Gerhard Mayer’s Call for Comprehensive Urban Change

Gerhard, given the recent vote by the LA City Council to remove its double staircase requirement from the City’s Building Code [1], how will such a policy change likely impact Los Angeles' urban form and public health, particularly in the context of your work with the Livable Communities Initiative?

Well, the single-staircase reform is only a part of a package of changes that’s required to create better and healthier cities. After all, for hundreds of years, most people around the world have lived in apartments within single-stair buildings. It’s necessary, but it’s not all that helpful as a standalone reform. 

What we’re trying to do with the Livable Communities Initiative is create urban environments that are so attractive that people who live in single-family homes right now might be enticed to want to move into an LCI multi-family neighborhood. Allowing single-stair buildings is a precondition, but, in isolation, it does not make this happen.

What I said to Lindsay, when we started LCI, was: I want to create a movement where people in your neighborhood, Hancock Park, want to move out of their single-family homes—because they’re too big and complicated or whatever—and want to move into a multi-family neighborhood. And for that to occur, the multi-family neighborhood, the LCI neighborhoods, needs to provide an outdoor environment that’s amenity-rich, like a nice urban environment that you want to come out to: pleasant, lively, traffic-free.

Apartments need to provide the quality of living that comes close to what we have in single-family homes. Right now, our methods do not generate that.

For context, please elaborate on the Livable Communities initiative that you have long supported.

The Livable Communities Initiative is being driven by Lindsay Sturman—a TV executive, writer, and showrunner—who has a real talent for shaping the public agenda and advancing efforts that serve the broader community good. She started charter schools and has a group that's called Hangout Do Good (HODG). 

As we talked about how to fix our urban environments, I said everyone always focuses on costs or individual aspects, but that misses the bigger picture. What we really need to do is make urban places so attractive that people want to move there. 

That kind of pull will create a groundswell—drawing in activity, financing, development interest, and competition. But it has to be something people genuinely desire, not just something they’re forced into because they can’t afford a single-family home.

Does your experience with and knowledge of European urban development influence what you believe could be developed in LA?

Well, the amount of single-family homes that we have in California is an outlier internationally, and few other cities have so many people living in single-family homes. And from that sea of single-family homes, we jump immediately to these massive seven-story buildings, where you have hundreds of apartments on very long internal corridors; that is not what international cities look like. 

They are usually built at a much smaller increment, individually built, and have a gradation of scales between the single-family home and the downtown. We used to have that in American cities also, actually, and Daniel Parolek has been writing about this at length. He is the inventor of the term and the author of the book, Missing Middle Housing. In it, he explains all the individual steps that occur from the edge of a city towards the center. It's called a transect (which is a New Urbanism term), right from the edge of a city to the inner denser zones, and we no longer have those gradated intensifications in our cities. 

The Livable Communities Initiative is an attempt to bring back denser and nicer streets, with apartments that you may have seen abroad on vacation, but that we cannot build here because our rules have been so changed that we no longer allow something like this to happen.

Gerhard, what has been the consequence for the development of more livable communities of the State’s legislation over the last five years that has usurped local government’s authority over land use and planning? Is not the singular goal of such legislation simply to increase neighborhood density on the unproven theory that more density will automatically produce more affordable housing?

Denser development can be justified if done the right way. Developers cannot really be blamed for how they turn out – they are legally obliged—because of their fiduciary responsibility to their investors—to maximize profitability. They build what they know and what others have built before them. Thus, this outcome is predictable. 

Such developers don’t want to have a whole lot of competition out there for ideas. You want to provide a similar product, and you provide it to a small group of people; it’s sort of like an almost rigged market, right? When you have just a couple of developers who act in an environment of scarcity, then you can almost provide whatever you want, and call it luxury, and charge luxury prices for it—but never provide enough, because that takes away the advantage. This is where we are…and it’s not the fault of the developers. It’s what we have allowed to happen.

I want to contrast that with the Vienna experience, because I was the guy who started these Vienna trips. In Vienna, what gets built is not determined by the developers at all. It’s determined by the City. The City sort of figures out what they need and want, and then they hold open and anonymous design competitions—so no favored firm will get these jobs by default. They hold open, anonymous competitions for what the project should look like, and then they have professional juries that adjudicate these competitions.

