CRA/LA Approves Five-Year Hollywood Implementation Plan

The CRA/LA recently approved a five-year development plan for Hollywood that will add affordable housing and "first-class office space." What features are included in the plan?

This is the five-year implementation plan that we are required to do for every project area every five years. We take these five-year plans seriously. De facto requirements for the process are to compile data on housing, housing-money-spent, and housing-money-still-available. We use this as a way to talk about our vision for the next five years. This five-year implementation plan for Hollywood is very broad in scope. It shows that we're talking about planning for the whole breadth of the community in Hollywood. It includes not only affordable housing and supportive housing, but also talks about conserving neighborhoods, historic preservation, retail, mixed use, social services, and has a large emphasis on new green open space for the community.

We have a few very exciting projects that we highlight, like the Association of Motion Picture Academy Museum that is being proposed near the Arclight Theater. That is a capstone for preserving and enhancing the entertainment and historical identity of Hollywood.

Every new Los Angeles community plan calls for investment in infrastructure, i.e. adequate parking, mitigation of street congestion, and open space. How does the Hollywood five-year plan address and prioritize infrastructure?

To address parking, we are looking at constructing a new public parking structure on Vine Street, north of Sunset. We are also looking at a parking plan for the area, which is essentially a parking district, including a valet and circulator system to deal with the fact that we have tremendous growth in entertainment clubs, and we need to do a better job of circulation and parking management.

More interesting is the emphasis on the Hollywood Freeway cap park. That's a different view of infrastructure. We plan to create new land over the freeway to create a Central Park for the Hollywood Freeway that would bridge over the 101 and create open space in one of the more underserved areas in the city. That's a substantial commitment to a different kind of infrastructure that we think will serve the community of Hollywood for several generations. We've already committed $125,000 for a feasibility study for this project, and we look forward to continuing to collect resources and accessing other sources of funds to realize that dream.

TPR this month includes a companion interview with Culver City's Sol Blumenfeld regarding that city's success in revitalizing it's downtown. And our publisher, David Abel, is moderating a panel discussion this week with the architecture critics of the L.A. Times and the San Francisco Chronicle about how both metropolises politically plan their cities and respect urban design. From where (i.e., other cities, authorities) does the CRA/LA derive its aesthetic for redevelopment plans for Hollywood or other project areas?

The vision and plans really come from the community. In a place like Hollywood, it's brimming full with creative ideas. I'd like to say that CRA/LA was the group that came up with the Hollywood Freeway cap park idea, but we're not. That is an idea that rose organically from the community. But we were in a position to help that dream stay alive and become something to energize the whole community.

In terms of the vision in place-making, Los Angeles is a city of small communities that have unique identities and cultural assets. At CRA/LA, we need to craft community plans that have broad consensus and will preserve and build on cultural and historical assets for the next generation. Places like Leimert Park, Hollywood, Little Tokyo, Watts, Canoga Park, Reseda, and Pacoima each have their own unique qualities.

North Hollywood is a place that has been particularly successful at taking what was already there-the theater district, the art galleries-and building on that, helping those institutions thrive and grow, even in the midst of revitalization. That's what real redevelopment is about. That's our inspiration. The inspiration in Los Angeles is community, diversity, history, and the great vitality of its future.

CRA/LA's mandate includes the provision of more affordable housing. Densification of neighborhoods is a probable outcome of CRA/LA investments. Public debate regarding plans for increasing housing density has centered recently around reaction by older Angelenos who want to protect the suburban nature of L.A.'s neighborhoods. Does CRA/LA's Hollywood plan reflect the city's attitude about density and future development in L.A.'s communities?

It's interesting to mention density and Hollywood in the same breath. Hollywood is already pretty dense, and what we've been trying to do is rationalize that density and make it more compatible with the neighboring communities, focusing it around a Metro stop where that capacity is best located. In Hollywood, folks can do without a car and really enjoy the benefits of a walkable, vibrant community. That's what density, or what we like to call "concentrated development," means to us. You can have concentrated development around Metro stops, as we've done in Hollywood, and still preserve the single-family components and a low-density residential community.

But Hollywood isn't suburban the same way that the San Fernando Valley is. There we also work hard to preserve the integrity of single-family residences, even as we're trying to revitalize some of the main streets, like Sherman Way or Canoga Park, where we've had a tremendous amount of success in revitalizing retail districts.

One of the examples is a project called the Bungalow Courts Project. We're preserving and rehabilitating four historic bungalow courts, which will come up to about 15 units, and then ten additional units in the East Hollywood Project Area. We're taking an old form, the bungalow court, and preserving and maintaining it for affordable housing. The bungalow court is a uniquely Los Angeles form. It's beautiful. It makes Hollywood's residential areas so special. That's not the same suburban format that you'd see in places like Canoga Park or Reseda.

