Given the level of new system plans underway with Measure R, a greater level of transit-oriented development advance planning in Los Angeles is both necessary and likely until proposals for development around stations correspond with market opportunities and project plans can become real business transactions. Local officials are partnering with ULI to find ways to realize the potential of the region’s light-rail system.
Los Angeles residents are determined to reduce roadway congestion and provide transportation alternatives to help fight global warming as the region continues to grow. Because most available land has already been developed and thousands of miles of freeway lanes have already been built, few spots remain for greenfield subdivisions. The best prospect for new housing is infill development along existing and new transportation corridors, which means creating more transit-oriented development (TOD) for Los Angeles.
The challenge is not entirely new. A century ago, Los Angeles was home to over 1,000 miles (1,600 km) of trolley lines, including the Los Angeles Railway and the Pacific Electric Railway, known respectively as the Yellow Car and the Red Car systems, amassed by Henry E. Huntington. While implementing his vision of interurban transportation was fundamental to the economic development and settlement of southern California through World War II, Huntington pursued transit chiefly as a means to generate new real estate development opportunities. Once the land sales were realized, the resulting connections between communities allowed new industries, as well as new lifestyles, to emerge. This private transit system fashioned the original urban nature of the entire region.
But the electric trolleys were difficult to maintain when the nation’s love affair with the automobile blossomed, and patience waned for waiting on the aging relics to clatter through intersections. By the early 1960s, the last lines were removed, many replaced by buses. It would be another 30 years before the first modern light-rail line was built—much of it on a portion of the same right-of-way as the Red Car system. By that time, southern California growth had already been fueled by an expanded freeway system. With the added suburbanization of so much developable land in the Los Angeles Basin, the result was what one sees today: a sprawling polycentric megalopolis with some of the nation’s worst roadway congestion and smog.
Voters in Los Angeles County responded to concerns about ongoing congestion and global warming in October 2008, passing Measure R, despite the economic crisis, to provide $40 billion in funding for transit projects over the next 30 years. The funding provided will essentially remake with modern technologies what at one time was one of the largest urban rail systems anywhere. In the meantime, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has proposed the 30/10 plan, under which all new urban rail projects planned for the next 30 years would instead be built over the next ten years— a plan supported by the Obama administration. The nation’s leaders wonder whether other cities might follow suit.
Just a month earlier, in September 2008, California lawmakers had passed Senate Bill 375, the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, which mandates creation of a Sustainable Communities Strategy to integrate regional land use and transportation planning to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from auto travel.
Sensing an opening, ULI Los Angeles this June held its first TOD Summit to bring forward a greater level of business involvement in TOD planning for Los Angeles County (see, “TOD Takes Center Stage in L.A.,”). Just under three decades ago, ULI joined with the Federal Transit Administration to study TOD along the new Los Angeles subway. Today, multiple local ULI district councils do much the same thing.
To best address the diverse needs of Los Angeles County’s 88 cities, as well as its unincorporated areas, ULI L.A.’s all-volunteer event committee has sought to advance the completion of TOD projects in all stages of execution. Drawing on the success of the San Francisco Bay Area’s TOD Marketplace, the L.A. committee chose a partnership with ULI’s advisory services program to initiate a set of technical assistance panels (TAPs) that in turn set the stage for a daylong local gathering to share TOD knowledge and expertise.
Ultimately, the committee would work the better part of a year to oversee the TAPs and prepare the TOD Summit program and event logistics. TAP applications are kept as open as possible with relatively few conditions for submission. A jury of TOD experts from outside Los Angeles chose four studies from a group of competitive applications. Over several months leading up to the TOD Summit, each of the TAPs convened on a single day and provided project proponents with economic, planning, design, development strategy, and related advice that otherwise might not be available. TAP results were then compiled and presented at local community meetings. Finally, summaries of the TAP reports were presented at the TOD Summit, along with a program focusing on the design, finance, and policy conversations needed to complete a TOD project.
Though observers have noted that TOD is more likely to succeed when project planning takes place in conjunction with transit system expansion, for most of the Los Angeles light-rail system, the constraints of environmental laws and limits on transit line project budgets have precluded that approach. Use of park-and-ride lots to accommodate passengers at various station locations is the primary means to mitigate the neighborhood parking spillover generated by transit stations. The TOD Summit, together with a spate of related new events at ULI L.A., offers business leaders the chance to join with public and nonprofit officials to carry out TOD project analysis in a manner that draws on the opportunities presented by Measure R and S.B. 375.