When the project gets selected, the project that wins needs to be executed that way. It can’t be value-engineered later, and it cannot be much altered either. The developers are happy with that because what they lose in profitability, they gain in ease of applying themselves. There is no lengthy entitlement process, no CEQA lawsuits, and there are sort of guaranteed profits. They even have stable companies that have limited profitability (under a special corporate law), but they’re still for-profit companies. There are 19 or 20 companies there that are very happily engaging in competitions with each other for these properties. 

The City of Vienna, of course, also has another advantage: they have built a land trust for 100 years and never gave it up, so it uses property that doesn’t need to be speculated over, and the city creates new projects on its properties. The result is that they build housing for less than half of what we build, at a higher quality than we dare to dream about, with workers who all earn union wages.

The European model appears to be driven by what’s in the public interest. Compare that driving motive to what’s driving the YIMBY libertarian model—which positions the private developer as the “steward” of a neighborhood’s built environment.

Well, I don’t know how that’s going to work out. It hasn’t worked out very well to date - the results speak for themselves, right? Do we want to keep doing what hasn’t worked before, ad nauseam—it’s like running your head against a brick wall, hoping it eventually breaks? 

Right now, our head is bleeding, but the wall is still standing.

Pivoting back to the single-stair building ordinance that the City of LA just adopted, what impact do such narrowly focused ordinances have?

They have an impact in terms of addressing a single problem, but since they introduce novelty and change, they also open you up to being exploited by skilled operators who can then make some mischief out of that. I’ve been arguing for a long time against dealing with these individual issues. 

Instead, I’ve been arguing for an ecosystem approach. You know, it’s not that the successful cities of the world do things so radically differently. It’s just that every department does things slightly differently—but in aggregate, they work together to achieve a completely different result. We seem unable to do that. 

For instance, a friend of mine who is now the design principal at Perkins Eastman has been saying for decades…that in LA, planning should coordinate community planning with transportation planning. I don’t know what’s so hard to understand about that, but it’s still not happening.

You published a recent article co-authored with Lindsay Sturman, which we excerpted, titled “Can Quality Solve LA’s Housing Crisis?” Elaborate on your thesis.

The impetus for this was the housing shortage, combined with these individual-issue ordinances that force people to accept more housing in their neighborhoods. The problem is, the housing that results currently still follows the existing paradigm of US development.

Larchmont has a couple of projects that want to be built there, but based on SB 79, I think there could be even more conventional projects built in people’s backyards, and these new projects will likely be seven stories tall. With the kind of building types that we are designing right now, everybody in that apartment would look into your backyard, and the local homeowners are very nervous about that. But it’s also dawning on people that we need to do something, and do it right? 

We have to allow some gentle density so our people can live in their neighborhoods where they grew up, and the LCI became an alternative that many people embraced with gusto. There is a lot of public support for that right now—instead of not allowing these seven-story slab buildings, you know, to be built next to a single-family house. That’s the quality aspect…and there are national surveys now—the most desired, livable living areas in LA, in the country, are no longer the suburbs. They’re walkable, compact communities that are amenity-rich, but we can’t provide them right now, and single-issue legislation does not necessarily reform our ecosystem enough to provide them either.

Now, the YIMBY equation is a little different. I think YIMBYs are just angry that they can’t live in the areas where they want to live or where they grew up. They are not necessarily moved by a quality argument, but are quantity-oriented. They are not objecting to having a nicer-looking neighborhood to be in, either. It’s just not their primary focus.

Following up—what’s your take on California’s SB 79–now being debated in the Legislature?

Well, I know where Scott Wiener got that from. I was with him and Alex Lee on the first trip to Vienna, and I made many suggestions to them. I said, “Look at these buildings. They look like ours, but they’re not—they don’t have corridors, they just have a single stair.” After that trip, Alex Lee passed the first single-stair bill in the Assembly, and Scott Wiener was very impressed with the transit-rich, fully integrated neighborhoods he saw there. But as a legislator, the only thing he can do is create a legal basis for that kind of development here.

The problem is, if that’s the only thing we change, and we don’t change the way we build, it could lead to really awful outcomes instead of the integrated, livable experiences that make for better cities. We are so overdue for a kind of “Manhattan Project” on how to reinvent the American city so it serves everyone. Instead, we fight over small, isolated issues, and everyone just wants the other guy to change a little bit while they keep doing the same old thing. That’s why construction and urban development are so difficult—because the public, in general, doesn’t like what it creates. 

