The recent rainstorms are a reminder of how quickly Southern California’s landscape can pivot from semi-arid to verdantly lush.

With so many development projects in L.A. either cancelled or indefinitely on hold, one cannot help but wonder about the massive potential of vacant lots as temporary sites for urban agriculture. A report last April by the Los Angeles Times documented the exceedingly long wait times – up to 4 years – for a plot in local community gardens.

Why can’t the mismatch between supply and demand be partially met through the transformation of individual parcels on a case by case basis, with the city helping to negotiate agreements with willing private landowners?

This property at 5th Ave/Rose in Venice, once envisioned for a mixed-use condo building,  lies fallow, bursting with green. Its conversion to a garden isn’t difficult to imagine.

This parcel at 5th/Rose Ave is one of many potential community gardens.

The upside to the landowner/developer would come primarily in the form of community goodwill (provided there was a clear understanding about the length of use and other conditions) from the creation of a new neighborhood amenity. In the case of residential projects, part of the garden could even be preserved and incorporated into the future development to meet on-site open space requirements for multifamily housing.

As a longtime admirer of Joel Kotkin’s iconoclastic thinking on urban issues, I am usually in agreement with his signature issue: the defense of American suburbia against attacks by environmentalists and policymakers who would like to promote a denser, transit-oriented way of life. Kotkin believes there has been no fundamental shift away from suburbs and back into cities, despite myriad media reports citing the trend. At worst, this narrative is driven by an ideological agenda; at best, it reflects a misreading of consumers’ unchanged preferences for single-family housing.

But in his latest article on newgeography.com, Kotkin has gone a step further to declare that the Democratic Party’s electoral defeat in the recent Massachusetts Senate race can be attributed to Obama’s “war against suburbia,” an aggressively pro-urban agenda that has in effect alienated a key bloc of “swing” voters living outside major cities.

The evidence for this so-called “war against suburbia”? A proposal to convert interstate highways to toll roads is one of many smoking guns, since in theory it would disproportionately impact suburbanites who drive more. Yet Kotkin also points out in the same breathe that suburbanites have shorter commutes to work than the average city dweller, due to the increasing dispersion of job centers, so it is unclear why they would be more affected by toll roads than anyone else.

As everyone knows, the real impetus behind toll road and congestion pricing proposals is a bankrupt Highway Trust Fund, not some imaginary war on suburbia. A policy that asks drivers to internalize the costs of road use deserves to be part of the political conversation. Of course, there is a double standard at work in Kotkin’s stance: massive federal subsidies for highway maintenance are somehow not “anti-urban,” whereas investments in mass transit are utterly “anti-suburban.”

Armed with a few original insights and talking points, Kotkin has built an enviable career as a nationally syndicated columnist. In this case, though, his tendency to apply the same insight to every situation results in a bit of an overreach.

In Los Angeles, it is very easy for pedestrians to feel like second-class citizens. Granted, we have inherited an infrastructure expressly built for cars, but the enormous width of our streets is further exacerbated by poor crosswalk design and signal coordination. Case in point: this intersection in Brentwood, where San Vicente Boulevard and Montana Avenue converge, is one of the most frustrating, infuriating, annoying places to navigate on foot in the entire city.

LA's pedestrian-last policy: one of the most poorly designed crosswalks (San Vincente/Montana in Brentwood).

Imagine you want to go from point A to point B. The awkward, rhomboidal shape of the intersection leaves you with few good options while awaiting a signal change to begin the long trek across San Vicente Boulevard. There are multiple segments to the crosswalk, with pedestrians left stranded on the various medians (yes, plural) while cars whiz past. Total crossing distance for the existing scenario (in yellow) is over 400 feet, or about an entire city block.

Diagonal crossing in Beverly Hills: breezy, efficient, and conducive to retail spending!

Contrast this with Beverly Hill’s downtown, where diagonal crossing allows a swift, efficient jaunt from one destination to the next. If this scheme were implemented in Brentwood, the crossing distance at San Vicente/Montana would be reduced to just over 120 feet (in purple), or 30% of the original distance.  This type of fix is not just about catering to the impatient pedestrian, but increasing economic vitality in Brentwood’s retail district overall. Think about the boutiques and restaurants on both sides of San Vicente that would benefit from increased flows of foot traffic across the boulevard. Right now, would-be customers have good reason to look at the intersection, ask themselves “why bother?,” and get back into their cars to drive elsewhere.

In mid-June, when Curbed LA reported on a price chop at Dogtown Station, a 35-unit loft development at 700 Main Street in Venice, 17 units were still available. Today, that number has dropped to 12, an absorption rate of approximately one unit per month, which seems fairly typical for the market and product type.

