So it stands to reason that the New York Legislature has now passed a bill to limit property tax increases to 2 percent a year (or less if the inflation rate is lower). This is one potent political issue in the suburbs.

Watching this development from afar, though, I wonder, hasn’t New York learned anything from California’s 30+ years of experience with property tax caps? Where are the obvious comparisons to Proposition 13?

Proposition 13 is widely pilloried for contributing to the demise of public schools, skewing the incentives for local jurisdictions to attract certain types of development, and generally wreaking dysfunction on local finances.

So why does New York think the outcome of a 2 percent annual property tax cap is going to be any different there?

There are, of course, some important differences:

1. Local governments can override the cap with 60 percent of the public vote or the governing body. In California, a 2/3 supermajority (67%) is needed.

2.  The cap does come with potentially significant exemptions. Court judgments, growth in a town or school district, and employee pension costs can allow taxes to go beyond the 2 percent limit without voter approval.

This tax cap will sunset in 2016, but it is hard to see this piece of legislation not becoming a permanent part of the political landscape.

As a Venice resident, I contemplate this question with some frequency and sense of resignation.

So it was refreshing to see USC urban planning students re-envision Lincoln Boulevard as a sustainable, vibrant hub of employment and activity, in a presentation given to the Venice Land Use and Planning Committee (LUPC) last Wednesday.

“Lincoln Place” would capitalize upon Venice’s creative, beachy vibe to attract a “tech” corridor nestled between Santa Monica’s emerging Silicon Beach and the LAX Airport/El Segundo’s aerospace/engineering cluster. Not such a stretch in light of Google’s pending move to Main Street.

Shown in red below, the new tech park would stretch along Lincoln Boulevard adjacent to the existing Lincoln Place apartments, a 38-acre complex with its own interesting history. It would displace two retail centers, Ralph’s supermarket and Ross Dress For Less, with the new building footprints adopting the New Urbanist best practice of a zero lot line and parking in the rear.

Lincoln Place Tech Park

Lincoln Boulevard itself would be transformed into a “complete street” featuring dedicated rapid bus lanes in the center lane, an all-electric fleet technology (notice the overhead catenary wires), wider sidewalks, and an enhanced public realm.

Lincoln Boulevard reimagined as a "complete street"

As one of the LUPC members pointed out, Lincoln Boulevard’s official designation as a state highway (Route 1) means that little in the form of traffic calming or retrofitting may be legally permissible, let alone desirable, given existing traffic woes on the Westside.

The leap from concept to implementation is always a tricky one. The makeover scheme also begs the classic question of phasing: Would public investment in better amenities and transportation options need to come first to make Lincoln Blvd more desirable for high-wage tech workers, who value quality of life, or would the increased employment base come first and then provide the tax dollars to do so?

That aside, USC students are spot on in identifying the locational advantage that Lincoln Boulevard currently enjoys but does not successfully exploit. City planners would do well to take note.

Construction is underway on a series of new public restroom facilities along the bike path between the Santa Monica Pier and Venice Beach.

Under construction - to be finished by Memorial Day 2011

Required by law to bring its facilities into compliance with accessibility standards, the City of Santa Monica is teaming with Roesling Nakamura Terada Architects to deliver much-improved amenities to beachgoers and visitors.

Design prototype for new Santa Monica Beach rest stops.

The old facilities were memorable mainly for their unpleasant odors, lack of sanitation, and pigeon infestations. They were maintained in a state of seemingly intentional decrepitude, almost as if to dissuade visitors from spending too much time inside them.

The new design concept takes almost the opposite approach, encouraging people to sit, lean, drink, and generally linger.

Each station will be complimented by a "palette of amenities."

According to the project’s official Web site, each station will be “complimented by a palette of site amenities, including showers, foot washes, bike racks, drinking fountains and seating.”

Voneelya Simmons, project manager for the City of Santa Monica, said that construction is due to be completed by Memorial Day weekend 2011, at a cost of approximately $3 million. Just in time to welcome the tourists.

• Short-Term Stimulus. During construction (2012-2017), the project will contribute an estimated regional income benefit of $701 million to Southern California workers who otherwise would have been unemployed;
• Green Jobs. By 2035, high-speed rail will attract over 127,000 new permanent jobs to Southern California due to the region’s increased livability and enhanced transportation network, providing a major catalyst for continued expansion of the region’s green economy and reduced greenhouse gas emissions.