Donald Shoup once said, “If people moved into your neighborhood without cars, they’d scarcely be noticed. But since they all come with cars, everyone’s up in arms, fighting new projects.” Those new projects are often massive because developers aggregate sites to make an efficient parking garage and build on top of that. Then you get a 700-unit apartment building with 2,000 cars, all hitting the same congested streets in the morning, and neighbors see no benefit from it.

In Vienna, it’s the opposite. People support development because their lives improve. When a project is proposed, the city upgrades transportation, creates new outdoor spaces, provides new amenities and institutions, and sometimes even new schools. Prices are stabilized, so you yourself might be able to move into that new neighborhood next door. Here in the U.S., when a development is proposed, neighbors see only negative consequences—and no real benefits.

Your views parallel what Gail Goldberg long ago coined the ‘City of Villages’ as planning director in both San Diego and Los Angeles; she vigorously advanced placing conditions on new infill development to ensure that neighborhoods benefited alongside developers. Yet today, with strong support from the well-funded YIMBY movement, developers have clearly won…

Pivoting to CEQA, which has been under attack for more than 25 years—how should CEQA be reformed or applied to advance the goals of the Livable Communities movement?

Well, CEQA is a nobly intentioned law. It basically says we need to be stewards of our environment, and we can’t harm it. But the way it has been used often has not followed that principle.

Since you’re in Santa Barbara right now, I used to live and practice there, so let me give you an example. I designed a very nice downtown project—walkable community, paseos, everything Santa Barbara said it wanted—on a site called Radio Square, at Carrillo and De La Vina. The city planning department was deathly scared of it. It was four to five stories tall, and the city threw everything at us. The project eventually didn’t happen. One of the tools they used was CEQA.

As you know, Santa Barbara has an elevated freeway, the 101, that cuts the city in half. It’s an awful thing to have, but it’s an existing condition. They used CEQA to force us to evaluate how the project would look from the freeway, and of course, it would stick out—it would obstruct somebody’s viewshed (from the freeway)—and that was a “problem.” I mean, if that’s not a perversion of CEQA, I don’t know what is. CEQA has been used to perpetuate the status quo. 

If CEQA is reformed to serve environmental goals—like supporting proper urban development in cities people want to live in—then it’s being used properly. A resident in an urban environment has a much lower carbon footprint than somebody out in the boondocks. I think that’s what reform should aim at. I’m not an attorney, but my understanding is that reform now means urban development can no longer be handicapped by CEQA the way it was before. That is a good reform.

Knowing metropolitan LA as well as you do, who do you now believe is the “steward” of the built environment?

I can’t give you a good answer to that because I don’t see a proactive steward. It’s not the planning department, and there isn’t a visioning process that allows for alternatives to be considered. The public isn’t filling that role either, because they don’t have the expertise. Architects, for the most part, are happy just getting commissions within the current paradigm. Developers also tend to repeat what’s been done before—not because they’re necessarily hostile to new approaches, but because they don’t want to take the risk. 

If you’re the first to try something different, you expose yourself, and you might not succeed. Developers would rather take the safe bet, even if something new might ultimately be more profitable. When I lived in London—in Chelsea and South Kensington, a very desirable (and expensive) area—I asked a developer there: “South Kensington is the most profitable part of the city. Why don’t you build more of it?” And his answer was, “Because it’s easier to build out on the M3 or M4. That’s just what we all do.”

Gerhard, before concluding our interview, a reality check: What has been the reaction from Southern California’s planning and development community to your livable communities thesis? 

Well, they mostly tell me I should go home if I like living in Europe better. They don’t like my message at all. I moved their cheese, and the reaction to this is sad. Some people, like Daniel Parolek, are supportive…there are planners like Matt Glesne in LA who certainly get it. There are occasionally standout planners and standout architects who understand what I’m talking about.

In general, though, people are afraid of my arguments because a different ecosystem means a lot of work, and it changes their entire framework of how they were educated and how they act. They just don’t know. And experimentation—we pride ourselves on being so experimental in America—but experimentation is not well respected anymore. We go by the rules and repeat the same old, same old.

To conclude, only because of space, what’s your response to critics who say European urban models just can’t work in Los Angeles?

I don’t want to just bring Europe to Los Angeles. What I want is for Los Angeles to have an open mind again—to experiment, to find authentic Los Angeles and California solutions. Solutions that actually work, and that don’t keep perpetuating outdated models that have failed a thousand times over. 

We need to embrace change, and then figure out how to direct that change in a way that makes us whole again. Ours is one of the most glorious natural places on Earth, yet the city we built is mostly not worthy of its natural setting. That’s the real problem.