But apparently not quick enough, because in the last week, the entry price has been lowered to $819,000 for a second-story flat of 1,383 sq. ft. (or $592 PSF).

I actually interviewed with the developer, Bob D’Elia, back in January 2008, as an internship-seeking graduate student. At the time, I had produced a mock pro forma for Dogtown Station, estimating its construction costs, revenue from condo sales, IRR, and presented it at the interview.

D’Elia was impressed by the accuracy of my estimate for sales revenues, $41.3 million, which took into account both pre-sales and the planned release of remaining units at escalating price points. With the development totaling 57,869 sellable sq. ft. (excluding common and outdoor areas), that translated into an average sale price of approximately $714 PSF. D’Elia would not verify the accuracy of my cost estimates but boasted of a project IRR in excess of 20%.

Overall, this newest price point, $819,000, represents a 17% decrease (on a PSF basis) from the early 2008 peak average…without counting the additional incentive of a 36-month lease on a new 2010 Toyota Prius with the purchase of any unit (valid until December 31st).

Dogtown Station has lowered its price and and is offering an additional buyer's incentive.

Assuming a 2010 Prius base sticker price of $23,370 with monthly  lease payments of $341, this incentive is worth around $13,000 by my calculations, meaning that the effective price PSF is closer to $583, or about 19% off the original ask. This percentage drop is, perhaps not coincidentally, in the zone of the developer’s originally projected IRR, which means that Dogtown Station may have hit rock bottom in terms of the price decreases its investors can absorb before erasing profit margins entirely.

At the November meeting of SCAG’s newly-formed Steering Committee* on Regional Congestion Pricing, transportation firm HNTB outlined its preliminary research for a crowd of planners, businesspeople, and community advocates, mainly summarizing existing practices in other cities around the globe. Against the resistance of some local politicians and even its own Board members, SCAG recently committed $4 million to a feasibility study on congestion pricing in preparation for its 2012 update of the Regional Transportation Plan (RTP).

With Southern California slated to convert existing carpool lanes to HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes on stretches of the 210 10 and 110 as soon as next year, the committee gathered to debate whether the application of road pricing strategies should be broadened across the region to manage anticipated increases in VMT.

HNTB was mostly preaching to the choir as it outlined the positive benefits – economic and environmental – that have been reaped from the implementation of congestion pricing policies elsewhere. Representatives from the trucking/goods movement industries were a tad more skeptical, but most everyone agreed that the success of congestion pricing in Southern California will ride on the rollout of the concept to the public, particularly how the revenues from any user-based fees are subsequently allocated.

One of the most interesting findings from HNTB’s research was that, even in other cities less enamored of the automobile than Los Angeles, public support for congestion pricing increased after implementation, but still barely passed the 50% mark. The graph below tracks the opinion of Stockholm residents before and after the city started charging cars to enter its central district. The poll further distinguishes between residents in the inner-city (ie. within the congestion pricing zone) and the outer region/periphery.

% of Stockholm residents in favor of congestion pricing, before and after implementation, by location (Source: Stephen Glaister, Imperial College, UK, via HNTB)

Two caveats: 1) Public support may have increased further since Spring 2006, as residents have presumably adjusted to the policy and perhaps shifted their places of work/residence accordingly. 2) Southern California is not Stockholm. It is a famously polynucleated region without a dominant urban core. But the longstanding disparity between job-rich coastal counties and the more affordable but primarily housing-driven Inland Empire could pose similar challenges to Southern California policymakers in garnering broad majority support here. Indeed, there are still so many variables that it is hard to gauge who the probable winners and losers would be (more on that in a future post). But congestion pricing may be part of the long-term solution to our traffic woes.

*Of which I am a member, representing UC Irvine’s Center for Urban Infrastructure.

Other New Urbanisms, a symposium held this past weekend at Sci-Arc in downtown Los Angeles, showcased one of the more interesting and perhaps utopic schemes to emerge from the recent  ”New Infrastructure: Innovative Transit Solutions for LA” design competition.

The Fletcher Studio, which won second place, proposed urban agricultural villages that would convert freeway embankments into terraced hillsides. Affiliated bungalow housing would be built alongside. These developments would be a new source of “green” jobs, employing farmers on a rotating, seasonal basis. Fletcher calculated that along LA’s 527 miles of freeway, there are approximately 960 acres of largely unused land that could be reclaimed as a productive landscape.

Freeway embankments: reclaimed space for urban agriculture?

Panelists responding to Fletcher’s presentation debated whether Caltrans, the state agency with regulatory authority over freeway-adjacent land, would ever “yield a square inch” of its terrain (both literal and figurative). Landscape architect Mia Lehrer, also a participant in the symposium, highlighted the importance of working within entrenched bureaucracies to make change happen. Not every project is going to be “sexy” or transformative on a regional scale, Lehrer stated, but if it has the potential to improve environmental or community health outcomes, design professionals should not shy away from the political challenges of implementation.

