High-Rise Initiative Stirs Hot Debate

They are a big city’s small towns--old-fashioned, slightly down-at-the-heels neighborhoods lined with barbershops, newsstands, coin laundries and delicatessens where city dwellers have traditionally gone to do weekend chores or to pass the time.

In Los Angeles, these storefront neighborhoods are fast disappearing, although what is left of them--along Fairfax Avenue, in Eagle Rock and Lincoln Heights, for example--still lends character and stability to a rapidly changing city often faulted for its sprawling sameness.

As the political debate over local growth intensifies, the city’s older neighborhoods have become symbols--like family farms--of a way of life worth preserving.

They stand for an ideal city where houses do not hover in the shadow of high-rises, where raw sewage is not contaminating the food chain, where people still get around easily, breathe clean air and look after their neighbors.

Recently, a group of local officials drew up a plan, offering protection to remaining older neighborhoods, that would try to lessen the perils of growth by limiting the size of new building across much of the city.

The politically charged proposal, which would appear as an initiative on the November ballot, would cut in half the maximum allowable size of new buildings along commercial streets outside the city’s main business districts. Sponsors say the initiative would have the effect of channeling future commercial development into 50 existing high-rise business districts, such as downtown, Century City, Universal City and parts of Wilshire Boulevard.

The plan is controversial because it would let voters in on one of the City Council’s most precious prerogatives, the right to decide who is going to build what and where. At the same time, the initiative represents a far less drastic approach to restricting growth than the strategies being pursued by a broad coalition of homeowners who have gone to court to stop new buildings.

“The initiative is a step in the right direction, although it does not go nearly far enough,” said Laura Lake, a co-founder of the coalition, called Not Yet New York.

Debate over the initiative would provide a convenient forum for three of the city’s more ambitious politicians--Council President Pat Russell, Councilman Zev Yaroslavsky and City Planning Commission Chairman Dan Garcia. Yaroslavsky, Garcia and Councilman Marvin Braude are sponsors of the initiative.

Russell has already expressed displeasure with the initiative, referring to it as “planning by ballot box.”

“I just think there are better ways of doing the job,” she said.

That is not a surprising sentiment from someone who has opposed sweeping moratoriums on commercial building in the past and jealously guarded the City Council’s right to approve new construction on a case-by-case basis.

But to head off the initiative, Russell must deal with its implicit charge that the council, grown flabby off the contributions of real estate developers, is no longer up to the task of protecting neighborhoods. Russell herself has been criticized for putting real estate interests ahead of neighborhood concerns.

If Russell finds herself on the defensive in the debate over the initiative, it is no coincidence.

The challenge to her comes from the two council members, Yaroslavsky and Braude, who have tangled most often with Russell over land-use issues. Moreover, Yaroslavsky and Russell are seen as two likely rivals in Los Angeles’ next mayoral election.

The initiative gives Yaroslavsky a chance to exploit a role--that of homeowners’ champion--he has played in the past at Russell’s expense.

“We’re going to find out what the people in this city really think about land-use,” said Yaroslavsky, who has hired Michael Berman, one of the state’s most accomplished political strategists, to raise money and signatures for the initiative campaign.

“We want to be able to match what the real estate industry spends if it decides to go crazy against us,” Yaroslavsky said.

Around City Hall, friends and foes of the councilman agree that the initiative could do a lot for him and the other sponsors.

“It smacks of Populism or at least middle-class Populism, and that’s important in a city full of middle-class voters,” said one City Hall political consultant. “There are a lot of people up in arms about all the new construction in the city.”

Interestingly, one of the places where people are most upset is West Los Angeles, in Yaroslavsky’s district. It is an area rife with new commercial construction and in which the councilman may need to shore up his own image with homeowners before waging an offensive against Russell.

In Westwood, one of the most heavily developed Westside neighborhoods, for example, a number of residents are unhappy with Yaroslavsky for backing luxury apartment projects that changed the face of the neighborhood around UCLA and cut into the supply of affordable student housing.

Westwood is also the home of Not Yet New York, possibly the city’s most aggressive anti-growth group, which is currently bypassing both Yaroslavsky and the rest of the council in its efforts to slow commercial building construction.

