What kinds of emotional distress are public problems?
/The practice of zoning today has become extravagant and baroque. Far beyond the already abhorrent goals of “protecting” higher income people from having to interact with residents of apartments, (see previous post) local governments also respond - at significant expense - to the anxieties and agonies of single family homeowners, for whom banning apartments is insufficient, when they become distressed by the prospect of single family homes that look like apartments.
Culver City, for example, recently completed a nearly 3 year process of rezoning their single family neighborhoods. Fortunately, by the time they passed the zoning ordinance reducing the maximum allowed size of houses (FAR) and prohibiting more than one kitchen per unit, this kind of downzoning had become illegal, and YIMBY Law filed suit to stop it. The excerpts below are from a public records request we did as part of our lawsuit. You can view all of the records here.
On Oct 17, 2019, at 10:52 AM,
Amy Levit wrote:
Could we maybe put a moratorium on new builds until the new codes can be put in place. Some of the new builds are so outrageous...take a look at 4301 Mentone Ave for example...almost 5,000 square feet...looks more like an apartment building than a home!
Thank you!
Amy Levit
Notes from a community meeting held on 09.18.2018:
[Resident] concerns included … Change of neighborhood character from single-family residential to multi-family residential when homes of similar style and materials (sometimes built by the same developer) are built to the maximum floor area ratio (FAR) and zoning envelope and are adjacent to one another.
From: Greg Cahill
Date: Monday, May 25, 2020 at 3:16 PM
Dear City Council members:
... My wife and I and our two daughters moved here thirty years ago and now I fear the small town ambience we moved to Culver City to enjoy is being irretrievably eroded before our eyes.
From: Michael Monagan
Thursday, April 18, 2019 7:10 PM
Hi William,
I’m Michael Monagan and I have lived on Fay Ave in the Arts District for 17 years. We have suffered and are suffering from overbuilt homes in our neighborhood.
Notes from a community meeting held on 09.18.2018:
The continued construction of similar houses that maximize the FAR and “flipped” is upsetting for residents. “I live in fear that my neighbors are going to sell and a developer will come in and build a huge inappropriate house. The flippers are ruining the neighborhood.”
Local officials receive distressed pleas from all kinds of “suffering” and “fearful” residents. In addition, all of us suffer and are fearful at one time or another. The question is, what kinds of emotional distress are really public problems, and which are best solved privately?
The answer to this question has changed over time, and also, in our time, depends on who is making the plea. Existing and historical land use patterns demonstrate unequivocally that when low income and non-white people express suffering and fear over nuisance land uses - even when those land uses are true nuisances, that cause asthma or release poison into the air or water - local governments ignore them.
However, as in the Case of Culver city, when high income and white people express their land use related fears - even those land use fears that are totally subjective, and have absolutely no health related impacts - local governments mobilize significant staff time and resources to soothe their anxieties and accommodate their tastes.
In 2017, Culver City hired John Kaliski Architects to helm a multi-year public process to develop new zoning standards to respond to the distress demonstrated by some Culver City homeowners. As part of this process, the city hosted ten meetings, each one 1.5 hours, where homeowners looked at photographs of houses, and indicated whether they thought the houses were pretty or ugly. Here is a sample description of one of the meetings:
A sixty-minute survey exercise was conducted with the group as a whole. The survey exercise consisted of twenty site photographs of Park West. The group voted with red and green cards to indicate their “like” or “dislike” of each photograph. A second ten-minute community comment exercise followed which gave participants the opportunity to share their interests/concerns and to describe what works and doesn’t work in their neighborhood. (Pg 151, PRA Request Response)
Here are images from the meetings:
Presentation by JKA, PRA Request Response pg 123
Community meeting in Culver Crest, Culver City JKA blog
Below is a table summarizing the number of city staff at each meeting, the number of consultant staff and the number of participating members of the public:
The city staff and consultants are planners, most of them with advanced degrees. There is an average of 2 members of the public to each city consultant or staff member. The total number of attendees across the 10 meetings is 136, but the consultants reported 99 participants, which means 37 people came to 2 meetings, or a smaller number of people attended more than 2 meetings. Just in these in person meetings, a total of 94.5 professional staff hours were spent serving the emotional needs of 99 homeowners in Culver City. According to a scope of services memo submitted by KSA for a related project, their staff’s hourly rates are between $100 and $205. City staff time probably cost slightly less.
According to a Professional Services Agreement with KSA executed in 2017, the consultant alone - not counting city staff time - cost up to $342,440. In addition to the 99 people who participated in person, another 239 residents answered an online survey. Culver City’s population is 39,437 which means every man, woman and child in Culver City paid at least $10 so that the local government could survey 338 residents to discover what kind of house they think looks cute, and what house looks ugly, and then craft new zoning reflecting those preferences.
What an incredible level of service for those residents! What a solicitous local government. How lovely it is for this local government to carefully protect these residents from suffering from ugly houses.
Culver City is our example city, but this practice is far from rare, in fact, every city runs programs like this for their low density, mostly white, single family residential neighborhoods. Culver City’s program, unfortunately, is extremely typical.
As we have seen in Culver City, even when residents expect houses to be single family and owner occupied, they believe that the “suffering” they feel due to homes merely looking like small apartment buildings entitles them to relief. How much more will their anxieties be when actual small apartment buildings begin to be built? If we are going to succeed in densifying low density neighborhoods, we cannot continue to treat these anxieties as a public problem.
Another reason to oppose the kinds of exercises described here, is that they are inequitably provided. Anxieties about one’s changing neighborhood are universal, they are not more or less prevalent in any population. Nostalgia is something that all humans experience and share. However, we see that when white homeowners express these anxieties, planning departments rush to dry their tears, whereas when renters and non-white homeowners bring the same kinds of concerns to their local governments, the response is sluggish or absent. Local governments should treat all land use concerns equally - when there is a true life/ safety danger, they should respond quickly. When the issue is nostalgia, all populations should be on the same footing.
Our budgets, as the saying goes, are our values. Why should Culver City spend at least $342,440 on a project that serves 338 residents who own their homes? Not only is it a very small number of people for the price, this population is not needy or in distress. There are about 1000 households under the poverty line in Culver City, what could $342,400 have done for them?