In a land of sprawl, urban village grows
The Record
November 28, 2003
In a land of sprawl, urban village grows; L.A. smart-growth development stirs interest
LOS ANGELES - After World War II, Levittown on New York's Long Island heralded the future of suburban America.
In the 1960s and 1970s, Irvine Ranch in Southern California's Orange County, with its teeming business parks built on the edges of immaculate neighborhoods, was seen as the cutting edge of the master-planned community.
Today, their successor in urban planning is Playa Vista, a densely packed housing development on Los Angeles' west side, north of Los Angeles International Airport, within city limits.
The project officially opened in September, but scholars and housing industry executives from as far away as Japan have been studying Playa Vista for years.
What draws students of urban planning is the layout. With an average 24 housing units to an acre - compared with suburbia's typical four to 12 - and more public space than private, Playa Vista is designed to look more like Old Europe than sprawling Southern California.
People will "look back in 20 to 25 years and say, 'Playa Vista really began this trend toward more dense Los Angeles,'-" said Fernando Guerra, director of the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola Marymount University.
No building is taller than four stories. The streets are narrow. Most residences have no back yards. Town houses, in a variety of architectural styles, including Spanish and Art Deco, are stacked over underground garages.
"We're very curious about how it works out when you have that many people living" so close together, said Greg Vilkin, president of Forest City Residential West Inc., which is developing a massive residential and commercial project at the former Stapleton Airport in Denver. Vilkin made his pilgrimage to Playa Vista this year to see firsthand what was unfolding.
In the end, the project will be much smaller than the 1,087 acres the planners originally plotted out, a change born of the environmental controversy that has long surrounded Playa Vista. In September, the state approved $140 million to purchase nearly 200 acres of the property, which will be restored and preserved as the Ballona Wetlands. Playa Vista has agreed to donate or give up its right to develop an additional 415 acres.
Planned for about 13,000 residents, Playa Vista is home to only about 1,000 people now, most of them paying $1,650 to $3,000 a month. Of the 489 housing units released for sale, priced from the low $200,000s to more than $1 million, 28 remain up for grabs.
A community center with two swimming pools just opened, and a branch of the Los Angeles County Public Library is under construction and set to open in 2004.
It will be seven years before the development is finished.
To Jocelyn Balaban-Lutzky, her new town home in the Tapestry section of Playa Vista is reminiscent "of brownstones from Boston, New York, or Chicago," with a concert park and a kiddie park a short walk away. It is, in other words, a look and feel that's very un-L.A. "It's a neighborhood, and everybody says hello," Balaban-Lutzky said.
Not everyone is impressed with what they've seen so far.
"The buildings in Playa Vista are too big, too loud, too town-unfriendly," said architect Stefanos Polyzoides, who worked on early plans for the project. "We wanted Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Pasadena. We've been completely betrayed. They're not doing this magnificent site to its ultimate potential."
But George Lefcoe, a University of Southern California real estate law professor, among others, sees Playa Vista as "probably the largest and best example" of smart growth in Los Angeles. He expects the project to merge well with its Westside surroundings. "Once the project is completed," he said, "it will be impossible for people to imagine it being any other way."
As planned today, much of Playa Vista remains the vision of developer Maguire Thomas Partners.
In June 1989, Nelson C. Rising, then a senior partner in the firm, held three unusual meetings that he called "charrettes," a French word he loosely translated as "designing against a deadline." In attendance were urban planners and architects, many of them pioneers in a movement called New Urbanism, dedicated to restoring city centers, conserving natural environments, and making rambling suburbs look and feel like old-fashioned neighborhoods.
At the charrettes, the experts put on slide shows for local residents, government leaders, and environmental groups. They juxtaposed pictures of towns where people know their neighbors and can walk their children to school - places such as Oak Park, Ill., and Princeton - and pictures of suburban sprawl. They talked about the benefits of the kinds of density and diversity that allow people to live within blocks of where they work and shop.
Indeed, as described in the charrettes, Playa Vista was to be a pedestrian-oriented community. A pocket park or two would be within a short walk of each dwelling, and a mix of services would be within strolling distance or a brief ride away on a clean-fuel shuttle.
Four years later, the Los Angeles City Council approved the project's first phase.
"What people didn't want is another suburb built in Los Angeles," said Steve Soboroff, a former Los Angeles mayoral candidate who serves as president of Playa Vista. "They said, 'Give me as much open space as possible and then have the rest be urban life. Create an urban life.' "
The effort to do just that has been a series of trials and errors.
For example, the Playa Vista team erected a fancy public restroom in the middle of Crescent Park, only to discover that it blocked views. It was torn down. A card room where builders thought residents might gather to play bridge was scotched in favor of a movie screening room.
Those who are moving into Playa Vista are finding the experience a mixed bag - at least so far.
