Back home in City Hall, Sol Blumenfeld was awaiting reports from four staffers he dispatched to last night’s slightly revealing unveiling of a proposed Downtown 6-story building that the city of Los Angeles intends to build so close to Culver City they can taste each other’s breath.
Not that it will change anything regardless of whether the members of the team tell the Community Development Director they loved the project, they hated it or shrugged.
In the bizarre, craggy-faced way that the boundaries of Culver City were laid out, the 90-foot-tall mixed-use building — consuming the north side of the 9900 block of Washington Boulevard — could have dead bodies hanging from all 6 stories, and there is not anything that Culver City, just across the street, could do about it.
It is not as if Los Angeles and Culver City are loving brothers who finally have been reunited after many years apart. They do not attend each other’s family unions, and each could survive happily if the other never calls again.
The Good and the Bad
As an ostensible courtesy, Todd Tipton, the Redevelopment Administrator for the Community Development Dept., explained that Los Angeles dropped off sketches of the plans last month, and Community Development has been studying them ever since — to what end, though, is not clear.
“They have been working with the Planning Division to analyze the project, assess its positives and negatives,” Mr. Tipton said. “Then we’ll forward those to the city of Lois Angeles during the comment period.”
Given the accompanying fuss from activist residents, and sometimes from business owners, whenever Culver City is planning a new building, the anticipated outburst for this project — too tall, too dense, will spawn even more traffic in an already congested neighborhood — may spend a lot of time looking for receptive ears to listen to their case.
Mr. Tipton is well into his second decade at City Hall, and he cannot recall another instant where Los Angeles built so large and so close to Culver City, just across a fairly narrow street. But he recalled a few years ago when Costco, which is in Culver City, was built on the far west end of Washington Boulevard. “Los Angeles had very serious concerns about that project,” he said. “So this is a bit of a role reversal.”
The Flame of Love Flickers and Fades
Mr. Tipton was reluctant to characterize the two cities in too stark relief. “Each community has its constituents, has its concerns,” he said, diplomatically. “We need to respect those.
“I think it is in everybody’s best interests to work co-operatively to resolve and mitigate the concerns.”
And then there is the matter of inter-city relationships as a negotiating to. “We, in Community Development, have counterparts in Los Angeles we are in contact with,” Mr. Tipton said.
He promised that City Hall will follow standard notification procedures so that “people potentially affected by the project will be able to participate.”
Does he anticipate resistance from the Culver City side of the line? “The concerns, regardless of the jurisdiction, are the same,” Mr. Tipton said. “Traffic, air quality, height, massing, density.”
How would he assess the strength of the hand Culver City will be playing the next several years, as the building evolves?
“I think it’s a different kind of hand,” he said. “In this case, we are not being asked to make any decisions. We are participating in the process more than anything else.”
Active or Passive?
Mr. Tipton said it would be wrong to characterize Culver City merely as an observer. “I would say we are a participant,” he said. “We can forward comments. And we are going to express our concerns. We will talk to the (Los Angeles) Council member in this district, Herb Wesson. We have good relationships with him. He respects our position. We respect his. We anticipate that he will react accordingly.”
