether the Legislature agrees with Pettit and other environmentalists who say that the ruling violates the spirit of CEQA.  "I do believe it is outside the intent of CEQA, which is to not let public agencies escape their responsibilities by passing them off to the voters," said attorney Antonio Rossmann. "The interesting thing to watch for will be this year to see if, after going back and forth on CEQA, there is a consensus that builds around some CEQA amendments. And if changes to CEQA prove too controversial, as they often have, there may be opportunities to amend the Elections Code instead."  Contacts:  James Butts, Mayor, City of Inglewood, (310) 412-5111 David Pettit, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, 310-434-2300 Antonio Rossman, partner at Rossmann and Moore, LLP, (415) 861-1401 Sunny Soltani, City Attorney, City of Carson, (949) 250-5407

In the continuous scrum of Los Angeles County planning, some kind of milestone was reached this spring when the Board of Supervisors formally approved the county's 2035 General Plan update. The new document is the first comprehensive rewrite of county planning rules since 1980. Among other things, it represents a new focus on the county's urbanized unincorporated areas, as well as more traditional undeveloped areas on the fringe. It is the first L.A. County general plan to take advantage of digital mapping approaches in promoting more consistent groupings of land use policies across multiple properties and types of ownership.  It's an approach that meshes well with current state and federal planning processes for alternative energy -- which matters especially because of pressures for solar and wind energy development in the Antelope Valley. The plan as approved March 24 promotes "smart growth" and energy efficiency, encouraging mixed-use and transit-oriented development with measures that include 11 "Transit Oriented Districts" in half-mile areas around major transit stops with special design standards and development incentives. The plan promotes air quality and climate protections, in part through a Community Climate Action Plan working to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020. The plan looks toward an expansion of Significant Ecological Areas for habitat preservation, updates a Hillside Management Areas ordinance for slopes, creates zones to focus business and industrial growth. A renewable energy ordinance is still in the works to clarify rules for utility-scale wind and solar projects. The county has given effect to these new policies by rezoning more than 4000 parcels for consistency. The plan primarily affects unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County that house about 1 million of the county's 10 million people. Most of the square mileage is in mountain, desert and military areas in northward parts of the county. But most of the population lives in urban unincorporated areas located near the City of Los Angeles, which is where the TOD areas are located. The volatile land use pressures in such areas can be inferred easily enough from the map of unincorporated areas . The city of Santa Clarita stands out as an island just north of the main incorporated cities. The Lancaster/Palmdale area is another island of incorporated territory farther out, flanked by the two protected expanses of Angeles National Forest and wrapped around the off-limits acreage of Edwards Air Force Base. The edges of these outlying incorporated areas are subject to pressure for real estate expansion, though their dryness adds irony to the term "greenfield development". The desert areas that remain in private hands offer attractive sunny and windy conditions for alternative energy installations. It isn't easy to balance interests in such a place. Irreconcilable tensions persist between developers and environmental advocates and between supporters and opponents of residential density. But Los Angeles County sees less tension than in some neighboring counties between state renewable-energy imperatives and counties' assertion of control over private land. The easiest DRECP county Los Angeles County has achieved a far easier relationship than other counties with the Desert Renewable Energy Conservation Plan (DRECP), an effort by state and federal agencies to streamline their renewable energy permitting processes across California's southeastern desert areas. Among the seven counties in the DRECP planning area, the five inland counties -- Inyo, San Bernardino, Riverside, Imperial and Kern -- have objected to the plan's emphasis on using private rather than public land to site large energy facilities. Since large areas of those counties are under federal or other public ownership, local governments have reasserted their claims to taxation and regulatory authority over the privately owned areas where they have some control. San Diego County has less land affected than the others. That leaves Los Angeles County. Among the seven, only Los Angeles County is in a position to coordinate gracefully with the DRECP process for substantial amounts of expected development. The reason is that L.A. County's unincorporated areas include plenty of taxpaying private property. Paul McCarthy, who was Regional Planning's Section Head, Impact Analysis, until his retirement in March, represented Los Angeles County Regional Planning in work on the DRECP draft. He said other counties would not want to see additional private lands removed from tax rolls for mitigation or other purposes. Whereas in Los Angeles County, if any land is dedicated to open space (as a mitigation parcel might be), "Oh, everyone's happy." "Not even half facetiously, I said, look, if you want to make all the mitigation areas come to L.A. County, you can do that." (More seriously, that can't precisely be done because lost habitat has to be replaced with   comparable land -- and not all desert habitats can be found in Los Angeles County, despite climates varying by 10,000 feet of elevation across an area the size of Connecticut.) As discussed previously in CP&DR , the county's Significant Ecological Areas (SEA), Renewable Energy Ordinance and Antelope Valley Area Plan update all interact with the DRECP plan, and thus far seem to be harmonizing with it. The SEA approach is analogous to the DRECP in that both plans use conservation overlays to promote connectivity in habitat preservation across