David Lazarus is showing to Southern Californians what Bay Area readers already knew: the man really understands the problems facing working Californians, and is not afraid to write about them directly and engagingly. In January he took on Prop 13 and called for it to be revamped, if not scrapped. Today he has shifted his focus to the struggles renters face in LA.
As any of us who have lived in the area realize, rents are nearly unaffordable in the urban center of LA – the place where it’s easiest to live without a car. Lazarus opens his column with the story of a single mother who makes $38K as an admin assistant and who can only afford a rental way out in Lancaster. This is a familiar story to me – I know a LOT of Californians who make a similar commute. And as oil prices soar toward $4/gal, it is becoming more difficult for working Californians to get around.
For the last few decades, Californians have been told the solution is more of the same – more sprawl, more freeways, more commuting. The obvious solution – to build more housing in the urban core – is opposed by those who believe, as a USC professor lamented in Lazarus’ column, “density is a four-letter word.”
Lazarus helps explain why the anti-density movement is blocking what I described last summer as the redefinition of the California Dream for the 21st century – that unless we invest in greater urban density, we will inscribe inequality permanently on the urban landscape.
For example, one of the major obstacles to affordable rental housing construction in the urban core is the archaic parking requirement:
One reason housing prices are so high is a requirement that newly built multiunit dwellings (and condo conversions) provide at least one — usually two or three — parking space per unit. This inflates the cost of each apartment and discourages construction of smaller, more affordable units because developers would be required to provide even more parking.
“The fixation on parking in Los Angeles has driven up the price of housing and increased congestion on our streets,” said Donald Shoup, a professor of urban planning at UCLA. He said including two spaces with a unit can add about $45,000 to construction costs.
One solution would be to waive the parking requirement for smaller apartments, thus creating an incentive for developers to place more such units on the market. And because there’d be no parking cost built into the rent, such units would (in theory) be cheaper than apartments that come with extra room for vehicles.
This could have the added benefit of increasing demand for public transportation — presuming, that is, people would trade car ownership for reduced rent. Increased demand would hopefully spur development of commuter-friendly projects like a long-delayed Westside subway line.
But Gail Goldberg, L.A.’s planning director, said any proposal that includes cutbacks in parking tends to go nowhere. “People feel like there’s already not enough parking and that people are intruding into their neighborhood. This is a difficult discussion to have.”
Here we see the core problem: those who established themselves in these neighborhoods in the 20th century, under a now-obsolete version of the California Dream, refuse to admit that their perspectives and expectations need to change. Whether they know it or not, those who oppose density are helping establish a “homeowner aristocracy” – where the benefits of society go only to those who were lucky enough to buy a house before 2000, or who inherited from someone who did. In order to maintain the fantasy that urban neighborhoods can have enough parking for everyone who wants a car, LA is now making it unaffordable to rent a home if you are not making an upper middle class income, and those who can’t afford it are forced to drive – and bear the brunt of peak oil’s arrival.
San Franciscans might empathize. The squeeze on parking spaces there is legendary; a garage is almost a mythical prize. And yet, as many more San Franciscans are realizing, there is really no good reason to own a car if you live in the City. MUNI has its problems, but it gets people around. Carsharing services like Zipcar or City CarShare allow one to access a vehicle on the few occasions they might need it, reducing the need for parking spaces and car ownership.
As more and more scholars are coming to realize, car ownership has high costs for workers – “you work on Friday to pay for your auto”. Adding in the environmental and climate costs of long car commutes, and anti-density policies are clearly having a catastrophic effect on our state. City centers can thrive with less parking, and it brings the added benefit of not bankrupting the workers who keep that city going.
Lazarus suggests that alongside going after the parking requirement, we pursue mixed use development:
A more politically practical remedy may be to ease zoning requirements for mixed-use properties, thus allowing creation of urban villages featuring retail outlets at street level and moderately priced living spaces overhead.
This is already happening to some extent above a handful of subway stations, such as the Wilshire Vermont Station project in Koreatown. But creation of dynamic transit villages throughout L.A. remains a distant prospect at best.
It’s unfortunate that this seems a “distant prospect at best,” especially because so many other West Coast cities already embrace mixed use. Seattle, where I lived from 2001 to 2007, is an excellent example of mixed use, and in my last years there I got along quite well without having a car at all. SF and Oakland exhibit effective mixed-use policies. So does my current home of Monterey – virtually everything I need, from the library to the supermarket to bars and entertainment is a short walk or bike trip away.
Much of Southern California looked like this as well, at least before 1950. Since that time, under the leadership of conservative Republicans, SoCal pioneered the single-use, car-based sprawl that has now brought the American economy to the brink of collapse. SoCal gambled that cheap oil and affordable land would last forever. That gamble is now quite clearly lost – so why should we listen to the anti-density forces who basically would have us double down?
If we are to renew the promises of the California Dream – affordable, clean, pleasant living for all the state’s working people – we are going to have to turn to density. We need to invest in public transportation, apartments and condos, and mixed use policies. If we do, we can restore the promise of economic security to the people of our state. If we do not, we will create a pattern of inequality that will likely dominate our society for the entire century.
