The City Planners Came To Town

This publication first appeared as a Concerned For Westchester Playa newsletter

Nov 20, 2023

The City Planners Toured Our City and Our Peripheral Plan

On Thursday, we and other invited guests hopped in a van with our four assigned Community Plan Update planners plus Jeff Khau, Traci Park's planner, to tour our community and learn why our community is:

against upzoning R1 residential, R2 and R3 lots
against upzoning corridors that feed the Los Angeles World Airport
against upzoning RSO and Section 8 housing units
in favor of affordable housing on Century Blvd, re-using/re-imagining empty commercial office buildings
in favor of affordable housing on Bellanca between Manchester and Arbor Vitae replacing the rental car lots that are moving to the centralized area with a planned development
in favor of affordable housing on East La Tijera/Centinela replacing empty lot with homeless RVs
in favor of affordable housing in Arizona Circle, just west of Sepulveda and Centinela
in favor of affordable housing in Playa Vista low occupancy commercial buildings

We want to give a special shout out to Lisa Gaines on behalf of Concerned for Westchester Playa, Kevin Ivey on behalf of Preserve Westchester, Cory Birkett on behalf of Concerned for Westport Heights, and Jolie Delja and Sarah Howard on behalf of One Voice Westchester, for their support in creating the tour route and pre-tour presentation

The city planners told us on Thursday they plan to “pivot on their plan.” We do not yet know exactly what that means, but we attribute their willingness to change their plans because of you, our neighbors, sending emails, and attending meetings. We, collectively, made an impact. We thank each and every person who took time to sign our petition, send an email and activated our voice with the city planners. They heard you. Good job neighbors!

Please enjoy the warm glow of a “win,”and enjoy your holidays and be ready in January to activate! January is when we expect the revised maps to be released and the scoping document for the EIR process to drop. Be ready to come together again and respond, raise funds, and attend more meetings and be ready to come together again and respond, raise funds, and attend more meetings. It takes a village!

Tracy In The Community

Tracy moderated the Kentwood Home Guardians meeting in October with the Planners on the topic of the CPU and this week, the association released their position letter in favor of our Peripheral Plan. Yay! Kentwood represents approximately 1/3 of the single family homes in our community and it's good to have the association on record supporting common sense.

Tracy is available to speak to any group you might want to host so she can share our Concerns about our Community Plan Update and Housing Element. We are available for zoom meetings, too.

The Peripheral Plan

Our community, as gateway to LAX, has unique challenges when it comes to traffic. And that is without adding a single additional housing unit. The city’s draft Community Plan Update is proposing to rezone our community for 10’s of thousands of new units and that is unworkable, for us and for LAX.

For this reason, we developed the Peripheral Plan, recommending density, if any absolutely has to be added to our community, on the periphery of our community.

The map is shown below. These are the benefits:

No upzoning for any residential lots;
No upzoning for multi-unit lots along our corridors with high RSO and Section 8 housing (to preserve the affordable housing we already have in our community);
Reuses existing office buildings for mixed use housing (close to transit and environmentally preferred);
Provides new affordable housing in areas on the periphery where affordable high density housing can easily be developed without impacting residential zoning and our gridlocked corridors; and
Prevents further demise of “F” rated intersections from high density housing in communities close to these corridors. Sepulveda, La Tijera, Lincoln and Manchester are used by the 65 million Los Angeles World Airport passengers (expected to double in the next ten years).

Reminding You What We’re Fighting

photo courtesy of United Neighbors

And One Parting Share…

Below is an update on the crazy project photo we built all our branding around at the outset of this project. Everybody was outraged by the original photo and now the project appears to have sprouted two more stories! 😳 What a travesty for the single-family neighbors. The city planners were driven by this very site on Thursday and were aghast at its enormity. They didn’t understand how state laws impacting communities with upzoning until they saw this street.

Please take a minute right now to forward this email
to 3 neighbors or local friends.

Have you signed our petition?

Concerned For Westchester Playa - Providing upzoning and housing policy information and guidance to residents in Westchester, Playa del Rey, Ladera and Playa Vista