multiple types of land ownership. Susan Tae, the Supervising Regional Planner for Community Studies North, said the SEAs are managed "for cumulative biological value" as a county resource. Los Angeles County's 1980 General Plan had some SEA designations but they were extremely limited. The newer SEA boundaries are larger but allow limited development more flexibly within them, with far greater emphasis on preserving habitat connectivity from one parcel to the next -- whether or not the zoning or ownership varies. SEA designations are uniquely flexible in that, instead of banning development outright on sensitive private land, they take a harm-reduction type of approach, keeping important vegetation on parts of the property and preserving ways for wildlife to pass through without blocking the economic benefits of ownership outright. "Everybody understood from the get-go that there was this basic difference" with respect to L.A. County, McCarthy said -- that "we had done a lot of work with the SEAs before we came on board with the DRECP." That meant work such as mapping by biologists had already been done under the long-established SEA program and "we were accustomed to operating with it." McCarthy said comparable programs had not formed in other DRECP counties. Like Los Angeles County, the inland counties of Imperial, Inyo, Riverside and San Bernardino received California Energy Commission grants to update their general plans for renewable energy production, but McCarthy said that despite "some conversation back and forth" he was "not aware of any conscious effort by another county to imitate us." Which made sense given the differing pressures, eh said. The timing, however, has been tricky. The four-agency DRECP drafting team had already circulated its draft environmental review document before the SEA boundaries were final. Comment on the DRECP draft closed in February 2015. Accordingly the draft DRECP document, read literally, implied that the state and federal agencies might support utility-scale wind and solar facilities across much of the Antelope Valley in northern Los Angeles County. McCarthy said "We knew that one of us would get to the finish line first but we didn't know which one would in terms of the DRECP getting out there or us getting our plans adopted." He said it was at his request that the DRECP draft incorporated the 1980 General Plan's much smaller SEA boundaries into the proposal, in order to avoid "jumping the gun" with new boundaries that might still be changed. "Everybody agreed that when the time came, as soon as they got the update they would change the maps within their documents." According to Tae and McCarthy, the understanding was that the final DRECP version would avoid the final boundaries of Los Angeles County's SEAs and also its Economic Opportunity Areas. As far as the DRECP agencies were concerned on this arrangement, McCarthy said, "They're very happy. There's no problem with them." A work in progress The new General Plan update builds on important prior approvals and looks toward more that are expected this spring. The SEA boundaries were chosen partly through a countywide process, but they were negotiated as parts of regional plans for two areas where there is strong pressure for development: the Antelope Valley Area Plan, which won preliminary support from the Supervisors last November, and the Santa Clarita Valley's "One Valley One Vision" area plan , passed in 2012, which includes the area of the massive Newhall Ranch development plan. Further approvals supporting the General Plan's completion are the county housing element update and the Santa Monica Mountains Local Coastal Plan , both approved last year. Tae said the new expanded countywide SEA boundaries were approved December 10 by the Regional Planning Commission, then received the Supervisors' initial approval as part of their main General Plan vote in March. The SEA boundaries and the Antelope Valley Area Plan were both awaiting final adoption by the Supervisors. Tae said the implementing SEA Ordinance was off calendar. The county's Renewable Energy Ordinance, which is designed to work with the DRECP, remains in a regulatory approval process. A draft EIR was posted for comment on February 20. The Regional Planning Commission recommended approval of the proposed ordinance as of April 22. It next goes to the Board of Supervisors. Tae took care to specify that by proposing detailed regulations for utility-scale wind and solar projects in the proposed ordinance, "the County is not trying to make it easier for those projects." Instead she wrote that the intention was to clarify the requirements to all parties, and she noted each proposed development site is subject to conditional use permit and California Environmental Quality Act review. 'The blink of an eye' McCarthy, who retired at the end of March, was interviewed for this story on his last day of work after 47 years of county service, 44 of them with the Department of Regional Planning. Looking back, he spoke with a touch of wonderment about the change wrought in the department by computerization -- a change that's highly visible in the current General Plan update's new approaches. Originally, McCarthy said, the department had 250 or 275 employees, he said, but the department had come down to 175 or so and it was "producing more" because of computerization, with staff often heading out to community meetings, which they did not use to do. "When I came in originally," he said, "most employees were World War II vets and they didn't type. The guys, they didn't type. So we had secretaries who did the typing. Today the planner does his own typing, his own proofreading. It's much more efficient." Clerical -- a department then -- would type a document. It would return to the planner for proofing. He would send it back with corrections. And so on. Comparatively, he said, productivity had increased hugely. Particularly the time it takes to get data onto a map -- "It's just the blink of an eye." He'd begun work before the 1970 passage of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). At first, he said CEQA environmental impact reports took up six or eight or ten pages. "One of the reasons for that was the limitations of a mimeograph machine," he said. And then -- "All of a sudden someone invented the copy machine and that's when the reports started getting much