Los Angeles and its "density hawks"

From the LA Weekly, 2008:

City Hall's "Density Hawks" Are Changing L.A.'s DNA

Bitter homes & gardens?

By Steven Leigh Morris

published: February 28, 2008

• Soon after taking the job of director of the Los Angeles Department of City Planning in 2006, Gail Goldberg made a declaration that let slip how City Hall is allowing developers to pursue a building frenzy straight out of the storied tale Chinatown.

Said Goldberg, newly arrived here from a similar post in San Diego:
"In every city in this country, the zone on the land establishes the value of the land. In Los Angeles, that's not true.
"The value of the land is not based on what the zone says ... It's based on what [the] developer believes he can change the zone to.
"This is disastrous for the city.
"Disastrous.
"Zoning has to mean something in this city."
Goldberg probably wishes she hadn't said that, not necessarily because she got reprimanded by L.A.'s famously vindictive Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, but because Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavksy has repeated her words in public, over and over. Yaroslavsky, who represented the city's affluent Westside District 5 as a councilman until 1994, has been staging a one-man campaign to slow City Hall's feverish promotion of density — a quiet war on the large swaths of suburbia and few hunks of countryside remaining inside the city limits. With little debate, a trio of new "density enabling" ordinances (a real mouthful, known as the Downtown Ordinance, the Parking Reduction Ordinance and the Senate Bill 1818 Implementation Ordinance) has rolled through Goldberg's Planning Department and ended up in the ornate council chambers on City Hall's second floor.

Read the rest here: http://www.laweekly.com/2008-02-28/news/bitter-homes-gardens/