Ven-Mar Neighborhood Association

Ballona Wetlands and Playa Vista

NY Times story of 8-18-01 is a good summary

AUG 18, 2001

Open Battle Over Little Piece of Los Angeles

By JAMES STERNGOLD

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 17 - When the architect Frank O. Gehry signed on recently to design a hip new office park at an immense development here known as Playa Vista, the combatants in a 20-year war over the site finally had something they could agree on. To each side, Mr. Gehry seemed a savior.

For the developers of the project, which would combine offices, apartments, hotel rooms and parkland on one of the largest buildable lots left in the city, Mr. Gehry offered not just the prospect of distinctive buildings, but much-needed marketing sizzle after years of bad publicity.

On the other side, the environmentalists who have picketed, chained themselves to bulldozers and filed lawsuits to stop the project hoped they could persuade Mr. Gehry, who once described himself as a "lefty- liberal do-gooder," to help them finally kill it. They want to transform the 1,087-acre waterfront property into wetlands and a public park.

But Mr. Gehry ended up vexing both sides. Like many Angelenos, he expressed ambivalence about the fight over Playa Vista, which could become one of the biggest land developments in the city's history.

If such large-scale building was to be done, he said, the plans might as well be good ones. But he quickly added on a local radio show that if there was a referendum on the matter (there was not), he would vote to turn the entire parcel into a park.

Mr. Gehry's clever effort to take both sides mirrors in many respects this city's struggle over how to manage growth and its most nettlesome consequence, sprawl.

The development poses a fundamental question: whether the answer to the sprawl slowly choking Los Angeles is to bring more - though smarter - growth deep within the city, as city officials and the developers contend, or to put a stop to it once and for all, as the environmentalists demand. It is the Southern California version of Westway, the Manhattan highway project that tied New York up in a bitter debate about priorities and growth for decades before being killed.

In a sense, the soggy, weedy Playa Vista parcel, which has already been used and discarded several times, is a slate on which many Angelenos have projected their aspirations and anxieties about the future.

"There is no truth, there is no falsehood at this place," said Jim Glymph, one of Mr. Gehry's partners and a designer of the office park. "It's been anything you want to call it at some point, and it still is."

The long, narrow site rests beneath high bluffs in a heavily developed area just north of the Los Angeles International Airport and south of the stylish neighborhoods of Venice and Santa Monica. To the west is the ocean, and to the east a slow-moving wall known as the 405 freeway.

Environmentalists regard this as the last chance to rescue the only remaining wetlands in Los Angeles, the Ballona Wetlands, and to create a public space larger than Central Park in a city starved for such amenities. On a recent walk, several opposition leaders pointed to every wildflower, heron and mole hole as a sign of nature's irrepressible vigor.

The developers, led by the Wall Street firms Goldman, Sachs and Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, see Playa Vista as an opportunity not just to make big profits but to complete the transformation of the city's west side from a bedroom community into an affluent business center.

To win community support, they have agreed to restore 190 acres of marsh at the western end of the site, and last week granted a public interest group the option to buy another large parcel for public space - if the group can raise tens of millions of dollars for it. While the most ardent environmentalists reject this incremental approach as inadequate, many elected officials embrace it.

City planners have another compelling reason to support Playa Vista: the tens of thousands of housing units it would bring to a part of the city that is job rich and housing poor. They acknowledge that perhaps 30,000 new residents and tens of thousands of daily workers would strain already overtaxed roadways, but say that the more pressing need is to put more workers closer to their jobs.

"Without this we can't make the western part of the city work," said Mark Pisano, the executive director of the Southern California Association of Governments, a regional planning body.

The project has had abundant problems - besides its legal battles, a few years ago it lost its highest-profile prospective tenant, the DreamWorks film studio, after some rancorous battles over finances.

But after nearly 20 years of such jousting, construction has begun on Playa Vista's first structures, about 750 apartments.

Playa Vista is expected to cost perhaps $6 billion when complete, with a total of 13,000 housing units, including government-subsidized low-income housing. It will also include a little more than five million square feet of office space and 750 hotel rooms.

The developers say that roughly half the parcel will be public open space, including the restored marsh. A coalition of more than 100 environmental organizations has flatly rejected the plan as far too little. But some proponents say that this forlorn industrial site is just not worth fighting over.

Others argue that since the developers are offering more money for restoration than the government would, the plan should be praised.

Ruth Galanter, a city planner, won election to the City Council in 1987, representing this district, on a platform of stopping Playa Vista. She has since become a supporter.

"It's as close to smart growth as you'll find anywhere in this country," Ms. Galanter said.

All sides agree that the site has been abused for decades. For centuries, it was a wetland, fed by creeks and an estuary. After oil was discovered in 1929, derricks spread there like weeds. Twelve years later, when Howard Hughes owned the land, he built an aircraft plant and runway. The hangar where he built the largest wooden plane ever, his Spruce Goose, is still there, in a cluster of buildings that have been designated historic landmarks.

Though the oil is gone, its legacy remains. Sempra Energy, a gas company, stores several billion cubic feet of natural gas in the depleted oil field far beneath the mole holes. Environmentalists maintain it is the source of dangerous methane leaks, but Sempra denies it. The developers deny it, too, but also say they are conducting a "methane-mitigation program."

The real battle over Playa Vista began when Hughes's heirs decided several decades ago to build a dense retail and commercial complex there. Local opposition was fierce, and they eventually sold the site.

Robert Maguire III, the head of the firm now developing the Gehry office park, was the principal owner and developer at one point, and he put together a mixed-use plan centered around a new DreamWorks studio. When DreamWorks dropped out in 1999, a new group of owners, Playa Capital, put together a new master plan and won city approval.

"This whole area was degraded and, in our view, it's important to get the investment to improve it," said Con Howe, director of planning for the City of Los Angeles. "We see it as a good thing that it has lots of public open space and a variety of housing. In that sense it could be a model for balanced development for the handful of remaining large open sites in the city."

The neighbors are not so sure. The City of Santa Monica opposed the first phase of the project until it received $1.5 million to lessen its traffic impact. It has installed stop signs, speed bumps and traffic circles to discourage commuters from taking to its back streets to avoid tie- ups on major thoroughfares.

"There's no question that, conceptually, it's the right approach to take," Suzanne Frick, Santa Monica's director of planning and community development, said of Playa Vista. "It's absolutely the wrong location. It's a heavily congested area already."

Opponents add that the city is also planning to expand the Los Angeles International Airport, which relies on many of the same roads as Playa Vista, promising even denser traffic.

"The people of Santa Monica I think are really missing the point," Ms. Galanter, the City Council member, said. "The advantage of Playa Vista is that it doesn't displace anyone."

Marcia Hanscom, executive director of the Wetlands Action Network, a group battling the project, bristled at that idea during a stroll at the site.

"What they have missed for so long is that this site, even with everything they've done to it, is filled with an incredible amount of life that would be wiped out," Ms. Hanscom said. "Yes, we do need more housing. This is just the last place you want to build it unless you want a really awful quality of life."

The developers say such arguments are becoming moot, even if some legal challenges remain. In September, the United States Supreme Court will consider hearing an appeal the environmental groups filed after losing in their last try at a federal appeals court.

"I'm kind of in the conservation movement so I understand their points," Mr. Maguire said. "What I've tried to say is, `Look, you have to wake up to reality here. And, by the way, it's happening.' "