A decade ago, Los Angeles County officials established transit-oriented districts at over a half dozen transit stations in unincorporated areas. The districts were designed to meet various objectives, including those in the state’s Transit Village Development Planning Act of 1994, which allows local agencies to employ tax increment financing to achieve transit development. Likewise, L.A. city planning officials implemented a number of TOD-specific plans in select areas within city limits. State and local transit agencies and regional governance councils have also completed studies, including a new in-depth multimodal TOD typology analysis. Local chambers of commerce have joined the effort, adding much-needed input on retail and industrial market analysis to community TOD visioning efforts. Among various government agencies, municipalities, and nonprofits, nearly 100 individual TOD projects countywide have been or are under consideration.
The four TAP choices made for the first TOD Summit are essentially redevelopment proposals related to light-rail lines; three of the four are set along existing lines that have been open for more than a decade, mostly without significant TOD investment—a phenomenon termed the “Blue Line blues” a decade ago.
The four projects are:
- Monrovia—Station Square Transit Village. Located about 20 miles (32 km) northeast of downtown Los Angeles, Monrovia has planned extensively for residential, commercial, and retail uses near a mission-style depot built in 1926 along the Santa Fe Railroad but closed since 1972. ULI completed a previous assessment of the proposed transit village project in 2003. The Station Square TOD, planned along the new Metro Gold Line Foothill Extension now under construction, is a public/private partnership with developer Samuelson & Fetter.
- Los Angeles County—Blue Line Slauson Station. The Metro Blue Line Slauson Station is situated in the midst of largely industrial land uses in the unincorporated community of Florence-Firestone, about six miles (9.7 km) south of downtown Los Angeles. Los Angeles County established a transit-oriented district there in 1999 to encourage pedestrian-oriented design and help revitalize the residential and commercial neighborhoods near the station.
- Los Angeles County—Green Line Vermont Station. The county also created a transit-oriented district in 2005 at the Green Line Vermont Station, located in the unincorporated community of West Athens. The Vermont Station is situated in the midst of mixed commercial and lower-density residential land uses along the Vermont Avenue corridor crossing the Century Freeway and light-rail line ten miles (16 km) south of downtown.
- Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles—Jordan Downs Public Housing Redevelopment. The 103rd Street Station on the Metro Blue Line is located a half mile (0.8 km) west of Jordan Downs public housing, which qualifies it as transit adjacent. ULI completed a previous assessment in 2009. A more fully realized link between transit and high-quality housing would offer a significant opportunity to stimulate revitalization in the surrounding Watts community, located eight miles (9.7 km) southeast of downtown Los Angeles.
In addition to the need to address the implications of Measure R, the predominant challenge facing Los Angeles is TOD redux—bringing back, revisiting, and otherwise redoubling efforts to stimulate development along and near existing lines where most of the land area is already built up. While these sorts of efforts are already underway, the TOD Summit signals the beginning of a new round of TOD studies connecting the modern remaking of the rail system to the need for denser, urban-focused development to accommodate growth in southern California.
Given the level of new system plans underway with Measure R, a greater level of TOD advance planning in Los Angeles is both necessary and likely. Continuous TOD planning, analysis, and community input are necessary until ideas for development near stations correspond with market opportunities and project plans can become real business transactions. However, the persistence of the current economic crisis now burdens local planners with cuts in resources that threaten efficient TOD project implementation.
That is the three-part challenge: more planning is needed; little help will come from local agencies facing staff cutbacks; and the private sector is in crisis without significant means to ensure that planning investments will lead directly to completion of proprietary projects. The benefits of urban transportation and related TOD alone are not enough to push the system forward. Extensive outreach, education efforts, community presentations, and consultation are essential in order for plans to overcome antigrowth sentiment and development opposition.
Undeterred, the TOD Summit TAPs did not choose to start by picking the low-hanging fruit. Each addressed much-needed redevelopment of entire districts situated at or near light-rail lines—in contrast with the most recent TOD projects to open in Los Angeles, which are situated atop subway lines on major commercial corridors.
In 1922, county planning efforts were among the first of their kind, implementing zoning in part to enable single-family residential development. Later, exceptional growth in the city after World War II partly resulted from promotion of highways as an inexpensive alternative to rebuilding of the rail infrastructure. Today, with new transit under construction and more TOD district zoning in place, TOD projects still need market analysis, parking studies, and integrated land use planning and design in order to implement mixed-use multifamily development as an alternative to more freeways and conventional development patterns. The TOD Summit contributes directly toward these ends.
The choice of these four TAPs addresses the unrealized vision of communities seeking positive outcomes from the nation’s third-largest light-rail system. By carrying out the first TOD Summit, local ULI members are now direct participants in generating the hard work needed to realize those visions in partnership with those communities. Perhaps it is not the system that generates the TOD. Perhaps it is the people.
