The  economic and environmental benefits could be enormous. Naturally, the long-term land use implications of this initiative have also attracted developer interest.

At the recent ULI Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Summit, 30/10 took center stage during a thinly-veiled stump speech by Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is shoring up support for her 2010 re-election campaign. To a cheering crowd, Boxer announced a minor breakthrough at the federal level related to environmental clearance for the 9.3-mile Westside Subway Extension, which is perhaps the signature project of 30/10 .

The level of excitement was palpable in the room, and yet I found myself asking: how much will the Westside Subway Extension actually promote TOD, defined in the traditional sense as development within a 1/2-mile radius of a station area?

The prospects for TOD along the Westside Subway alignment are less promising than they might intuitively seem.

Based on the proposed alignment, I concluded that the potential for TOD remains elusive at best, especially on the Westside “proper”:

Veteran’s Administration Hospital – future development on or around this site is virtually DOA, given the political forces in favor of maintaining the grounds as open space, as noted in my September 19, 2009 post.

UCLA – the station will most likely be located on Lot 36 of the UCLA campus. University property is exempt from local land use controls; the city therefore cannot change station area zoning to encourage future development.

Century City – the alignment here is constrained by the San Andreas fault line, which was discovered during seismic tests to run spookily parallel to the section of Santa Monica Blvd near Wilshire.  Which means any high-rise development in this immediate area should logically be out of the question, too.

Wilshire/Rodeo – the existing density of this commercial district, combined with the surrounding NIMBYists south of Wilshire, makes it difficult to envision dramatic changes here, although it could just be my lack of imagination.

Wilshire/La Cienega – same caveat as above applies here.

Wilshire/Fairfax – will the owner of Johnnie’s Coffee Shop finally sell out? will LACMA develop the fenced-off no man’s land behind the former Bullocks May?

Wilshire/La Brea – prospects here are more sanguine. A Metro-owned property at the NW corner of the intersection, along with adjacent city parking lots, could be prime candidates for TOD.

This is not intended to dampen enthusiasm for the overall objective of 30/10, which remains a worthy initiative. Still, it seems unfortunate that the proposed station locations on the Westside are diminishing the opportunities for real estate development typically associated with transit. Hopefully, between now and final design, some of those location options could change.

The proposed Bundy Village at Olympic Blvd. could include 119,838 sf retail, 385 condos, 384,735 sf medical offices, and 3,395 parking spaces.

The massive mixed-use complex has been pitched–somewhat disingenuously–as “Smart Growth at its best” given its proximity to the future Expo line station (Phase II). But as Los Angeles City Planning Commissioner Michael Woo recently noted at a workshop held by Psomas in downtown LA, the developer Cerrell Associates plans 3,395 parking spaces–the minimum required under city zoning. In other words, no attempt is being made to incentivize future transit use by reducing the amount of parking to be provided on site.

At the February 11th Planning Commission hearing (case file here), Woo pitched an elegant solution: the creation of a Travel Demand Management (TDM) zone, in which the Bundy Village developer would be allowed to provide the full amount of requested parking, but users of the medical offices who drove to the site would be assessed an additional $3 parking fee, collected at the garage entrance, that would in turn be used to subsidize the cost of transit passes for other users who arrive to the complex via light rail or bus.

This arrangement would strike an interesting balance between the free market and government regulation. By sending a clear price signal to drivers (and at the same time rewarding transit users), it could conceivably reduce traffic impacts in the area. Neighborhood opponents may not be appeased, but compared to their demand for a radical “downsizing” of the overall project,  a TDM zone is the closest thing to an innovative planning idea that we are likely to hear out of this debate.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Representatives from the CRA in Los Angeles put on their best game face and talked up the $180 million in committed funds that are still on the table (despite the contested money grab by Schwarzenegger), while a city employee from Lancaster admitted that the downturn is “an opportunity to update the city’s general plan.”

There was much discussion about what the “new normal” would look like once the current market has bottomed out and self-corrected. One of the most interesting remarks came from Ellen Michiel of RBF who predicted that immigrants would lead the way in economic growth, via an explosion in small businesses, entrepreneurship…and that mainstream financial institutions would do well to support this burgeoning demographic group through increased micro-lending.