The Los Angeles Times - December 13, 2005 

Hands off my yard, Mr. Mayor! 

n a series of speeches around town, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has recently begun to flesh out a utopian vision for Los Angeles that gives new meaning to the idea that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The way he sees it, Los Angeles shouldn't be Los Angeles at all but should be reshaped into something that mimics the lifestyles of the great cities of the East Coast and of Europe — dense, transit-dependent cities of high-rise apartment buildings like New York, Chicago, Boston and Paris.

"This old concept that all of us are going to live in a three-bedroom home, you know, this 2,500 square feet, with a big front yard and a big backyard — well, that's an old concept," the mayor suggested in a speech last week.

Instead, he said, Angelenos need to move away from that and look at the "good life" lived in traditional, densely packed, apartment-dominated cities.

But is that necessarily a good idea? Is that what Angelenos want? To be sure, some measure of market-driven densification is probably inevitable. But what sets L.A. apart from other great cities — and what makes it so attractive — has traditionally been exactly the opposite: its pattern of dispersion and its strong attachment to the single-family home. Assault that basic form and you will turn L.A. not into Paris but something more like an unruly, congested, dense Third World city. A Tehran, if you will, or a Mexico City.

Despite the conventional wisdom, L.A.'s multi-polarity — it has no one distinctive center — was created intentionally. In 1908, L.A. created the nation's first comprehensive urban zoning ordinance, encouraging the development of sub-centers, single-family homes and dispersed industrial development.

Henry Huntington's sprawling Pacific Electric Railway set the pattern for the city's expansive geography by allowing for the dispersion of jobs and homes throughout the vast L.A. Basin. Later, the automobile further accelerated dispersion. As early as the 1920s, Angelenos were four times as likely to own a car as the average American. At the same time, the city's historic downtown was already becoming ever less important as the region's economic and social center.

The usual motivation — the quest for greed and power — motivated some of these developments. But many L.A. bureaucrats and developers also believed they were creating a superior urban environment. In 1923, the director of city planning proudly proclaimed that L.A. had avoided "the mistakes which have happened in the growth of metropolitan areas of the East."

The prevailing vision was of a city where residents, as one editor put it, "could retain the flowers and orchards and lawns, the invigorating free air from the ocean, the bright sunshine and the elbow room." In the 1930s, single-family residences accounted for 93% of the city's residential buildings (almost twice Chicago's percentage).

Over the ensuing generations, as the city has filled up, densities naturally have grown in certain sections of town. Even the commercial and residential high-rise now has a role, particularly in the central core, parts of Hollywood and in some parts of the Valley.

But do most Angelenos really want most of their city to look like Manhattan or to have the densities of Paris? When voters were last asked for their two cents — in 1986, when growth-limiting Proposition U won almost 70% of the vote — they opted both to cut commercial density in much of the city and protect residential neighborhoods from overdevelopment. And in a 2003 Public Policy Institute of California poll, 86% of California residents said they preferred to live in a single-family home.

The mayor tells us that living in houses with front yards and backyards is "an old concept." Yet it is his ideas that are anachronistic. Virtually everywhere in the advanced industrial world — from Tokyo to Toronto and Paris to Buenos Aires — the bulk of metropolitan job and population growth is occurring in places that look more like Manhattan Beach than Manhattan. Meanwhile, many celebrated older cities, including Chicago, Boston, San Francisco, Paris, Frankfurt, Hamburg and Tokyo, are losing population.

Why? Because most people prefer privacy and space over density.

Do we really want to be like Chicago, New York or San Francisco? These are all expensive cities with economies that have been creating fewer jobs and opportunities than Los Angeles. They also have fewer children per capita.

Without a doubt, such dense cities are wonderful places to visit. But young people leave these cities when they get older, usually for environments that offer more space for their families.

Mayor Villaraigosa needs to understand that we cannot build a better Los Angeles by trying to become someplace we are not. Instead, we should focus on becoming a better version of ourselves, a city that has created the new model of urbanism not only for America but for much of the world.

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