bigger." Planners started doing their own editing and copying, he said, and the documents ballooned. On the other hand, McCarthy remembered highly effective and accurate population research reports written long ago by demographer George Morrow, now deceased. In the absence of Internet posting, he said Morrow worked on the phone to the Census Bureau in Washington, forming such warm relationships with Census staff that after retiring he made a social visit to see them in D.C. Better mapping, new problems Better mapping may allow for more nuanced planning, but it also stirs up sleeping issues. Hearings on the General Plan components have been punctuated by public-comment appearances of property owners worried about status changes for individual parcels. At a Regional Planning Commission hearing last October 8, an example came up of a deferred zoning issue made visible by better mapping. It's presumably not the only one of its kind. At issue was whether a decision in the 1970s to rezone a North Pasadena property as "open space" was a technological glitch to be undone or an informed policy decision worth keeping. A neighbor, Greg Lasel, liked the "open space" designation as is. He told the Commission the property was mostly a "drainage ravine," so construction there would create drainage and slope stability issues. Tina Fung, a Senior Regional Planning Assistant working on housing aspects of the General Plan, testified in response that the parcel appeared to have been zoned Open Space for consistency reasons in a temporary urgency ordinance related to the 1980 General Plan. In the new General Plan process, Regional Planning staff proposed an R-1/20,000 zoning designation. Fung added a comment that pointed to the importance of technological change: "Back in 1970's, because of the lack of technology... our zoning map was pretty much a bubble map, so it wasn't really parcel-based. Now that we have the technology to look at parcel-by-parcel level, then we realize that this is privately owned and there's no dedicated open space there." She displayed an aerial map of nearby parcels, changing the map's scale as she spoke, to support her argument that the sloped parcel was surrounded by residential zoning designations of R-1/20,000 and was not dedicated open space, hence should be rezoned to match its neighbors. The property, with its alleged ravine, presumably looked much as it did in the 1970s. And the conversation at the hearing didn't resolve Lasel's question. But the system surrounding the question had changed. The data for resolving the problem no longer had to be dug out of paper copies of maps stored at headquarters. The response to it no longer had to be typed out by hand. And sent to the planner for correction. And sent to Clerical again for retyping. By hand.

By most accounts, planners don't need to pay much mind to the policies of stage actors unions. It's the rare city in which theaters have much of an impact on the built environment. And yet, planners have every reason to care about the culture of the cities that they build and administer, and cities can profit mightily from their theater scenes — especially when the the city in question is Los Angeles.  That's why everyone in Los Angeles, actor and non-actor alike, should care about the recent vote by the leadership of Actors Equity. Actors Equity is the guild to which most professional and aspiring stage actors belong. After a bitter dispute over questions of professionalism and exploitation, the 100 members of the guild's National Council voted to require union actors to accept no less than $9 per hour to work on professional stage productions. Formerly, actors could essentially volunteer to perform in "equity waiver" productions, which were limited to theaters of fewer than 100 seats. This opportunity goes away June 1, 2016. The policy is admirably intended to ensure that actors get fair compensation and respect as professionals. The problem is, most actors who participate in equity waiver productions aren't seeking compensation. They're seeking experience, connections, and exposure. To put it romantically, they're wedded to the pursuit of art. The trope of the starving artist is, in many ways, a depressing one. (Scott Timberg describes the contemporary plight of artists passionately in Culture Crash, which I reviewed on Planetizen.) Whether they are created in the city streets or in a solitary mind, the arts are infinitely enriching. If only artists were paid accordingly. Artists often forego payment, though, because the creation of art can be as satisfying for the producer as for the viewer. Most artists, be they musicians, painters, dancers,  or whatever will create regardless of whether they're getting paid or even watched. I'm no artist, but I've written plenty of pieces purely for my own satisfaction. (This is one of them.) These are the arguments that inspired 6,500 rank-and-file members of Actors Equity in Los Angeles to vote, by a 2-to-1 margin, to retain the traditional equity waiver rules. The leadership clearly disregarded this advisory vote.  Given that Actors Equity can't vote itself higher ticket prices or larger audiences, this likely means that dozens of small theaters in Los Angeles will go dark while hundreds, if not thousands, of actors will have to find other ways to hone their craft. (Many will probably take more acting classes, which will cost them dearly.) Ironically, the "Entertainment Capital of the World" doesn't have a theater district, nor does it have theater zoning. Nevertheless, small theaters are sprinkled throughout the city, often in warehouses, mini-malls, and other marginal places. Carnegie Hall, they're not. But, wherever they may be and whomever may attend them, they are integral parts of Los Angeles' cultural landscape.  Los Angeles has always been short on communal spaces, and it is more wedded to pop culture than to true craft. It's heartening to think that, sometimes, some random, ugly building on one of our hideous commercial strips might bring people together and play host to a thing of beauty. Actors Equity has just made some actors slightly wealthier, others much more anxious, and the city that much less beautiful. Unless someone writes a play about planning -- and produces it in the next 14 months -- there's probably nothing planners, or anyone else outside the guild, can do but watch as the tragedy unfolds.

