By ANASTASIA LOUKAITOU-SIDERIS

The Los Angeles City Council is set to vote this week on whether to override a veto by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa of an ordinance that would allow the city to sell unused air rights from the convention center to downtown developers.

Councilmembers may want to think twice.

By paying a fee to the city, developers could increase the density of their downtown projects and build higher. The transfer of development rights from one site to another is a useful planning tool. It can give much-needed revenue to municipalities and allow them to create open spaces, encourage affordable housing, or even save historic buildings. Developers can increase the floor area ratio of their lots which translates into having more square feet to rent or sale and higher profits.

Downtown may come closer to meeting its yet unfulfilled dream of a vibrant, high density mixed-use urban environment. So everyone is happy, right? Not exactly.

There are a lot of unanswered and nagging questions in the rather hasty adoption of this ordinance that should give us some pause. For one, we do not seem to have a clear vision and understanding of where exactly in downtown we wish to encourage higher densities. What is the appropriate balance between commercial, residential, and industrial land uses? Which streets should be designated as high-density residential and mixed use corridors? How will they be better served by mass transit? What types of open space and other urban amenities should supplement the commercial and residential environments, and where will they be located? How will the increased density impact traffic congestion?

In the absence of a clear overall vision for downtown, planners become by necessity reactive; they respond to the private-sector initiative, instead of proactively guiding development, partnering with the private sector and local communities for the benefit of the public. The city is, thus, perpetuating an episodic and disjointed, “project-by-project” mode of development.

In the last three decades downtown Los Angeles has witnessed a significant building boom of major high-rise towers and important institutional buildings. While some of these mega-projects are characterized by spectacular architecture and were built by brand-name architects, they compose a collage of unrelated, self-contained, and fragmented downtown spaces. The episodic nature of downtown development, combined with a lack of an overall vision and planning have prevented many downtown mega-projects from becoming integrated into the city’s urban tissue. Many of them turn their back on city streets, and discourage the urbanistic goals of coherence, continuity, transitions, and pedestrian connections.

Second, there has not been much discussion as to how the expected revenue will be used in downtown and who is going to benefit from it. Will it provide much needed affordable housing for many who work in the downtown area but cannot afford to rent or buy there? Will it help create an open space in downtown’s industrial district where thousands of workers are crammed in small work spaces and airless cubicles with no open space amenity nearby? Or will it subsidize the development costs of high-rise, luxury condominiums and upscale hotels envisioned by the private sector?

So far, downtown Los Angeles has experienced quite an uneven pattern of development with most of the private and public investment going to the Bunker Hill, Civic Center, and Central Business District. This has contributed to a growing polarization between the old and derelict downtown for the indigent, homeless, and migrant workers, and the new glamorous downtown of the corporate America. Without a clear prioritization of the different “needs” in downtown the revenue may likely fund, mitigate, or subsidize the projects of those with the most power.

Third, it is not clear what calculations were used to establish the sales price of $20 per square foot for buying the convention center air rights. The price may be just right if developers, for example, agree to build more affordable housing. Since acquiring air rights is analogous to buying land, the price must be established at below market value to make such projects feasible. On the other hand, a discounted sale of this limited city-owned resource might unwittingly be a gift of public resources if only luxury condominiums and high-end commercial space are built. Such uses typically sell in excess of $500 per square foot in downtown.

In conclusion, the lack of overall vision, strategic planning and prioritization of needs in downtown Los Angeles may result in a lost opportunity to take advantage of a useful planning tool and guide development. Let’s first build a vision for our downtown, decide where it makes more sense for development to take place, understand and mitigate its impact, and build linkages and connections that will help make downtown a coherent whole. I am asking for nothing more than good planning.

Anastasia Loukaitou-Sideris is the chair of the UCLA Department of Urban Planning and co-author of the book “Urban Design Downtown: Poetics and Politics of Form.”