This Thursday, a conference sponsored by Brandman University in Irvine, appropriately entitled “The Light At the End of the Tunnel,” will mark the official release of the study to the press. It will also feature distinguished panelists, including yours truly and Mayor of Anaheim/Chairman of the High Speed Rail Authority Curt Pringle, who will discuss the future of the project and how to advance it beyond the planning stages.

Location: Brandman University | 16355 Laguna Canyon Road, Room 111 | Irvine, California 92618 | 949-375-0856

Time: Thursday, August 26, 2010, 9:00am – 3:00pm

RSVP: alia@formol.com

Since a professional architectural critic has already covered the main points, allow me to draw attention to two of SMP’s most thoughtful yet overlooked features:

• Public restrooms. Mall retailers typically seek to hide their bathrooms: on the top floor, down a long corridor, behind inadequate signage.  But SMP has decided to go the other route, conveniently placing one of its restrooms within 50 feet of the street-level entrance from Colorado Avenue. If it survives the inevitable petty vandalism, this will stand out as a much-needed public amenity.
• Built-in Heat Lamps. Everyone loves to glorify Southern California weather and conclude that of course malls should be open-air here. But for most of the year, beach city weather can only be described as “FF” (f—ing freezing), as my Mom likes to put it.  Attuned to this reality, SMP has placed built-in heat lamps near all of the outdoor tables. The lamps are set into the concrete, presumably to survive one of the other enduring Southern California realities: earthquakes!

Built-in heat lamps are one of the mall's most thoughtful, context-specific features. (Photo: Architect's Newspaper)

As an organic extension of the Third Street Promenade, SMP is perhaps most successful in capitalizing upon existing flows of pedestrian traffic, but its generous orientation toward the street  has also breathed new life into the formerly moribund Colorado Avenue. No longer a barrier to those approaching from the south, it makes an extended stroll from Main Street to the Promenade much more tolerable.

Even as Santa Monica Place is inhabited by many of the same high-end national and chain stores found elsewhere in LA, the beach views make it a retail experience distinct from the high-rise, in-the-city feel of the Century City Mall or the paparazzi-lined sidewalks of Robertson Boulevard. Plus, it is too geographically removed from its would-be competitors to cannibalize much of their customer base or retail dollars.

Not to bitch, but I do hate all the new evening traffic on the 4th Street exit from the 10 West. Now it is routinely backed up onto the freeway. At least the underutilized, LEED-Certified Civic Center parking garage on 4th St/Olympic is getting some additional off-peak occupancy and will hopefully start to generate more revenue for the City of Santa Monica.

The  economic and environmental benefits could be enormous. Naturally, the long-term land use implications of this initiative have also attracted developer interest.

At the recent ULI Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) Summit, 30/10 took center stage during a thinly-veiled stump speech by Sen. Barbara Boxer, who is shoring up support for her 2010 re-election campaign. To a cheering crowd, Boxer announced a minor breakthrough at the federal level related to environmental clearance for the 9.3-mile Westside Subway Extension, which is perhaps the signature project of 30/10 .

The level of excitement was palpable in the room, and yet I found myself asking: how much will the Westside Subway Extension actually promote TOD, defined in the traditional sense as development within a 1/2-mile radius of a station area?

The prospects for TOD along the Westside Subway alignment are less promising than they might intuitively seem.

Based on the proposed alignment, I concluded that the potential for TOD remains elusive at best, especially on the Westside “proper”:

Veteran’s Administration Hospital – future development on or around this site is virtually DOA, given the political forces in favor of maintaining the grounds as open space, as noted in my September 19, 2009 post.

UCLA – the station will most likely be located on Lot 36 of the UCLA campus. University property is exempt from local land use controls; the city therefore cannot change station area zoning to encourage future development.

Century City – the alignment here is constrained by the San Andreas fault line, which was discovered during seismic tests to run spookily parallel to the section of Santa Monica Blvd near Wilshire.  Which means any high-rise development in this immediate area should logically be out of the question, too.

Wilshire/Rodeo – the existing density of this commercial district, combined with the surrounding NIMBYists south of Wilshire, makes it difficult to envision dramatic changes here, although it could just be my lack of imagination.

Wilshire/La Cienega – same caveat as above applies here.

Wilshire/Fairfax – will the owner of Johnnie’s Coffee Shop finally sell out? will LACMA develop the fenced-off no man’s land behind the former Bullocks May?

Wilshire/La Brea – prospects here are more sanguine. A Metro-owned property at the NW corner of the intersection, along with adjacent city parking lots, could be prime candidates for TOD.

This is not intended to dampen enthusiasm for the overall objective of 30/10, which remains a worthy initiative. Still, it seems unfortunate that the proposed station locations on the Westside are diminishing the opportunities for real estate development typically associated with transit. Hopefully, between now and final design, some of those location options could change.