Back in 2010, when I was Mayor of Ventura, the city installed parking meters downtown for the first time in 40 years. Not for every parking space, of course. The meters covered only 300 or so prime spaces on Main Street and a few popular side streets. Thousands of other downtown spaces � both onstreet and off � remained free. The problem we were trying to solve was a pretty typical one: Demand was so high for the prime spaces that people were cruising up and down Main Street, causing a constant traffic jam, in search of a space. The spaces themselves were hogged by merchants and their employees. It was hard to enforce the existing two-hour time limit, and the parkers gamed the system with such familiar tricks as wiping the meter maids' chalk of their tires. Meanwhile, a half-block away, parking lots and a parking garage sat empty. The initial political blowback from our paid parking system was, to put it mildly, overwhelming. Merchants complained that there was no place for their customers to park. Longtime customers said they would never come downtown again. Even the Tea Party got worked up. They said it was double taxation because the parking spaces had already been paid for with tax money, and they got the notorious Los Angeles radio talk show hosts John & Ken to rail about me for an entire afternoon. (For the record, John and Ken called me a "dumbass".)  Despite all the blowback, however, one thing was clear: The paid parking system worked . The merchants and employees stopped parking in the prime spaces on Main Street and parked in the off-street lots and garage instead, but there were still plenty of free spots for customers as well. The traffic jam on Main Street vanished. Spots were available on every block, all the time, for drivers willing to lay out a dollar an hour. Some business reimbursed their customers for the parking, and retail sales actually went up. Just about the only people who vanished from downtown were window-shoppers who never bought anything. Over time everybody got used to the new system and decided it was a good thing. None of this would have happened were it not for the inspiring vision of one man: Don Shoup.  Since the publication of his book, The High Cost of Free Parking  a decade ago, Don Shoup has accomplished something every academic hopes to achieve and almost no one ever does: He has completely reframed an important public policy issue so that everybody thinks about it differently.  Even policy wonks used to think of a good parking space as a birthright � a free public good that everybody was entitled to. Now, policy wonks � and, increasingly, everyday folks � understand that parking is an expensive commodity to provide in America's increasingly crowded and expensive urban neighborhoods. As with any other commodity, if parking is too plentiful and too cheap, we'll use it inefficiently � and we won't be able to make profitable use of urban land as a result. That's bad for business and it's bad for the quality of urban neighborhoods. Even in my new job running a think tank in Houston, not a day goes by where I don't invoke Don Shoup's name. The idea that Don Shoup has emerged as one of the most influential urban thinkers in America is nothing short of extraordinary. For almost half a century, he has been a quirky, bearded, bicycling professor of urban planning at UCLA � often regarded as interesting but not always viewed as a heavyweight. When I went to UCLA planning school in the early �80s, he was largely dismissed by his colleagues in the program. Instead of talking about large planning concepts, he talked about how people cruised for parking spaces in Westwood. Instead of publishing in academic journals, he published op-ed pieces in the Los Angeles Times. Instead of testing us on big-picture concepts, he administered quirky quizzes. One of his quiz questions was: "Who said, �The difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight, but the difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous'." The answer, of course, was not Milton Friedman or Paul Krugman but Dolly Levi. I was the only student in the class who got the question right � only because I had just gone to see a revival of Hello Dolly ! the weekend before. Quirky the question may be, but embedded in the answer is a good lesson about life in an age of income inequality. Even though I got that question right, I often struggled in Don's class. In fact, my struggles later formed the basis for one of Don's favorite stories -- about a young writer trying to understand how to write like an economist. I won't repeat the story here, but you can watch Don tell it here . The story tells a lot � not so much about me but about how much Don loves a good yarn.  Which, of course, is one of the reasons why he has been so successful in the last decade. Above all else, Don Shoup is engaging. He tells his stories in a low-key, funny way. And by being so matter-of-fact, he makes his take on parking seem logical � and therefore the traditional view of parking as a free commodity seem like utter nonsense. The next time you walk down the street in a vibrant urban neighborhood, thank Don Shoup. He's the reason there's always a place to park � for a price � and the reason parking hasn't consumed the entire neighborhood. Don Shoup is retiring from UCLA and the Shoup Fellowship Fund has been established in his honor. If you donate to the fund by May 30th, Don and Pat Shoup will match your contribution 2:1. (I already donated $1,000.) Just visit Shoupista.com to donate!

