What are the two biggest problems about living and working in Los Angeles?
If you answered “high housing costs” and “traffic,” you’re like maybe 90-some percent of Angelenos.
Everybody knows about these significant and chronic problems. So what is our state government doing about them? It’s about to make them worse.
The state will soon make a big change in the way it measures the impact of new developments. In the past, the increased traffic that could result from a new residential or commercial project needed to be measured and mitigated, perhaps by new lanes, better stop-light synchronization, more turn lanes or whatever. But in the future, the state won’t care about decreasing traffic congestion. Instead, it will measure the impact of a new development by the number of additional miles traveled and the number of trips generated by that new project.
That may seem a subtle difference, but it’s not. Its true aim is to cut down the number of cars. It means housing and commercial developments will get blessed by the state if they are near subway stops and bus lines. By contrast, developments that are in distant locales far from transit hubs will get sent into regulators’ purgatory.
Why this change? In the upside-down thinking that goes on in Sacramento, wider and more efficient roadways are now considered bad because they are a “growth-inducing impact.” Better roads don’t just accommodate the existing motorists, they encourage more driving, state regulators now say. In other words, the state is declaring that good roads are bad and bad roads are good. Maybe if you sit in traffic long enough, it’ll frustrate you so much you’ll dump your car and ride a bicycle or board a bus.
That’s fantasyland logic, of course. In a county of 10 million people, there simply are too many of us to all live next to the few train stations, stations that connect to few places, not including the airport. And the bus? For many of us, it makes a one-hour commute into a three-hour one. There’s a reason why L.A.’s mass transit ridership has been stuck below 5 percent for decades: The mass transit system simply isn’t built out, and it is decades away from being truly useful for 95 percent of us.
The changes are being made to CEQA, the California Environmental Quality Act. That’s the law that businesses love to hate because it runs up prices on nearly every development, thanks to challenges from competitors and lawsuits from groups wanting a payoff. Those costs get passed on to tenants, and residential renters already are among the most burdened in the country, according to a UCLA report earlier this year.
And the changes will open the door to all kinds of new CEQA challenges. According to the law firm Holland & Knight, the changes will “increase the cost, complexity and litigation uncertainty already inherent in CEQA.” That means more costs to be passed on.
So we can look forward to worsening traffic and higher rents.
Thanks, Sacramento.
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Frank, are you out there? Can you hear us, Frank McCourt?
We miss you, and – I never thought I’d say this – some of us want you back. Oh, sure, you made some bad decisions. OK, some really classic stinkeroos. And we gave you a hard time about them. Called you nasty names and spit on your old table in the dugout suite and all. But, heh, heh, all in good fun, no?
Fact is I’d rather have your bad decisions than your successors’ bizarre ones. At least when you owned the Dodgers, we could watch them on TV. Now, after last week’s weird player trades, I don’t want to watch them at all.
All is forgiven, Frank. Please, come back.
Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].