Judging from the pessimistic mood of the panel, it is clear that designers are suffering from an acute sense of disempowerment in the current economic environment, with its renewed focus on pragmatic, “shovel-ready” infrastructure projects, at the expense of more radical, paradigm-shifting proposals. On the other hand, the glass can be seen as half full: current approaches to issues of growth and mobility in Southern California have failed, so there may be a growing receptivity to systemic change. A small dose of unconventional thinking may be necessary to get the city unstuck, as it were.

Shopping centers in Southern California have become a pretty fascinating bellwether of contemporary trends in architecture and urbanism. Developer Rick Caruso’s The Grove, for instance, made a splash when it opened in 2000 by modeling itself after a traditional European village with a purely ornamental trolley line, in many ways echoing the New Urbanist call for transit-oriented, walkable places. The Americana at Brand in Glendale, also by Caruso, added to this concept a mixed-use component (rental apartments) and a more generous public realm. Granted, these shopping centers paid lip service to New Urbanist ideas, more than implementing them in earnest.

In this context, the recently renovated Westfield Culver City off the 405 represents its own leap into the future of architecture. Inside, vaulted ceilings and slices of skylight create an airy, vertical sense of space, a cathedral-like effect. The interior is more or less gutted, with walkways around the perimeter. Diagonal ramps straddle and crisscross this spatial void at non-perpendicular, irregular angles. The ground plane feels tenuous. From virtually any given point in the mall, the consumer enjoys panoramic, unobstructed views of the retail frontage on multiple levels. Paradoxically, however, it is nearly impossible to identify the shortest way from Point A to Point B, if you actually see somewhere you want to go. The developer of Westfield Century City wanted to “blur the boundaries between exterior and interior spaces,” and by this measure succeeded, but the effect is disorienting.

What does this mall say about trends in American urbanism? Well, the Westfield Culver City actually seems much closer to the grands magasins, the great department stores of early 20th-century Paris than the nostalgic village concept so successfully exploited at The Grove.

With its generous use of glass and open-air quality, the architecture is undeniably complicit in a sense of voyeurism. There is nothing new about places of commerce serving as a showcase for social spectacle and celebrity. Indeed, the Parisian upper classes would frequently go to these luxe Art Deco retail palaces to see and be seen. During my visit, the TV phenomenon “So You Think You Can Dance” was hosting auditions on the main plaza, amid a 360º ring of onlookers.

Overall, this design concept is thoughtful and contextually appropriate. Westfield Culver City is located not only at the intersection of the 405 and 90 freeways, but of ethnically diverse communities who might otherwise find few opportunities or excuses to patronize the same places. Because the architecture makes voyeurism acceptable, it in turn allows people to gawk at cultural differences and feel comfortable doing so.

In its quest to be modern and cutting-edge, however, the mall overlooks features that might make the experience more user-friendly. The parking system is disorganized. None of the innovative traffic management strategies used at other Westfield locations, such as the red/green lights installed above parking spaces to signal occupancy/vacancy, are imported here. Directional signage is inconsistent at entrances and exits.

Despite high hopes, especially for a Target both nearby and easily accessible via freeway, the new Westfield Culver City mall misses the bullseye in terms of convenience.

This past weekend I had the opportunity to see a fascinating photography exhibit at LACMA, New Topographics, the re-creation of a 1975 exhibit originally held at the International Museum of Photography, George Eastman House. Misunderstood and critically underappreciated at the time, it documents seemingly banal subjects such as tract homes in nondescript suburbs, commercial strips, parking lots, and other “everyday” objects of the postwar built environment. The work of these photographers is no less captivating today, even as the terrain it covers is more familiar to the viewing public.

Suburbs often lend themselves to various moralizing statements (about a spiritual void in American culture or about our unsustainable consumption of land and resources, for instance), but these photographs generally avoid value-laden judgments on the inhabitants of these arguably “ugly” buildings and aesthetically-minimalist landscapes. Nor do they read, more than thirty years later, as an anthropological time capsule, a window into shifting modes of architecture and living. Instead, intentionally or not, much of the work feels redemptive of the uniquely American visual vernacular that are today’s first-generation suburbs. Robert Adams, whose photographic series The New West receives prominent placement in the LACMA exhibit, would probably disagree strongly with my interpretation, as he makes his own contempt for suburbia well-known in the accompanying text to his book. But such is the nature of art–its visual meaning sometimes escapes the author’s control and becomes something quite opposite of the original intention.  The show is definitely worth seeing before it closes in January 2010.