Los Angeles' housing crisis has been building for long enough that just about anyone who rents an apartment here could have told you about it years ago. But it wasn't until last summer that UCLA released a report confirming what many of us already know: as a function of average rents (high) and average incomes (low, especially compared to those in San Francisco and New York) Los Angeles is the least-affordable rental market in the country. Circulating around the blogosphere now is a single graph that illustrates why: This graph comes from a dissertation by UCLA Ph.D. student Greg Morrow, posted on the blog of Prof. Richard Green, of USC. Green showed it to me on Friday at the Urban Land Institute's Urban Marketplace conference. I'd like to say that we had a lively discussion (which we did, on other topics) so much as we shared a moment of mutual speechless bewilderment. The graph mostly speaks for itself: Los Angeles' population is, after 100 or so years of development, just about equal with the city's maximum allowable population. As Henry Grabar puts it in Salon , Los Angeles has "reached capacity." What this means for housing costs is obvious: the difference between those two lines is affordability. It's also opportunity for developers. Constrained supply and ever increasing demand equals  insane housing prices . In a typical industry, supply would never become this constrained. Firms would produce more, or consumers would seek substitutes. Equilibrium would be restored. But this is real estate, and those rules don't apply. Usually "constrained" is used as a passive verb, as if it's something that just happens. But the "hand" here is very much visible. When we think of "capacity," Los Angeles didn't lose 60 percent of its landmass en route from 10 million to 4 million, and it didn't lose 60 percent of its water, power, food, or sewage capacity either (though the first one remains to be seen). Those 6 million men, women, and children were zoned, voted, and legislated off the island. That downward slope tells a fascinating tale for anyone who's not currently struggling to make rent. The greatest irony is that Los Angeles' peak population of 10 million was allowed a time when its population was a fraction of what it was today. Either the city's public officials were thinking big prior to 1960, or they figured that even a number like 4 million was unthinkable, so what difference did a few more million make? What happened, though, was a revolt by homeowners. The 1960s were heady times for the conversion of single-family homes into multifamily dingbat apartments, leading residents to fret about the loss of "neighborhood character." This usually equates with a fear of poor people and/or minorities. They were, at the same time, horrible times for public transit, as the trolly system clanged its last bell. The freeways ran smoothly for a while, but then they filled up, leading to more fears about growth. Los Angeles has always been, a "reluctant metropolis," to borrow CP&DR publisher Bill Fulton's phrase, and the dream of the single-family home has held sway. Worries about the "Manhattanization" have persisted for years, never mind that even at 10 million people, Los Angeles would be about as dense as New York City as a whole, but still nowhere near as dense as Manhattan. So, homeowners pushed through anti-growth legislation, advocated by residents who wanted to keep Los Angeles all to themselves. As Grabar catalogs in his Salon piece, small measures to keep Manhattan out of California included silly, unjustifiable requirements like setbacks, which do nothing but waste land, and parking requirements, which also waste land and jack up developers' costs. On the more monumental scale, these sentiments culminated in 1986's Prop U. Prop U , which is where that top graph bottoms out, was the mother of all slow-growth measures, down-zoning much of of the city's commercial areas. (According to its framers, Prop U itself was crafted not to directly impact housing supply.) It passed by a 2:1 ratio. What you can bet is that the actual sentiments among Los Angeles residents were probably flipped. Except, owners of single-family homes control 80 percent of L.A.'s residential land while representing a far smaller proportion of the population, so do they dominate elections. A 2013 poll by the Pat Brown institute found that "older voters and homeowners are disproportionately represented in mayoral voting." Half-measures and creeping protectionism that had satisfied anti-growth activists during the 1960s and 1970s were no longer enough once they saw the city hitting 3.5 million. (Not coincidentally, the city's public transit system was in a world of hurt at the time, thus favoring lower densities and people who could afford cars and places to park them.) The implications of movements like Prop U were largely invisible for a while � you can't see what you can't build � until they started showing up in astronomical rents. Today, many of Los Angeles' planners are trying to wring as much density out of the city as they possibly can. Developers are too. But, contrary to the stereotype of the marauding capitalist, they know as well as anyone that they build only at the pleasure of city policy and the public officials who can grant variances to it. Los Angeles' planners are also working on ReCode:LA, a comprehensive, and much-needed, overhaul of the city's zoning code. You can bet that they're going to go for more density, especially around the city's new transit nodes. If the effort fails, though, that red line on the graph might one day overtake the black line. People are going to keep coming to L.A. whether the slow-growthers of 1986 like it or not. And we'll really have a crisis on our hands. Reporter's note: This post has been updated to clarify the relationship between Prop U and residential zoning. Prop. U did not directly affect residential zones.

Until the mid-2000s, the South Park neighborhood of downtown Los Angeles had exactly one high-rise tower: the looming, vaguely Stalinist Transamerica Building (now the AT&T Center). It most famously supplied the rooftop where Guns 'n Roses shot the video for "Don't Cry." The area—which occupies the southern portion of downtown Los Angeles, between the Financial District and Interstate 10—otherwise consisted of dilapidated retail, low-rent residential buildings and acres of surface parking lots.  The area was avoided by businesses, developers, and rock stars alike.  Today, the AT&T Center is but the tallest tree in a rapidly growing forest. No fewer than 20 high-rise and medium-rise projects are under construction or in development in the roughly 40 square-block area. At least that many projects are in earlier stages of development.  It is, say planners, the next phase in the resurgence of downtown Los Angeles.  "The last boom was the adaptive reuse boom," said Tanner Blackman, planning deputy to Councilmember Jose Huizar, referring to the renovation of former commercial buildings in downtown's Historic Core that was facilitated by 1999's Adaptive Reuse Ordinance. "The ground-up construction boom on parking lots...it's wonderful to see the spaces in between the communities that have been growing downtown fill in." South Park's projects represent over 3,000 units of mostly rental housing that is expected to be available by 2017. The tallest will be 45 stories. Though they are being developed by a hodgepodge of developers, the loose vision for the area is that of a miniature Vancouver, or a high-end version of Portland's Pearl District.  It is the closest thing to a development bonanza that Los Angeles may ever see.  High-rise developments have faced all manner of opposition elsewhere in the city. In Hollywood, for instance, wary neighborhoods have backed California Environmental Quality Act lawsuits that have stopped developments in their tracks. There, a dispute over the location of an earthquake fault has impeded development around Capitol Records building. Elsewhere the city, community opposition often leads to development agreements and shrunken projects. Not so for South Park. What's extraordinary about South Park is that the neighborhood is, in large part, a blank slate. The vast majority of new development is taking place on the sites of parking lots. Developers can build high and wide without demolishing anything and without raising neighbors' ire. Traffic concerns are alleviated by a Blue Line light rail station. "I can't see any other place in L.A. where you have such a nexus between market opportunity and land availability," said Paul Beesemyer, Southern California Program Director for the California Housing Partnership Corporation, which promotes affordable housing. "It's also important to...remember that it's not just happenstance."  Beesemyer noted that the now-defunct Community Redevelopment Agency established the vision for South Park in collaboration with sports giant AEG, which owns nearby Staples Center.  Vacant land is one reason why South Park has attracted a veritable United Nations of developers. They, or their parent companies, are based in Canada, China, Phoenix, Houston; they are joined by a half-dozen or so local firms. Out-of-town developers are focusing on South Park in part because it gives offers them the chance to put their names on brand-new marquee properties, in a marquee city.  "For developers who want to put their signature stamp, South Park is the place to do it because you can develop from the ground-up," said Jessica Lall, executive director of the South Park Business Improvement District. (By contrast, many renovated buildings in downtown's Historic Core are named for companies that no longer exist.) For all the excitement surrounding South Park, it is still not exactly a Paradise City for developers.  As enticing as South Park's vacant lots may be, the area also suffers from Los Angeles' notoriously convoluted zoning laws, many of which include building restrictions that were imposed in the slow-growth era of the 1970s and 1980s.  Some of the area permits only 3:1 floor-to-area ratios, meaning that many towers can occupy only a fraction of their parcels. Others will engage in the controversial practice of purchasing "air rights" from nearby parcels that are developed at less than 3:1. Even with these tricks, many properties are encumbered by "Q Conditions," which are limitations that the city places on individual parcels. This means, for instance, that some would-be high rises will instead come to life as seven-story wood-frame structures.  "There are a lot of old rules and old regulations that, in a lot of developers' minds, conflict with the vision for South Park," said Lall.  Meanwhile, building restrictions tend to keep heights down. City building code allows for wood-frame buildings up to seven stories. Taller buildings must use different, more expensive techniques to conform to earthquake codes.  "You end up getting a lot of seven-story buildings, unless you're going to go to all the way to 24 stories," said Blackman. "If you're going to go beyond that, you're going to go to the moon." The upside is that development in downtown Los Angeles is governed by floor-to-area ratio, not by units-per-acre. Developers may cram as many units as they see fit within a building's envelope regardless of how tall it is. Some of those seven-story buildings could have nearly as many units as buildings three times taller.  Last year Huizar introduced a motion that would have imposed a moratorium on development in South Park so that the city could revamp its codes and promote more intensive development. That ordinance did not pass, but Blackman said that the effort served its purpose by signaling the council office's endorsement of more and taller buildings. "Almost immediately after that, I think partly because of that message and partly because of economics, that we began to see more tower proposals," said Blackman.   No matter how high the towers soar,  Blackman said South Park's developers must create a street environment that is functional, appealing, and inclusive. "There's a pull between wanting Los Angele to have the fantastic, world-class skyline that it deserves, but the urban planner in me hearkens back to Jane Jacobs and that human-scale," said Blackman. "It all comes down to the details of urban design." South Park's blank slate means that few, if any, existing residents will be displaced. South Park developers speak of gentrification openly and enthusiastically.  "There's a real tight group of investors, developers who want to see the neighborhood gentrify in a way that is going to create a safe, walkable area," said Paul Keller, CEO of Mack Urban, which has projects in South Park.  South Park wants to be the antithesis to downtown's Bunker Hill, a 1980s redevelopment area that has virtually no street life. The South Park BID has extensive plans for sidewalk improvements, public murals, planting of street trees, a "Green Alleys" program, and activation of other public spaces.  If development in South Park sounds maddening, many in the city agree. The Department of City Planning's  Recode:LA initiative  is currently overhauling the city's zoning code in part to promote high-quality development in places like South Park. But it won't be complete until 2017.  South Park's developers see the market opportunity now – and want to get shovels in the ground before the next economic downturn – so they are dealing with the current system.  "You're basically going 100 miles per hour down the freeway on a bus and you're trying to fix the tires," said Lall. "The question is how fast can the city go to take advantage of the opportunities that are here today?" A version of this article was originally published at Next City , with financial support from the Surdna Foundation.

