LA.'s own "soft revolution" is, for the present, colored bright orange -- the color of Home Depot's nearly ubiquitous logo. By a 12-1 majority, the City Council last week took the highly unusual step of denying the desire of the home-improvement retailer to open a 93,000-square-foot store on Foothill Boulevard in Sunland-Tujunga.
Home Depot has spent an estimated $600,000 in recent weeks on a hard-knuckle campaign to get a building permit for the new store in a renovated Kmart building. But the effort backfired badly when the company's tactical plan to pack the council chambers with orange T-shirted Home Depot "supporters" was published on the blog of community organizer Joe Barrett. Now the retailer will have to go through the city's environmental review process because construction work at the site was so extensive, a route the company sought to avoid.
City Hall players, trying to make sense of Home Depot's unexpected defeat, gave points to the opposition of a rival home improvement store, Do-It Center, down the street. But something else should be given credit -- a change in the rules of the local development game. I am not sure that all the players realize what has happened.
Neighborhood councils are the new players, with unknown strengths and weaknesses. Their behavior is not like the usual waltz around neighborhood concerns performed by some City Council members and developers with deep pockets and even deeper knowledge of campaign financing. And if the development game is to continue in Los Angeles as it has for decades, the effect of these new players has to be calculated -- and neutralized, if possible. That is what Home Depot sought to do and -- astonishingly -- failed to achieve.
Neighborhood councils might seem to be marginal players. They cannot coerce any of the other players; they can only advise. They cannot challenge the city in court, as angry homeowners associations often do, because neighborhood councils are city government. Last year, Controller Laura Chick's audit made the point that the councils function far too much like the rest of city government -- they lack fiscal resources, they tend to be overly factious and they do not seem to be especially effective when measured by the yardsticks usually applied to legislative bodies.
