Who decides what L.A.’s 114 diverse neighborhoods should be like? Those who call the communities home? Or real estate developers? In Los Angeles, “density” deals among developers, elected leaders and planners are destroying the character of beloved and livable neighborhoods, and steamrolling communities.

The Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, aimed at the L.A. city ballot in November, will give residents a reasonable voice, ending a backroom process driven by developer greed and the failed new-age urban renewal theory that dense and crowded areas have less congestion.

Los Angeles in 2016 resembles Los Angeles of the 1960s, when decisions about how to shape communities were made in smoke-filled rooms by city officials, planners and developers. Developers sought rezoning for their individual projects without regard to the environmental effects upon neighborhoods or infrastructure. And they got it.

Planning lawlessness is back in Los Angeles, leading to devastating results: L.A.’s widespread loss of affordable housing, the related tragic upswing in homelessness, extreme neighborhood congestion as well as destruction of cherished neighborhood livability and character.

In the bad old days, the practice of elected leaders and city planners agreeing to developers’ desires led to the rezoning scandals of 1966 through 1970. A grand jury found evidence that L.A.’s planning and zoning process was corrupt, and news media covered the juicy story — and the court convictions for bribery and corruption that followed.

At the sentencing of a corrupt L.A. city councilman of that era, then-Superior Court Judge Pearce Young, himself a former state assemblyman, warned that the power to rezone individual parcels of land was “the power to create great wealth.”

That’s where we are again today. Vast wealth is being created for developers through “spot rezoning” by city of L.A. elected officials. The decisions are presented to communities as all-but-inevitable deals that communities must either fight, often all the way to court, or live with.

No corruption probe is underway, perhaps only because today’s city officials and planners have found ways to get around the city charter, L.A.’s constitution. In 1969, the city charter was reformed by voters to ban parcel-by-parcel rezoning. Voters said that if the City Council wanted to rethink how to develop Los Angeles, it must approve a new general plan, the cohesive framework for the city’s future.

But rewriting the general plan would be a highly public process — residents would have a say. And it would be an unpleasant chore for today’s City Council members, who spend hours each week handing out “proclamations” and complimenting one another on a job well done.

Instead of updating the 1980s-era general plan, city officials are engaged in an outrageous workaround. The City Council simply “amends” the general plan whenever a developer convinces his local council member that a project should get around zoning rules.

‘Spot rezoning’

This “spot rezoning” has created a land-flipping war, driving land values through the roof. Affordable housing? Impossible to build, with the City Council and developers gaming the value of the underlying land. Skyrocketing homelessness? It’s being exacerbated by L.A.’s widespread destruction of older, livable housing in “hot” areas spot-rezoned for dense luxury developments.

Clearly, this is no way to run Los Angeles, fight homelessness or create livability in one of the world’s great cities.

The people, in reforming the city charter years ago, said that zoning amendments to the general plan can be approved only for substantial geographic areas of “significant social, economic, or physical identity.” Residents were smart – they intended to force city officials and planners to create broad, cohesive plans.

But instead, L.A. officials and planners have engaged in a furious level of backroom dealing to justify endless general plan amendments to enable spot rezoning.

Mayor Eric Garcetti was a key proponent of this practice as a city councilman and Garcetti has sturdily backed spot rezoning as mayor. City officials and L.A.’s planners have made livable neighborhoods unlivable, creating stunning gridlock on surface streets and wiping out huge net numbers of affordable, older apartment units.

Angelenos are not against business or development, and neither are backers of the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, the Coalition to Preserve L.A. The measure forces the City Council to prepare an updated, comprehensive and long-term general plan, and to review and update it. It places a two-year moratorium on projects that seek general plan amendments, requiring developers to live with current zoning until City Hall gets its act together.

We’ve taken a look at current zoning for Los Angeles and the business community might be surprised by what we found.

The general plan allows for a tremendous amount of construction, construction jobs and development. During the brief, two-year moratorium, developers would have more business than they could handle, just by following the rules.

Without the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, decisions about livability in L.A.’s 114 neighborhoods will be driven by developers’ desire for “great wealth,” as Judge Young warned so long ago.

Michael Weinstein is a founder of the Coalition to Preserve L.A., which created the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative. He also is president of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation.