Changing Los Angeles: How Highland Park Stopped Being a Hillside

Once upon a time, in the City, real estate boomed and neighborhoods seemed awash in bulging oversized houses on residential streets. Behemoth monster “McMansions” overwhelmed tidy streets of bungalows and ranch houses. Sunlight was blocked; looming ugliness stalked the land.

In 2008 several fierce communities across the realm petitioned their City Council Overlords, who heard their cries, and conjured an ordinance preventing overblown monstrosities, limiting square footage, enforcing height and setback rules. Constituents were well pleased. However, the Ordinance specifically excluded hillsides and coastal areas.

The little village of Highland Park, easily distinguished by its lack of coastal access, was under a terrible spell, considered entirely a hillside area, and therefore not defended by the doughty Anti-Mansionization Ordinance. Look upon Meridian opposite our beautiful newly restored ATT mural at the Bluto-sized, inflated, overbearing, unfinished, empty, looming eyesore--slowly decaying.

Wise sages pointed out, some of Highland Park is in actual hills. Who will solve this riddle?

There came young Erick Lopez-the-Relentless--Knight of the Department of Planning--undertaking a two-year quest mandated by the Mighty City Council to find a Hillside Ordinance.

Sir Lopez knew his first labor was “to determine what is a hillside.” Obvious though it seemed, he carefully explained Highland Park was among many areas of Vast Los Angeles demonstrably flat in parts, and yet cruelly designated entirely hillside, and therefore vulnerable. Using magical geo-synchronous satellites, and cabalistic digital surveying runes. Lopez remapped the entire city. He sent the new map galloping all the way through the Planning Dept., the Planning and Land Use Management Committee, the Dreaded City Council, until it was signed by the lofty Mayor of the Compound Name. And lo, the re-map came to pass, the flats of Highland Park were then defended by the original Anti-Mansionization Ordinance, leaving only the indisputably actual hills to be Ordinancized.

Lopez-the-Relentless next set up many a community meeting to hear the people, all the people--homeowners, as well as purveyors of uncontrolled development. There was shouting. There was gnashing of teeth. Lopez remained calm, not distracted by howling accusations of  “you are taking away our rights” from the monster-wanters, and “you will never get this to work, we have seen it all before” from the cynical community veteranos. Ever patient, Lopez-the-Relentless focused on his quest, and was not tempted into the perilous Thicket of Asperity. Suggestions heard in one meeting, materialized in the proposals at the next, and then were incorporated in the final Hillside Ordinance. Lopez-of-Planning was actually listening to the community activists, residents, developers and architects who came to yell at him.

This collectively developed Hillside Ordinance for residential single family housing, was then sent on its long journey through the labyrinthine Halls of the City, where it met with universal approval, given its new magical language by the dark wizards of City Attorney, and the Baseline Hillside Ordinance was signed by His Most Elevated Mayorness May 9, 2011.

We know what a city with unrestrained development looks like. We live in it everyday. This Ordinance offers new tools for hillside communities, and our few open spaces. It will limit mad-dog development unconcerned with narrow streets, stressed ancient water mains, overwrought parking. Nothing can ban all development on hillsides. With enough determination and money you can build on even the most difficult hillside. But, you may no longer bulldoze an entire hilltop into a valley to build a development.

Look how Los Angeles has changed. Erick Lopez, and his band of young City Planners have given us tools for better control of development in our own neighborhoods. Look how a large bureaucracy can to listen to the people it serves.

Thank you, Erick & Co. for your relentless devotion.

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