Solair Wilshire, a 22-story mixed-use development featuring 186 for-sale residential units and 50,000 square feet of retail space, is in many ways the embodiment of  ”transit-oriented development” (TOD), currently in vogue among urban planners and developers alike. It literally towers about the MTA’s Wilshire/Western Purple Line Station in Koreatown. The design of the tower is so seamlessly integrated with the subway entrance that the 70 residents who have put down non-refundable deposits on those units must have a hard time finding an excuse not to take mass transit.

Towering above an MTA station, Solair is the quintessence of TOD.

Countless polemics have been raised over TOD, particularly in Los Angeles, none more vociferous than an L.A. Weekly exposé several months back characterizing it as a sort of Trojan’s Horse, a pretext for density foisted on unwilling or unsuspecting neighborhoods, contrary to the very DNA of the city.

Its viability in the marketplace aside, and even putting aside for the moment any discussion of whether it actually encourages transit (a June 2007 L.A. Times study sadly indicates that it doesn’t), TOD seems to have escaped criticism on the more basic level of urban design. Using Solair as an example,  the much-touted “walkability” promoted by TOD  ends up being something of an illusion, a fiction that extends no more than a city block in either direction. Because if you walk around the block, north toward Sixth Street from Wilshire, the seamy underbelly of high-rise density becomes apparent in both the massive above-grade parking structure and surface lots necessary to comply with already-relaxed parking requirements and service entrances for the retail component. There is a massive, intrusive ramp leading from the sidewalk up to the second story of the building, with prominent banners and flags advertising “Solair Sales Center,” the irony being of course that the realtors for the project clearly expect prospective customers to arrive by car. So much for a self-selecting, transit-conscientious pool of buyers in Los Angeles. (Additional site photos to be posted shortly).

This side street (Oxford Avenue) becomes a classic “dead zone,” mere steps away from the bustling Wilshire corridor, utterly uninviting for a pedestrian to casually explore. So much for a contiguous street wall, or any of the other urban design principles thought to be necessary for activating street life. The groundfloor storefronts at Solair seem like the façades on a movie set – hollow when viewed from the rear.

KOAR, the well-intentioned developer behind Solair, is probably doing the best it can, given both site constraints and market demand for parking. Solair could not succeed without it, and subway infrastructure beneath the building most likely prevents more than one subterranean level from being built to tuck more of the parking out of sight. But the fact remains, even the posterchild for TOD is still the visible product of a car-centric regulatory regime and culture.

As the largest institutional landowners on the Westside,  the Veteran’s Administration (VA) and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) are, at 388 and 419 acres respectively, the most influential players when it comes to real estate development, traffic congestion, and the provision of open space in this part of town. To that end, the Westside Urban Forum invited prominent panelists from both institutions for its monthly event. Also in attendance was County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, whose jurisdiction includes the VA and UCLA (even though both properties are technically exempt from local zoning controls).

The panel was supposed to discuss long-range planning efforts, but most of the official statements sounded like a defense of the status quo. Ronald B. Norby, Network Director for the VA Desert Pacific Healthcare Network, vowed to uphold the VA’s core institutional mission and put himself on record as opposing any changes in land use, either for commercial development or  ”anything that is not veteran-focused” (read: a public park).

Yaroslavsky, fielding hostile comments from local residents about insufficient public access to the VA grounds, defended current policy, explaining that “the pastoral nature of the campus is very therapeutic…healing time with the environment is crucial to patients suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder.” When Brentwood resident Michael Cohn complained about the lack of a continuous boulevard or bicycle lanes through the property, Norby responded, “the last thing that relatives want when they’re visiting their loved one [in the cemetary] is to be disrupted by a noisy car or bicycle riding by.”

Chancellor Gene Block of UCLA was there mainly to trumpet the university’s virtues. He briefly outlined plans for more residential infill on campus, mainly dormitory and affordable housing for junior faculty. Asked about the university’s responsibility to help revitalize the struggling Westwood commercial district, Block compared it to Telegraph Avenue, the main commercial corridor near UC Berkeley, and declared that Westwood’s downtown looked pretty good by comparison!

Transportation planners in the audience wondered whether the planned Westside subway extension was influencing either institution’s long-range planning considerations. Yaroslavsky intervened with a pointed remark on 7 members of  the MTA Commission who are allegedly colluding on a “heist” of Measure R funds for the Gold Line Extension to Montclair in the San Gabriel Valley, at the expense of the Wilshire subway line. This internal feud over countywide transit funding is “about to become very public,” he warned. Meanwhile, Block focused on the university’s success in congestion management, noting that its commuter vans and ridershare programs have kept the number of daily vehicle trips to the campus steady since 1995, even as the university’s size has significantly expanded. Currently, 50% of trips involve carpooling, well above the citywide average.