Skip to main content

Villaraigosa's Legacy: A Dubious Meshing of City Departments

Support Provided By

 

William Fulton, writing in 1997, thought that the "growth machine" yoking political ambition in Los Angeles to developer money had ground to a halt. Fulton saw development in Los Angeles constrained by the lack of land -- "sprawl hits the wall" -- and by the resistance of NIMBYist homeowners.

It's now 2013, and the more things have changed, the more they have remained the same.

As these pages have noted, new state laws (SB 375 and AB 32), new land use mandates, and the erosion of support for CEQA-backed challenges are making NIMBYist protests less and less a threat to developer interests. And developers have learned to exploit the opportunities created for them in the "vertical" acres found in disused office towers downtown and in the air elsewhere above the city's generally low-rise commercial real estate.

Almost no one foresaw how a retooled "growth machine" -- using new aliases and old allies -- would change the character of downtown Los Angeles so dramatically and so thoroughly for the good of the city.

Unfortunately for good planning, the "growth machine" in Los Angeles operates on a feedback loop: the more that developers cash in from concessions from the city, the more cash the political class in Los Angeles collects, and the more concessions politicians make to developer interests to get more of the cash.

These forces sometimes result in a graceful, appealing development. In many other cases, the result is a mess.

The feedback loop of money and political ambition recently gave politically connected developers a big, end-of-term gift from Mayor Villaraigosa and an eager city council: the merger of the city's separate Planning Department and Building and Safety Department. The marriage of the two departments is supposed -- like other machine-friendly streamlining -- to make the development approval process in Los Angeles swifter.

"Smart growth" advocate Rick Cole argues in The Planning Report that faster isn't better:

Yes, the current "project by project" approval process in Los Angeles can be a subjective, miserable, and expensive nightmare for developers and an equally sickening, dispiriting, and exhausting war of attrition for citizens. But simply speeding up the dysfunctional process is clearly not the solution. The primary problem isn't that the production line is too slow. The primary problem is that it is producing crap.

Ron Kaye, a frequent and acerbic critic of the "growth machine," pins the union of the two departments on the low economics of city politics. Kay notes "how little time and effort went into adopting a revolutionary change that allows every project to be put up for sale to fund political corruption."

Former City Planner Richard Platkin, expanding on an earlier posting to KCET Departures' Laws that Shaped L.A. series, sees reorganization as inflating another real estate bubble:

The deregulation of land use is well on its way at City Hall, albeit obscured by such misleading phrases as "elegant density" or "transit-oriented districts." In some policy circles, government regulations are considered to be the bane of economic prosperity. In fact, this was this outlook that gave rise to the deregulation of the telecommunications and aviation sectors under Ronald Reagan and the financial sector under Bill Clinton.

The race to insulate the city's "growth machine" from both community resistance and good planning is nearing an end after eight years of Mayor Villaraigosa. As Rick Cole bitterly remarked on the mayor's abandoned ambitions:

There has seldom been a mayor who embarked on his first days in office with more soaring promises of pursuing livable, sustainable development than ... Antonio Villaraigosa. He said all the right things at the outset. In picking San Diego's Gail Goldberg (former planning director) to replace Con Howe, Villaraigosa sent unmistakable signals that a new golden age was dawning. Yet within three years, he installed Austin Beutner over City Hall and Bud Ovrom at Building and Safety to dismantle anything blocking new development. That they didn't entirely succeed had less to do with lack of effort on their part and more to do with Villaraigosa's curiously short attention span. (Planning Director) Michael LoGrande has been tasked with finishing the job through the merger.

The products of the "growth machine" are new, but the old logic of the machine survives. Can incoming Mayor Garcetti do anything to change it?

Support Provided By
Read More
A row of cows stands in individual cages along a line of light-colored enclosures, placed along a dirt path under a blue sky dotted with white puffy clouds.

A Battle Is Underway Over California’s Lucrative Dairy Biogas Market

California is considering changes to a program that has incentivized dairy biogas, to transform methane emissions into a source of natural gas. Neighbors are pushing for an end to the subsidies because of its impact on air quality and possible water pollution.
A Black woman with long, black brains wears a black Chicago Bulls windbreaker jacket with red and white stripes as she stands at the top of a short staircase in a housing complex and rests her left hand on the metal railing. She smiles slightly while looking directly at the camera.

Los Angeles County Is Testing AI's Ability To Prevent Homelessness

In order to prevent people from becoming homeless before it happens, Los Angeles County officials are using artificial intelligence (AI) technology to predict who in the county is most likely to lose their housing. They would then step in to help those people with their rent, utility bills, car payments and more so they don't become unhoused.
blue themed graphic including electric vehicles are charging stations, wind turbines and trees, 2023 in reference to year

A Look Back at Climate Solutions In 2023

The U.S. may have a long way to go in its decarbonization goals, but these stories show signs of progress in climate solutions.