Is CRA/LA coordinating with City Planning Director Gail Goldberg to craft the dozen community plans now being redrawn? How are the CRA/LA and the Planning Department coordinating the revitalization of inner city neighborhoods, like Hollywood?

We're coordinating quite well. In some case, we are assisting by providing financial assistance to the Planning Department to ensure that community plans get done. For example, in South Los Angeles, we've contributed resources to ensure that the environmental documents are prepared and that they have the money to hire an environmental consultant for the community plans. We wanted to make sure that South Los Angeles went to the front of the line when it came to community plan updates, not the back of the line.

In places like Hollywood, we have so many interesting design issues and unique challenges in terms of architectural preservation, as well as the need to balance growth and entertainment uses and density. We've worked pretty closely with the Planning Department on that.

We hope to work more closely with them on signage, in particular. It's been very controversial in Hollywood. Initially, in the earlier years of the Project Area, allowing signage on buildings was a way to finance rehabilitation and preservation of historic structures. It also became a way to close the financial feasibility gap for projects that might not have otherwise been accomplished, like the Sunset and Vine project, which was the area's first new upper-end, multi-unit building. That building helped catalyze the revitalization of that corridor.

But now things are going very well in Hollywood, and the demands for additional signage and super-graphics are overwhelming. Some people think it has gotten out of control. Others think that it creates the kind of environment that is entirely appropriate to the new Hollywood. Whatever the case, this is something where the Planning Department and CRA/LA need to work very closely together to revise the supplemental use district for the Planning Department and CRA/LA's Design for Development for signs.

Hollywood signage has also become a great source of litigation regarding the extent that government can regulate signage. This is a critical issue for the city of Los Angeles. There are portions of Hollywood where signs can really be wonderful, but there are other portions of Hollywood where we're looking at super-graphics that are over-scale and don't contribute to the community fabric. It's not clear that developers are offering any potential community benefits in exchange for these enormous super-graphics.

I know that Gail Goldberg shares my concern about this. We've had a number of conversations about it, and our planners are working very closely to analyze what to do next in this new phase of Hollywood, where we don't need super-graphic funds to finance projects anymore. It's not the only way that things will get developed in Hollywood. We need to do this together so that various folks pushing additional signage do not play us against each other.

Let's turn to the June 3rd ballot Propositions 98 and 99. From CRA/LA's perspective, should one or both of these propositions pass into law?

I'm most concerned that, if Proposition 98 becomes law, we're going to lose a tremendous number of affordable housing units in the city by the rollback of rent control. That's been the Trojan Horse of this campaign. It's been termed an eminent domain reform bill, but in fact, it's a way to destroy rent control in the state of California. In a city with a dire need for housing and a tremendous housing shortage at all income levels, we cannot afford to be taken in by this proposition and have rent control eliminated. It simply is not something we can stand to bear in the city of Los Angeles.

We set aside 25 percent of our tax increment for affordable housing. If Prop. 98 passes, that will be just a drop in the bucket of the need that we will have to address as the result of the rollback of rent control. Anybody who lives in the city of Los Angeles and wants to have a mixed-income community should be very concerned about this.

For eminent domain reform, Prop. 99 provides a very balanced approach. It protects single-family homeowners, which has been a major source of concern as a result of the Kelo decision from the Supreme Court a few years ago. The voters have a clear choice, if they read carefully. They should vote no on 98 and yes on 99.

At a recent AIA event, you spoke about a vision plan for a green jobs corridor along the L.A. River. What opportunity does an emerging green job market provide Los Angeles, and what does the CRA/LA vision include?

Los Angeles is poised to become the center of green and clean teach for the United States, if not the world. What we envision is a corridor stretching from the Cornfields State Park on the north all the way down to the CRA/LA's Crown and Coach green tech parcel around Santa Fe and Alameda and 17th Street. This corridor would have everything from R&D facilities to business incubators to light manufacturing to a mix of manufacturing of green technology.

This could also be a wonderful blend with the creative artist's district that we currently have in the Downtown loft area, where we could have architects and designers working in recyclable materials, coexisting in the same location with people working on solutions for the global warming crisis. This is a tremendous opportunity. It's a way to help revitalize the river and help create well-paying jobs, in a growth sector, and in our community.

CRA/LA happens to be in the enviable position of owning a 19-acre piece of property in the southern part of this district, which we think will become the anchor and centerpiece of the new clean tech corridor.