The group has filed lawsuits aimed at scaling down high-rise construction along Wilshire Boulevard and is counseling five other neighborhood groups around the city that also have sued the city to curtail large-scale commercial construction.

The goals of Not Yet New York have a Populist flavor that could make Yaroslavsky’s initiative seem downright palatable to a lot of developers.

For one thing, the group is talking about a ballot measure of its own that would create a citywide network of community planning councils with veto power over any building a particular neighborhood did not want.

While it mulls over that approach, the group’s lawyers are pressing for a ruling in a Wilshire Boulevard lawsuit that also would have citywide implications. It would give homeowners the right to call for a full-scale environmental review by the city of any proposed building regardless of what local zoning permits.

Should the lawsuit succeed, it will allow costly, time-consuming environmental challenges to new building, and, as a result, could deter builders from doing business in the city.

For that reason, the sponsors of the less far-reaching initiative have roundly condemned the Not Yet New York strategy.

“It is intellectually bankrupt,” Garcia of the planning commission said. “What it shows is a group of overly self-righteous people refusing to live within the established rules. One of the reasons those people in Westwood can make a nice living is because the building boom made Westwood a very prosperous place.

“If those people get what they want now,” he said, “builders would never know where they stand. They would go somewhere else, and that would be ruinous to the economic health of the city.”

At the same time, Garcia said he understands why homeowners are going to court these days.

He said it is part of a trend that started in 1984 when impatience with bureaucratic inertia led a citywide coalition of homeowner groups to sue the city to compel enforcement of the Los Angeles General Plan.

That suit, which was successful, launched the current movement to limit commercial construction in areas close to residential neighborhoods. It affected about 25% of the city’s buildable acreage. The proposed initiative would extend that protection to about 75% of the city.

Garcia defends the initiative as the logical next step in the movement to protect homeowners. He said a ballot measure is necessary because the council still lacks the finesse to make a bold stroke on its own.

“The council would take forever to do it,” he said. “And by the time they got it through, they would have attached 220 exceptions to it.”

Maybe so. But the initiative itself is not exception-proof. While it offers voters an unusual opportunity to apply the brakes to local growth, it leaves the council room to maneuver on behalf of development interests.

If approved by the voters, the initiative would cut in half the allowable size of buildings in what is called Height District One, planners’ language for low-rise commercial zones that form a buffer between residential neighborhoods and high-rise districts.

However, the sponsors of the initiative say many areas of the city currently classified as Height District One should not be subjected to building restrictions proposed in the initiative. They say, for example, that some areas are in depressed parts of town that need to attract more commercial development. And they argue that other areas of Height District One have already been developed so intensely that it would be wrong to suddenly prohibit more building.

Consequently, the sponsors contend, before the voters decide whether to limit building in Height District One, city officials will be able to decide how much of the area ought to be rezoned and placed out of reach of the voters.

“There are clearly areas of the city where the initiative would be going too far,” Garcia said. “The initiative should be accompanied by some rezoning.”

Even if voters approve the initiative, the council will be able to grant zoning changes to property owners within Height District One who want to build more than the initiative allows. A small-business person, for example, who wanted to expand a four-story building into eight stories could apply for a zoning exemption, argue for it before the city and possibly qualify for the expansion.

Phil Krakover, one of the city’s most experienced real estate lobbyists, said he thinks that the initiative would increase rather than diminish the City Council’s authority over new building.

If that is the case, the initiative appears to be a shrewdly crafted compromise, giving power to the people and the politicians.

Nevertheless, it is causing a fuss at City Hall. Councilman Howard Finn, chairman of the Planning and Environment Committee and an ally of Council President Russell, recently expressed his dissatisfaction with the initiative.

“I have problems with it. I am going to be introducing my own motion to control building,” Finn said last week.

And Russell said she is looking at another alternative being prepared by the city Planning Department.

Sizing up the reactions, one council staff member said that, whatever the merits of the initiative, it is one of those issues that politicians apparently cannot afford to ignore.

“It’s like a day at the beach when the surf is irresistible,” she said. “Everybody has to catch a wave.”