Frank Arredondo, a Los Angeles police officer, acknowledged that construction noise and dust were bothersome and that many of the promised amenities were years away from being built. He also finds the homeowners' fees - from $356 to $773 per month, depending on location - somewhat steep.
Still, Arredondo said he and his wife, Kerry, and 17-year-old son were "excited to be a part" of a new community. The family bought a two-bedroom, two-bath condo in the high $300,000s. After nearly 10 years of commuting from the Orange County city of Santa Ana, Arredondo is pleased with his shorter drive. He also likes the parks, the recreation center, and the prospect of a nearby library.
Playa Vista is hoping that many others will be drawn to such conveniences.
To create its community, Playa Vista hired 15 different builders, most of whom had previously concentrated on single-family homes and had little experience putting up multiple-unit dwellings.
One of them is Shea Homes, which is building its first town houses in an unusual configuration: two-story units stacked on top of each other, reaching a total of four stories.
Such dynamics have been of interest to the more than 100 Japanese home builders who have flocked to Playa Vista. Noriko Yamamoto, president of Global Link Inc., a Marina del Rey firm that supplies advice on home building to Japanese developers, said they were especially curious to see how the Americans met the challenge of building such a large project in the middle of a city.
Also on the minds of the Japanese: how Playa Vista handled the ecological aspects of the development amid protests from environmentalists who wanted the land to revert to its pre-industrial state.
Though green activists have wrested numerous concessions from the developers over the years, many still harbor deep concerns.
"The Playa Vista project is not urban infill, it is sprawl," said Tom Francis, executive director of the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust. "Urban infill means you already have roads and infrastructure. Playa Vista is covering open land [that had no] roads or infrastructure; therefore, it is sprawl."
Part of Playa Vista's response to protests against building near the Ballona Wetlands has been to emphasize conservation. It has recycled construction materials and is encouraging the use of non-polluting cars. Some residents will be able to finance the purchase of small electric vehicles along with their home loans, and will get preferred parking at Playa Vista shopping areas.
Others have come to Playa Vista to learn different lessons.
Developer Jim Schulte of Boeing Realty, for instance, came looking for tips on how to build a community that is attractive to employers. Boeing plans to start work next year on a 3.3-million-square-foot commercial development on a former aircraft manufacturing site near the Long Beach Airport. It is slated to also include 2,500 residential units, ranging from apartments to single-family homes.
Playa Vista's combination of housing, shopping, and office space arranged on simple street grids with landscaped parkways "revisits the past," Schulte said, "doing density in a form that's quite palatable." He plans to plant the kinds of streettrees found at Playa Vista - magnolias, Mexican fan palms, and camphor trees - in Boeing's development.
Even executives from Irvine Ranch, itself long considered a model development, are looking at Playa Vista as a paradigm. Joseph D. Davis, president of Irvine Community Development Co., said that although densities were less in suburban-minded Orange County, he thought that some Playa Vista-style housing might have merit for his company.
"Instead of just providing products for a particular price point," said Davis, Playa Vista "really satisfies a wide array of buyer opportunities. To me, that's terrific in one community, and particularly a community that is so starved for new housing."
Soboroff acknowledges that many of Playa Vista's features are throwbacks, including the reproductions of street lights from older Los Angeles neighborhoods.
But Playa Vista also is experimenting with several new twists.
Among them are wireless Internet access beamed into neighborhood parks by AT&T Corp. and the built-in valet cabinets produced by Whirlpool Corp. The manufacturers are among the 15 industry-exclusive sponsors that have purchased rights to be preferred providers at Playa Vista. CompUSA will help residents set up their computer systems for free - in the hope of generating some new business. Dunn Edwards has introduced a "Playa Vista" line of paint.
Many of Playa Vista's experiments still lie ahead. The development's second and final phase, which is in the environmental review stage, is billed by the developers as the heart of the place. Plans call for a grocery store and other community-serving businesses that are crucial to Playa Vista's vision of a total urban experience.
The second phase, which Playa Vista has dubbed "the Village," is years away at best. Doug Moreland, Playa Vista's senior vice president of development, said the company hoped to obtain city approvals next summer. His timeline also builds in 12 to 18 months for battling environmental lawsuits.
Moreland said opponents would face a tough time if they attempted to present a case that the area should be considered a wetland. "I think the biggest issue we have for Phase 2 is educating people that the Village is on an old airport site," Moreland said.
Soboroff added that his bosses - the investment banks and the union pension fund - are on "rock-solid" financial footing and are "totally committed to completing the project." On top of their initial investment, the owners have put in an additional $240 million, Soboroff noted. That outlay has been offset by payments from builders, who have bought the parcels they are putting houses on.
"The money was being spent for all these years for litigation and planning," Soboroff said, "and now it's being spent on building a community."
As the building continues, students of urban design are sure to keep coming. Said Soboroff: "They can learn to shave on our beard."