Currently on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, Sink or Swim: Designing for a Sea Change  is an arresting exhibition depicting consequences of, and solutions to, rising sea levels. It includes photographs by artists and journalists of disasters, like Hurricane Katrina and the Japanese tsunami, and responses, like floating schools in Bangladesh, sculpted sea walls in the Netherlands, and the restoration of the Malibu Lagoon, just a few miles away. Sink or Swim celebrates, and issues a charge to engineers, designers, and public officials to acknowledge rising seas and start embracing ways to build resiliency. Sink or Swim was curated by Frances Anderton, known locally for hosting KCRW public radio's DnA: Design & Architecture show. She spoke with CP&DR 's Josh Stephens. We've seen documentaries and read news stories. What's special about portraying climate change and sea level rise in photographs? A lot of climate change is a data story. It's a sad story and that tends to be quite hard to convey in a way that is emotionally stirring. What photography can do is get to the human heart of a story. To what extent can we say that it was because of climate change rather than a freak disaster? I don't think we can say this was because of climate change, and I don't think the show is doing that either.  The projects are situated in the context of vulnerable coastlines, which are associated with problems of rising seas and catastrophic storms, which are, in turn, associated with climate change. But the show is not directly attributing all the situations to climate change. One of the things that was truly fascinating that emerged in researching the show was the kind of…an issue that was kind of equally compelling, which is our propensity to live in vulnerable situations. An astonishing percentage of the world's population now lives on coastlines. We build right up to the water in estuaries, deltas. Five-hundred years ago we saw water as both a precious resource and something to fear. We now build right up against coastlines. So we have built ourselves into vulnerable situations. I believe that's a corollary to the story of climate change. Some images come from highly developed countries with incredibly sophisticated resilience response, and then you have places like Benin that are as poor as they come. What messages are we getting from those contrasts? The show is about architecture and thereby it's about ingenuity. Ingenuity can take the grassroots vernacular form, and it can take the highly resourced, highly developed form of sophisticated infrastructure. I definitely felt it's important to show a kind of range of thinking because the issue of climate change and rising seas is global. If one was to think about, say, Bangladesh one would one would think more astutely about Bangladesh's situation if it was shown that there was some analogy to our own situation, and vice-versa. The global connectivity in this issue that was certainly something we wanted to get across in the exhibition. Some of the photographers are artists, and others are journalists. What's the relationship between journalism and art in these photos? You want people to linger on photos. You want photos to be so compelling that people are drawn to look at them and then think about the stories. I think it's a crossover. There's an incredibly good journalistic photo goes to some higher level of engagement.  I think there's a whole conversation about what constitutes art. In choosing the photographs for this exhibition, which I did in concord with Pat Lanza, I don't think we were asking ourselves, "is this journalism, is this art, what is it?" I think we were looking at images and asking, will this grab the viewer? If people think it's art, that's great. If they purely think its good visual reportage, that's good too. I think one of the big questions is, when does the photograph become too beautiful? We don't ever want to sanitize or render the human story here so visually compelling and lovely that it gets separated from the issue. We're trying to arrive at a place of a really compelling image that, at the same time, dramatizes the issue that we're trying to explain. Many people, especially in coastal California are concerned about these issues. Many people are defiantly not concerned about these issues. How do you feel like this exhibit will be received by both parties? We didn't make this part of a partisan political fight. We didn't even go there. In that sense, we endeavored to make this an exhibit that would appeal to everybody. What I've heard anecdotally is that people expected to find something depressing. One of the reasons people will turn away from the issue is that it feels so big, and "what on earth can I do about it? It's too big to even think about."   What I did hear is that people went to the show and found it inspiring. They felt that what the show largely depicted—and this was our goal—was ingenious thinking and the human capacity to adapt. Hopefully (the show) rises above the issue of climate changes and says, look at what the human community is capable of doing. What has to change about our approach to resiliency?  What really did strike me over and over again, talking to many people in completely different locations is that going forward, is that we cannot build in a post-war Modernist way in that we segregate ourselves from the perils of nature. We channelize our rivers, we wall off our seas. The meaning of resilience is that we have to find a way to build in concert with nature that provides protection while accommodating our rivers, our coasts. The Los Angeles River plan where they want to soften the edges. There's this sensibility that suggests that moving forward we have to incorporate soft and hard defenses. That could be absorbent wetlands coupled with well conceived strengthening structures. That to me was the overriding philosphy I came away with. What roles must architects, engineers, and planners play? It has to be more multidisciplinary. There's been a segregation of these professions for many decades. The Rebuild by Design Projects, which are speculative, what they suggest is a multidisciplinary approach that brings in architects and engineers and landscape designers and members of the community and political representatives and so on and so on. The view is that there has to be a collective and comprehensive approach that takes into account the forces of nature and our capacity to defend against them and create this combination of soft and hard defenses. Reporter's Post-Script Sink or Swim is on display at the Annenberg Space for Photography, in the Los Angeles office district of Century City. The classic edge city, Century City could not function without personal automobiles. Its office towers are accompanied by thousands of parking spaces, and a subway stop is many years away. It is exactly the kind of place that has contributed to greenhouse gas emissions. The day I visited it was 85 degrees. It was January 28. Sink or Swim Annenberg Space for Photography 2000 Avenue of the Stars Los Angeles, CA 90067 Through May 3, 2015. Admission is free. Sink or Swim  will be moving to the Long Beach Aquarium in June. Photo Credit: Arambagh, Dhaka, Bangladesh, 2009. After a night of heavy rain, Dhaka experienced widespread flooding around the city. © Jonas Bendiksen. This interview has been edited and condensed. Portions of this interview appear in Josh Stephens' review of Sink or Swim at Nextcity.org.

