[Lapg] "Saving LA" - LA Weekly : Mark Lakeman Quoted

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Saving L.A.

Wanted: A city planner who can organize communities

by ROBERT GREENE

Los Angeles is about to select a leader whose vision,
skill and personality will determine the city’s course
through a wrenching period of growth and reinvention.
The person who gets the job will place an indelible
stamp on L.A., making decisions that will determine
how smooth traffic flows, how thick the smog becomes,
even how genuine the city’s democratic culture will
be.

It’s not the mayor. It’s the planning director, a
little-known post in a city with a laughable
reputation for a lack of urban planning. Academics and
professionals make jokes about the job of L.A.
planning director, comparing it with, say, supervisor
of snowplows in Honolulu.

With the retirement announcement last year by city
planner Con Howe, though, long-frustrated community
activists, besieged homeowners, and developers angry
over City Hall red tape have become excited over the
rare opportunity to change course. But the opportunity
to weigh in on the selection nearly got away from
them. Mayor James Hahn set March 4 as the deadline for
applications after doing little outreach other than
placing the job description on the city’s Web site. No
national search firm was hired, and no listing was
placed with the usual Web and other resources for
planning professionals. It was as if LAPD Chief
William Bratton announced his retirement and the mayor
quietly set out to pick his replacement - before
Election Day.

Responding to complaints from neighborhood and
activist groups, Hahn extended the application period
to March 18 - still far too short a fuse in the view
of a coalition of organizations and individuals who
sent the mayor a nine-point list of criteria to be
considered in the selection, together with a request
that no final decision be made until at least after
the May 17 mayoral runoff.

"It is so hard to do things right, isn’t it?"
complained activist Helen Coleman, who has organized
efforts for equitable treatment of Los Angeles
neighborhoods south of the Santa Monica Freeway.

In many ways, the city does need the Bratton of city
planning, whoever that person may be. The city’s
planning department is overwhelmed with a nearly
impossible workload, and planners describe an
environment with low morale and little vision. City
Council members complain of paltry assistance from the
department staff, but also chafe at the prospect of
giving up any of their near-feudal power over
development in their districts. Builders of affordable
housing, as well as market-rate homes and commercial
properties, blast the department for an East
Berlin-type bureaucratic maze of red tape. Homeowners
feel under assault by a new wave of building and
community densification that, unchecked, could
undermine L.A.’s characteristic suburban
neighborhoods. At the same time, the high cost of
housing has spurred a crucial need for affordable
units, and an equally dire need for an accompanying
infrastructure - first, streets wide enough to
accommodate the additional cars of the new residents,
and bus and rail lines to lighten the load; then,
conveniently located schools, stores and public
services.

Some elected officials quietly call for an empowered
planning director who has the courage to tell them
"no," offering them political cover for development
decisions that may not play well with the voters in
the short term. That brings to mind a visionary
autocrat like Robert Moses, the redevelopment guru who
swept away whole New York neighborhoods in the postwar
era and dictated the location of parks and major
development projects.

But that kind of personality would never play in Los
Angeles, where neighborhoods are just beginning to
shake off the feeling of powerlessness in the face of
City Hall dictates. Many urban activists are calling
instead for a leader who is as much a community
organizer as an urban planner, to empower communities
enough to give them a real stake, and a real role, in
developing the future.

"At this point, the job requires someone who thinks of
himself/herself as a mobilizer," said Occidental
College professor of urban and environmental policy
Robert Gottlieb, one of the drafters of the letter to
Hahn. "Someone who works with constituents to build
and empower."

The mayor, Gottlieb said, also must be willing to
"unleash" the planning director in a way some might
find uncomfortable, while the council must be willing
to back up the new official instead of simply asking,
"What goods can you deliver to my district?"

The letter calls for a director who will design a city
with affordable housing, "viable alternatives to
driving alone, jobs that pay a living wage, streets
that are pedestrian and bicycle friendly, and parks
and plazas in every neighborhood."

The progressive vision for planning in Los Angeles,
taken to its extreme, calls for a revolutionary
re-creation of the city, similar to efforts undertaken
in smaller cities like Portland, Oregon. In Portland,
a neighborhood-based movement has begun to take over
residential intersections, turning the city streets
into town centers of community interaction and even
fairs and neighborhood-sponsored art projects.

Grassroots planning of this sort, Portland architect
Mark Lakeman said this week at an L.A. lecture on
"People’s Urbanism," is about recapturing democracy.

"It’s about people engaged in a place and not just
making decisions, but coming out and saying ‘hello,’"
Lakeman said.

It’s not clear that the Portland model could ever gain
traction in Los Angeles, a city many times larger and
with a starkly different history of development and
political and social organization. Free enterprise and
real estate subdivision and development have a more
central place in L.A.’s civic lore than planning and
commonwealth projects. It’s merely amusing, for
example, to imagine Portland-style urban villagers
turning the intersection of the 405 and the Santa
Monica Freeway into a community gathering spot.

But planners in cities more similar in size and
history to L.A. - San Diego, for example - have
adopted more human-scaled and sustainable urban
visions. San Diego is creating a city of villages,
giving stakeholders power over local development,
while the city devotes its resources to
infrastructure, like streets, parks, schools and
police stations.

Hahn responded to the letter from Gottlieb and others
by rolling out a process for public testimony on
selection of the new director. The first hearing is at
the planning-commission meeting on March 10, with
additional hearings at each of the seven area planning
commissions over the next two weeks.

Hahn also has given an unprecedented role to
neighborhood councils, calling for a group of one
representative from each of the seven planning areas
to screen his final picks and make a recommendation
for the appointment.

"We did this same process for director of Animal
Services," said Deputy Mayor Doane Liu, "and it worked
very well."

That should be enough to send shivers up the spines of
planning activists. Many vocal animal-welfare groups
were deliberately omitted from the selection process
that ended up in the appointment last year of Guerdon
Stuckey. Stuckey has been greeted with continuing
protests as he fights the perception that interested
activists still have no role in the city’s
animal-welfare system.

There is also concern that neighborhood councils are
too dominated by homeowners - or too early in their
development - to play an evenhanded and constructive
role.

"If they’re like my neighborhood council, we’re in
trouble," said Helen Coleman. "We’re still in the
learning stages."

Liu said groups represented in the letter to Hahn
would take part in the final selection committee for
planning director.

The planning department’s chief antagonist, City
Councilman Ed Reyes (who once worked in the
department), applauded Hahn for extending the deadline
but said it wasn’t enough. He wants hearings in front
of his committee - the City Council’s planning and
land-use panel. But he acknowledges that the council’s
official role is limited to approving or rejecting the
mayor’s final selection.

"It is bothersome that we didn’t have a search firm,
we didn’t go through all that is done for other
departments," Reyes said. "But the charter has taken
away a lot of our role in terms of how you hire and
fire a department head. So I’m doing the best with
what I have."

Reyes also is concerned about what he said were
reassignments of staff in the department in advance of
the director appointment. He introduced a council
motion, which has yet to come to the floor, calling on
the department to stop making internal promotions
that, because of the civil-service system, would tie
the hands of the new director.

In the background of the whole process, of course, is
the mayoral election. Anyone appointed by Hahn today
could be ousted by a new mayor on taking office in
July.

It’s hard to attract the best applicants under those
circumstances, said Reyes.

"It’s unfortunate it’s getting caught up in the
turbulence of the mayor’s race," he said.

The letter to Hahn can be read at
http://departments.oxy.edu/uepi/planning_director.htm. 

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