Los Angeles is having a city-building moment.
Two massive projects -- the L.A. Live entertainment complex next to Staples Center and the Grand Avenue development on Bunker Hill -- are underway. A third giant project, a major expansion of Universal City, was unveiled last week. All adhere to a much-ballyhooed planning strategy embraced by Los Angeles power brokers.
The projects, at a combined cost of about $7.5 billion, follow what has become the big planning trend in Los Angeles and elsewhere: mixing dense housing, retail and office space in village configurations near mass transit. The idea is to foster "smart growth" -- in which residents leave their cars behind, walk to shops, and take buses and rail to work.
For Los Angeles, "this is the beginning. This will be the place where a model gets created," said Gail Goldberg, the city's planning director. "This is very different from past development in L.A. We have in the past seen sort of a limitless amount of land. And I think that there were opportunities for sprawl that don't exist anymore."
Goldberg and other planners suggest that the current projects demonstrate that Los Angeles has learned from the drawbacks of past mega-developments.
In the 1960s and '70s, for example, city planners created a second downtown in Century City -- but they did so far from any freeways or mass transit, a legacy that Westside commuters deal with daily.
But critics are more skeptical, saying that "smart growth" is only a euphemism for more sprawl.
They worry that the sheer size of the projects -- Grand Avenue's six skyscrapers, Universal City's 2,900 homes, and L.A. Live's huge shopping and entertainment venues -- will overwhelm any small improvements made by increasing the number of people who use mass transit.
That point was underscored in the environmental impact report for the Grand Avenue project, which found that the development could significantly worsen traffic in downtown -- despite the fact that it would be built along the Red Line subway.
"The landowner is always going to want to put as much as possible onto their properties, and push off onto the public sector the costs for doing it," said Rick Cole, city manager of Ventura and a longtime L.A. urban thinker, speaking of large-scale projects in general. "The public ends up having to foot the bill."
