Taller buildings a tough sell

Neighborhood activists in the northeast San Fernando Valley thought they scored a major victory in 1995, when they persuaded Los Angeles officials to approve zoning rules to keep new buildings on Foothill Boulevard from blocking their hillside views.

But under a proposal headed to the City Council today, those height restrictions -- limiting some buildings to 45 feet and others to 33 -- could be rolled back for real estate developers who promise to build condominiums or apartments with at least a few units of low-income housing.

The concept infuriates Cindy Cleghorn, president of the Sunland-Tujunga Neighborhood Council, who said her neighborhood spent years fighting for passage of the zoning plan, which applies to Foothill and several surrounding streets.

“We have a plan with limits and guidelines . . . that was developed by people who are active in the community,” Cleghorn said. “They put a lot of work and effort into it. And now something comes along that knocks a hole in it.”

The proposal is the latest bid by the city’s Planning Department to fuel the construction of affordable housing in the wake of a housing boom that caused thousands of rent-controlled apartments to be demolished or converted to condominiums. Yet it also threatens to undermine confidence in zoning plans produced by that same department.

If the council approves the proposal, developers of subsidized housing would qualify for new, more generous “density bonuses” -- permission to build projects with up to 35% more homes than zoning allows.

They would also get the chance to weaken other established planning rules governing building height, the number of new parking spaces required and the amount of open space that must accompany a new development project.

That puts the city’s politicians and planners on a collision course with neighborhood groups across the city who thought they had finally gotten the ear of City Hall.

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s top appointee on development issues, Planning Director Gail Goldberg, swept into her post two years ago with a promise to update a dozen “community plans,” documents that spell out the zoning and height limits for one or more neighborhoods.

Goldberg invited residents of San Pedro, Sylmar, South Los Angeles, West Los Angeles, Granada Hills and half a dozen other communities to get involved in rewriting the community plans, saying the three-year effort would give them the opportunity to decide how their neighborhoods should grow -- and make the planning process less unpredictable.

That invitation will ring hollow, some homeowner groups say, if developers receive the right to override limits laid out in those plans.

“The purpose of community plans is to provide certainty for everyone, so people know what’s allowed and what’s not allowed,” said Mike Eveloff, president of the Tract 7260 Homeowner Assn. “When you have overrides, it removes the certainty and creates confusion. And that doesn’t seem to be good planning.”

Goldberg said she has no choice but to seek passage of the new density rules, which are part of an effort to comply with a state housing law that went into effect in 2005. The law requires that every city and county create an “implementing ordinance” that rewards developers who make as few as 5% of a project’s units affordable.

Furthermore, she and other planning officials predict the new incentives will be used only in a tiny fraction of the city’s development projects.

“We would be concerned if we saw a large percentage of projects” taking advantage of the weakened rules, Goldberg said. “But I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that that’s going to be a problem.”

Homeowner groups across the city have grown increasingly sophisticated in their efforts to control development, winning passage of pedestrian districts, historic zones and specific plans that impose more-restrictive rules on neighborhoods, business districts and even a single boulevard.

The density bonus plan would trump most of those efforts, according to planning officials. And it contains dozens of scenarios that would allow a real estate project to add housing units or gain other concessions from the Planning Department.

In some cases, a development company could increase the size of a residential project if it includes a child care facility. In other cases, a builder could reduce the number of parking spaces if the project is occupied by low-income seniors.

While neighborhood activists in Hollywood, Sherman Oaks and Westwood are quick to criticize the proposal, business groups such as the Central City Assn. and the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce are pressing hard for passage.

The chamber sent an e-mail to business advocates earlier this week pushing for the council to act. And other business leaders say the proposal will finally help politicians stare down homeowner groups in the fight over density. The new incentives for affordable housing were devised under Senate Bill 1818, a 2004 law that sought to make it easier to build subsidized housing. The law required cities to roll back their zoning requirements, even if that meant defying the wishes of their constituents.

“The intent of the law was to give local officeholders more [political] cover to allow growth in urban areas,” said Brendan Huffman, president and CEO of the Valley Industry and Commerce Assn., a San Fernando Valley-based business group that favors the measure. In Los Angeles County’s smaller suburbs, elected officials have faced huge protests from constituents upset over a single condominium or apartment project. By comparison, Los Angeles has had great success in building new, and frequently affordable, homes, said Jane Blumenfeld, director of citywide planning.

“Our city has not been a slacker compared to most cities in the state. We’ve done a lot,” she said. “But we have a lot of people and an awful lot of poor people. So we have a more difficult time creating affordable housing because the incomes are so much lower than in other parts of the state.”

Under the density bonus rules, the greater the number of affordable housing units in a project, the more license a developer has to exceed the city’s zoning. If a development firm creates a significant number of “very low income” housing units -- for families that live on $28,000 per year or less -- it can roll back several rules at once.

Foes contend that the law would exacerbate the city’s housing crisis by replacing rent-controlled housing with new, pricey condominiums. And Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky has repeatedly argued that city planners are trying to “roll back the clock” to an era when the city had fewer restrictions on development.

“They are attempting, with the stroke of a pen, to bust the height limits on all of these streets across town where people have fought for two- and three-story height limits and won,” he said.

Even Goldberg has sounded less than enthusiastic about the measure, telling an audience of developers and lobbyists three months ago that the state housing law takes planning decisions out of the hands of local elected officials.

“Do I like these kinds of programs? I don’t,” she said. “But we are stuck trying to come up with an enabling ordinance that will not please everyone.”

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david.zahniser@latimes.com