Century City may have a reputation as a premier business center, but for most of the district’s history, developers have had to deal with a standard Westside headache: homeowners angry at steadily worsening traffic congestion.
That anger surfaced most recently in the failed attempt by some Century City homeowner leaders to recall L.A. City Councilman Jack Weiss. While the immediate trigger for the recall was a dispute over who would control a pot of traffic mitigation funds, the underlying frustration was driven by increased traffic.
While the recall fever failed to spread beyond a small group of disgruntled homeowners, it once again drew attention to the thorny issue of traffic in Century City, one that has been building for 35 years.
These days, on a typical weekday rush hour, Motor Avenue as it snakes through Cheviot Hills is often choked with bumper-to-bumper traffic as commuters from Century City try to get to the Santa Monica (10) Freeway.
“This was once a quiet two-lane street in a residential neighborhood. Now, just look at all the cars backed up at the stop signs. It’s terrible. There simply aren’t any large corridors for all this traffic to go through,” said Kevin Hughes, president of the Cheviot Hills Homeowners Association, who believes even recent improvements to Santa Monica Boulevard have made little difference.
Back in the early 1960s, when Century City was originally designed as a “second downtown,” city planners and executives with developer/landowner Alcoa Corp. had envisioned cars pouring off of the proposed Beverly Hills Freeway (along the route of Santa Monica Boulevard) and right into the shopping center and office towers.
But broad opposition on the Westside and especially from Beverly Hills killed the freeway plans, leaving Century City two miles from the closest freeway. That set up the fundamental conundrum that has plagued the community ever since: As more buildings have gone up in Century City, the traffic has overwhelmed the available street capacity, especially on streets leading to and from the district.
Pact unravels
The issue reached its first crisis point as the two 44-story theme towers at the ABC Entertainment Center were nearing their 1975 completion. Residents in Cheviot Hills and other adjacent communities as well as Beverly Hills filed suit against the City of Los Angeles over Century City’s zoning.
“What you had here were groups of residents who had bought their homes years earlier next to a largely vacant studio back lot. Then the back lot gets sold off and they started watching building after building going up, with each tower generating traffic that was going all over the place. They were really panic-stricken,” said L.A. County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, who inherited this conflict when he took office as an L.A. City Councilman in 1975.
After four years of negotiations, the parties agreed on a novel plan: setting an upper limit on the number of additional vehicle trips the region could absorb.
“We basically apportioned future development rights,” Yaroslavsky said. “What we said to Alcoa was, ‘We don’t care what you build, as long as you stay within the total trip limit.'”
That landmark agreement held for the next 15 years, with only three major buildings going up in Century City, including the Northrop Grumman Corp. headquarters in 1984 and the SunAmerica Tower in 1990.
But by the mid-1990s, this consensus was breaking down as traffic congestion steadily worsened on the Westside. JMB Realty Corp., which had taken over the development of Century City from Alcoa in 1986, was planning a new office tower on Constellation Place. While JMB had enough trip rights for the tower, homeowner group leaders no longer felt the agreement was adequate. They wanted JMB to pay for improvements to streets both within and surrounding Century City.
“The frustration was mounting as everyday tasks like driving to the market and driving the kids to school were taking much longer and were so much more stressful,” said Michael Eveloff, president of the Tract 7260 Homeowners Association just west of Century City.
Eventually, after negotiations with homeowner groups and then-Councilman Mike Feuer, JMB agreed to pay for computerized traffic signals along Santa Monica Boulevard, among other traffic flow improvements.
Then, four years ago, JMB returned with another, even more massive project: two 47-story condo towers across from the Century Plaza towers. Homeowner groups again rose up.
Essentially, Hughes contended, the developer and the city have underestimated the traffic that the condo towers would generate. “Motor Avenue now is backed up much of the day. This will just make it worse,” he said.
To homeowners like Hughes this is symptomatic of the larger problem of controlling development and traffic around Century City.
“Our experience has been: A development is proposed, the city approves the development maybe with some mitigations but there is no larger plan, no larger analysis of how the development fits into an overall traffic plan on the Westside,” he said.
