Developers who reserve 15 percent of their units for the urban poor, which is most of the downtown population, will be exempt from most open space requirements. They will be permitted to make their buildings 35 percent larger than zoning codes allow.
The only visible greenery will be in the Produce Dept. at Ralphs.
Why, When Drive Started
Back in the 1960s, Los Angeles City Hall originally financed this hyper-density campaign by tearing down vast numbers of private homes in Westchester in order to expand the L.A. International Airport.
You can be sure that LAX is the engine that drives L.A. is not an empty slogan.
Sixty-five years ago, the famed detective writer Raymond Chandler, in his third novel about private eye Philip Marlowe, “The High Window,” set Bunker Hill as the scene of the murder of a fellow private detective.
Chandler, whose Marlowe character was immortalized first by Dick Powell in “Murder My Sweet” and later by Humphrey Bogart in “The Big Sleep,” practically invented Los Angeles noir. He described Bunker Hill in the following fashion.
Bunker Hill is Old Town, Lost Town, Shabby Town, Crook Town, Chandler wrote. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full-corner bay windows with spindle turrets…
In the tall rooms, haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide, cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
In and around the old houses there are fly-blown restaurants and Italian fruit stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody but people named Smith and Jones sign the register, where the night clerk is half watchdog and half panderer.
Things certainly have changed since the early 1940s.
Turning Off the People
With glistening Disney Hall, the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion and all of the high-rises that have been built, Raymond Chandler would hardly recognize the old neighborhood.
But will the loss of open space and the lack of any green space in the concrete canyons that are currently being contemplated turn prospective tenants away from the new neighborhood?
In a recent article in the Op-Ed section of the Los Angeles Times, a professor of urban geography writes;
“One effect of high-density development that can increase energy consumption is a phenomenon known as the urban heat island, he wrote. Because the building materials retain heat and cool slowly, they raise the ambient air temperature and make central cities a few degrees warmer than rural and suburban areas.
Neighboring city councils eyeing mixed-use developments as a way to fatten their treasury should read the professors essay in which he makes the case that high-density developments may add to global warming.
Wishful Thinking?
Finally, we have to ask what kind of environment do we want to leave our children and grandchildren?
Twenty years from now, will Brad and Angelina have to go all the way to Darfur to rescue children from filth and squalor?
The population of Los Angeles is supposed to double in the next 20 years.
Does it have to?
Is the population forecast a law of nature or the wishful thinking of greedy developers and power- hungry politicians?
Are our children and grandchildren doomed to live in matchbox size apartments in glass and steel towers alongside 20-lane freeways?