Perhaps fittingly, one of the state's oldest, stateliest cities will be the first to institute one of the most sophisticated advances in planning tools since the slide rule. Not long ago, the City of Pasadena implemented metrics that measure projects' impacts under the California Environmental Quality Act in terms of vehicle miles traveled rather than level of service.  Pasadena is not only the first city in the state to adopt VMT metrics but may also be the first in the nation.  Pasadena's switch both responds to and precedes the adoption of Senate Bill 743. Passed in 2013 as an amendment to the California Environmental Quality Act, SB 743  will require cities to evaluate traffic impacts according to vehicle miles traveled, not to traditional level-of-service thresholds. Those thresholds take a narrow view of mobility, measuring only the flow of vehicular traffic. This switch means that impacts need not be mitigated only by improving vehicular flow but also by almost any other program or mode – including public transit, cycling, pedestrian improvements, and many other methods.  SB 743 complements 2008's Senate Bill 375, which encourages dense development and alternative transportation in the effort to curb greenhouse gas emissions. Many planners considered CEQA ironically hostile to SB 375's goals in part because of its reliance on VMT. Projects that increased congestion at poorly rated intersections were considered to have significant negative impacts.  The Office of Planning and Research recently released draft guidelines for VMT metrics, with a final draft expected later this year. Pasadena, however, is well ahead of most of its peers.  In 2004, Pasadena adopted a development plan that favors further density in the city's already built-up urban core. In 2008, the city began the process of updating the land use and mobility elements of its general plan. Building on the 2004 development plan, the general plan update all but necessitated the adoption of VMT metrics (allowed, but not necessarily encouraged, under CEQA at the time), so city planners drafted theirs from scratch, years before SB 743 was drafted.  The Pasadena City Council voted to adopt the metrics in November, and they were implemented at the beginning of this year. The metrics will soon be integrated into the entire general plan and its environmental impact report.  "They realized that…if we were going to transform our streets, we needed to measure whether a project is good or bad, figure out how to put the appropriate design into the project," said Pasadena Planning Director Vince Bertoni. "We had to measure traffic differently." The LOS approach, born of 1950s-era management approaches, set up the paradoxical situation in which high-density development was often pushed away from city centers – where multiple transportation options are available – and out to urban fringes, where intersections are less congested even if they end up generating more and longer car trips.  "Over-reliance on level of service as the only indicator of success in our transportation systems is one of the biggest obstacles to infill development," said Jeffery Tumlin, principal and director of strategy at Nelson-Nygaard.  In many ways, Pasadena is the perfect city to usher in California's next chapter in smart growth. It is a metropolis in miniature, with a dense, mixed-use downtown, distinct thoroughfares, and stately suburban-style neighborhoods on its edges. The Old Pasadena commercial district instituted innovative parking reforms decades ago, and the city has embraced the Gold Line light rail.  "We're…essentially down to nothing but infill development," said Fred Dock, Pasadena's director of transportation.  VMT therefore complements the direction in which Pasadena was already headed, even with the inconveniences of LOS metrics.  "We don't widen the roads. We're managing congestion, we're managing traffic volumes, we're managing how signals operate," said Dock. "We're not able to add capacity in the sense that we would be able to mitigate a level-of-service impact."  Dock said that the inclusion of an impact fee will be crucial for the success of mitigation under the VMT metrics. Pasadena has used impact fees for amenities like parks for a decade. Dock said that impact fees can now be used for mitigation measures such as bike infrastructure and pedestrian plans and a host of other projects that can offset would-be VMT increases but would have been nearly meaningless under LOS metrics.  While embrace of VMT is a paradigm shift in the planning field, Pasadena may be an ideal proving ground, because the new metrics do not promise to have a significant impact on the city. They are expected to appear slowly, on a project-by-project basis.  "But what you're going to see is…changes over time in terms of how people behave and move around," Bertoni added. He said that buildings might get taller and a few surface parking lots might disappear.  No matter what guidelines OPR sends to the Natural Resources Agency in the coming months, Pasadena is almost bound to have an easier time adopting VMT metrics than many other California cities will.  "The learning curve in Pasadena isn't going to be nearly as sharp as other places," said Bertoni. "In other places, you're going to have people who come to the table very leery of this and very cautious." Bertoni cited instances when community members, with no apparently connection to professional planning, arrived at meetings proactively asking the city to move off LOS and go to VMT. "And they know what it means!" he said.  Nonetheless, cities around the state are expected to take notice of Pasadena's efforts. Bertoni said that he expects and welcomes inquires. "When you're at the cutting edge like we are, that's also part of your responsibility," said Bertoni.  Other early adopters, including Oakland and San Francisco, are not expected to release their draft metrics for months.  "There's a few cities that have been pioneering and gotten out in front of SB 743, which is helpful to us," said Chris Ganson, senior planner at the Governors Office of Planning and Research. "They're developing these methods that can be examples for other cities."  OPR is currently taking comments and working on the next draft of guidelines. Ganson said that the current  draft has elicited "every flavor of response."  However long it takes Calfornia's other cities to become as comfortable with their VMT metrics as Pasadena is with its, Bertoni maintains that acceptance of VMT is inevitable – not just in California, where it is mandated, but in places outside California too. "This is where we are going not only as a city, as a region, as a country," said Bertoni.  Contacts & Resources:  Vince Bertoni, Planning Director, City of Pasadena, (626) 744-7311  Fred Dock, Transportation Director, City of Pasadena, (626) 744-7311  Chris Ganson, Senior Planner, Office of Planning & Research, (916) 322-2318 Jeff Tumlin, Principal and Director of Strategy, Nelson/Nygaard, (415) 284-1544 Find OPR's SB 743 Guidelines Discussion Draft here .