**
The New York Times
March 10, 2002 Sunday
Sprawl-Weary Los Angeles Builds Up and In
By TIMOTHY EGAN
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES, March 9
Look up the word sprawl in the dictionary, the joke goes, and there is the City of Angels and the dirty halo of dispiriting words it contributed to the urban lexicon: smog, suburban wasteland, Blade Runner. But look again. Ten years after riots ripped apart this city, Los Angeles is transforming itself in ways that defy the stereotype.
While the greater metropolitan area is still spreading out, especially 60 to 70 miles east toward the desert, the nation's second-biggest city is growing inward, upward, and making a fledgling attempt to free itself from the automobile. Last year, Los Angeles issued more building permits for housing inside the city -- more than 8,500 units -- than at any time in at least a decade. Most were for the kind of projects planners praise as the antithesis of sprawl.
Downtown, almost 4,000 lofts are under construction or in development, giving fresh life to a moribund historic district. In the riot zones of South Central, hundreds of houses have risen on weed-choked lots. Throughout the city, parking lots are going down and more densely built apartments and commercial developments are going up.
A person can walk in Los Angeles, from home to work to curbside food vendor. Every day, nearly 250,000 people take the subway, the most expensive ever built in the nation. Even if the number of train riders is only a fraction of total commuters -- and a blip by New York or Chicago standards -- the volume has exceeded expectations by about 50 percent.
What brought Angelenos to a point where an apartment near the old Farmers Market in the Fairfax neighborhood is more desirable than a tract house with a pool at the edge of the San Fernando Valley are the very forces that nearly made the city unlivable, planners and critics say.
Drivers in Los Angeles now spend an average of seven working days a year motionless in traffic, according to a study by the Texas Transportation Institute. At the same time, Los Angeles County -- the nation's most populous, with 10 million people -- has nearly run out of available land for housing developments.
With six million cars, and no new freeways under construction, Los Angeles may have reached its tipping point.
"Congestion has gotten so bad that people are finally willing to trade space for proximity to work and play," said William Fulton, the author of "The Reluctant Metropolis" and head of a land-use think tank in Ventura, the Solimar Research Group. "Plus, sprawl is dependent on plenty of cheap land and middle-class families. For the most part, we don't have either of those anymore."
Of course, Southern California is a long way from the New Urbanist ideal. The 2000 census showed that 18 of the nation's 53 "boomburgs" are in the Los Angeles area. The term describes communities of 100,000 people or more that grew by at least 10 percent and are not the principal cities in their region.
Moreover, people are still leaving the city because of its public schools and uneven services. Secession movements are afoot in Hollywood, the San Fernando Valley and the harbor area. All three communities could vote, as early as fall, on proposals to secede from Los Angeles.
But unlike old cities in the East like Cleveland, Detroit or Pittsburgh, where the core of the city was hollowed out by migration and never replaced, the oldest parts of Los Angeles are still growing. The last census showed that the city grew by about 6 percent, to 3.7 million. The central city -- basically downtown and the fringe -- grew by 21 percent.
Los Angeles, with 7,600 people per square mile, is nearly 3 times as dense as Houston, and 10 times as dense as Phoenix, by one census calculation.
"When I came here 10 years ago from New York, everyone said, 'Don't Manhattanize Los Angeles,' " said Con Howe, the director of the city planning department. "And there's still no great ground swell of support for high density. But it's happening through the market. People are making choices and we're a changed city because of it."
That change was encouraged by changes to city code and new transportation centers.
"We try to build in the city, along the new transit corridors, where somebody can get off a train or a bus after work and walk home," said Steve Olson, whose company specializes in building homes for first-time buyers.
Business, Mr. Olson said, has never been better, particularly among second-generation Latinos who want to buy a home but stay close to the neighborhoods where they grew up.
Los Angeles is fast becoming a majority-Latino city. And it is Latinos, along with Asians, who kept the core of the city growing while whites were fleeing to other Western cities, city officials and other experts say.
"The starter-home market for upwardly mobile Latinos is bottomless," Mr. Fulton, the author, said. "These are people who want a home with new countertops and a nice entertainment room, but they also want to be close to the old church and family."
When the city, in 1999, made it easier to convert historic buildings to lofts or apartments, a wave of building followed. Now, along Spring Street, Broadway and Main, the 1920's offices that were abandoned decades ago in favor of the glass towers that rose above downtown are being converted into homes.
The city no longer requires apartment or loft builders to provide parking spaces, making it easier, builders say, to create something resembling compact old cities. It costs less for the builder.
The city has also used various incentives to get contractors to build houses in place of strip malls. Last year, 27 percent of new home permits were in these commercial areas, city officials say.
"I've never seen anything like what's going on now," said Jeff Lee, who has been building apartments, houses and lofts in the city for 18 years. "We're just about out of land, and yet people want to live in the city. The market is telling us that people want to go vertical."
Downtown, near the Staples Center, Mr. Lee is converting a 1930's truck-hauling building to apartments. At Playa Vista north of the airport near the ocean, where housing, offices and stores are under construction at the site where Howard Hughes built the Spruce Goose more than 50 years ago, Mr. Lee is building houses that sell for around $800,000. In South Central, he said, he has 175 houses under construction for sale at about $180,000.
Next week, the biggest new mixed-used urban project in years, called the Grove, will open in the Fairfax neighborhood, next to the Farmers Market, which dates to 1934. The development will have a trolley and walkways connecting the market to blocks of new stores.
While the retail area looks, in one sense, like a pastel-colored, outdoor version of the latest suburban mall, the project has generated a surprise just across Third Street. A village of 1,300 apartments and town houses is under construction on what used to be strip malls. The selling point of the new middle-income-priced apartments is a tenant's ability to walk to parks, stores, restaurants or work, and still mix it up with the sunbaked regulars at the old Farmers Market.
"It's not Disney," said Mr. Howe, the planning director, as he walked among a frenzy of construction workers at the Grove racing to finish by next weekend's opening.
The good news for Los Angeles, Mr. Fulton said, is that the city is morphing into what he calls dense sprawl, with an ethnically diverse, lively inner city.
The bad news, he said, is that traffic and parking will only get worse, perhaps pushing more people to the subways and the already crowded buses.
"The big master-planned communities that Los Angeles is known for have moved to places like Phoenix and Las Vegas," Mr. Fulton said. "Here in L.A., our future is to be packed closer together. This is an amazing city. But this also means eternal traffic congestion."
No comments:
Post a Comment