With so many development projects in L.A. either cancelled or indefinitely on hold, one cannot help but wonder about the massive potential of vacant lots as temporary sites for urban agriculture. A report last April by the Los Angeles Times documented the exceedingly long wait times – up to 4 years – for a plot in local community gardens.

Why can’t the mismatch between supply and demand be partially met through the transformation of individual parcels on a case by case basis, with the city helping to negotiate agreements with willing private landowners?

This property at 5th Ave/Rose in Venice, once envisioned for a mixed-use condo building,  lies fallow, bursting with green. Its conversion to a garden isn’t difficult to imagine.

This parcel at 5th/Rose Ave is one of many potential community gardens.

The upside to the landowner/developer would come primarily in the form of community goodwill (provided there was a clear understanding about the length of use and other conditions) from the creation of a new neighborhood amenity. In the case of residential projects, part of the garden could even be preserved and incorporated into the future development to meet on-site open space requirements for multifamily housing.

But in his latest article on newgeography.com, Kotkin has gone a step further to declare that the Democratic Party’s electoral defeat in the recent Massachusetts Senate race can be attributed to Obama’s “war against suburbia,” an aggressively pro-urban agenda that has in effect alienated a key bloc of “swing” voters living outside major cities.

The evidence for this so-called “war against suburbia”? A proposal to convert interstate highways to toll roads is one of many smoking guns, since in theory it would disproportionately impact suburbanites who drive more. Yet Kotkin also points out in the same breathe that suburbanites have shorter commutes to work than the average city dweller, due to the increasing dispersion of job centers, so it is unclear why they would be more affected by toll roads than anyone else.

As everyone knows, the real impetus behind toll road and congestion pricing proposals is a bankrupt Highway Trust Fund, not some imaginary war on suburbia. A policy that asks drivers to internalize the costs of road use deserves to be part of the political conversation. Of course, there is a double standard at work in Kotkin’s stance: massive federal subsidies for highway maintenance are somehow not “anti-urban,” whereas investments in mass transit are utterly “anti-suburban.”

Armed with a few original insights and talking points, Kotkin has built an enviable career as a nationally syndicated columnist. In this case, though, his tendency to apply the same insight to every situation results in a bit of an overreach.

LA's pedestrian-last policy: one of the most poorly designed crosswalks (San Vincente/Montana in Brentwood).

Imagine you want to go from point A to point B. The awkward, rhomboidal shape of the intersection leaves you with few good options while awaiting a signal change to begin the long trek across San Vicente Boulevard. There are multiple segments to the crosswalk, with pedestrians left stranded on the various medians (yes, plural) while cars whiz past. Total crossing distance for the existing scenario (in yellow) is over 400 feet, or about an entire city block.

Diagonal crossing in Beverly Hills: breezy, efficient, and conducive to retail spending!

Contrast this with Beverly Hill’s downtown, where diagonal crossing allows a swift, efficient jaunt from one destination to the next. If this scheme were implemented in Brentwood, the crossing distance at San Vicente/Montana would be reduced to just over 120 feet (in purple), or 30% of the original distance.  This type of fix is not just about catering to the impatient pedestrian, but increasing economic vitality in Brentwood’s retail district overall. Think about the boutiques and restaurants on both sides of San Vicente that would benefit from increased flows of foot traffic across the boulevard. Right now, would-be customers have good reason to look at the intersection, ask themselves “why bother?,” and get back into their cars to drive elsewhere.

With Southern California slated to convert existing carpool lanes to HOT (High Occupancy Toll) lanes on stretches of the 210 10 and 110 as soon as next year, the committee gathered to debate whether the application of road pricing strategies should be broadened across the region to manage anticipated increases in VMT.

HNTB was mostly preaching to the choir as it outlined the positive benefits – economic and environmental – that have been reaped from the implementation of congestion pricing policies elsewhere. Representatives from the trucking/goods movement industries were a tad more skeptical, but most everyone agreed that the success of congestion pricing in Southern California will ride on the rollout of the concept to the public, particularly how the revenues from any user-based fees are subsequently allocated.

One of the most interesting findings from HNTB’s research was that, even in other cities less enamored of the automobile than Los Angeles, public support for congestion pricing increased after implementation, but still barely passed the 50% mark. The graph below tracks the opinion of Stockholm residents before and after the city started charging cars to enter its central district. The poll further distinguishes between residents in the inner-city (ie. within the congestion pricing zone) and the outer region/periphery.

% of Stockholm residents in favor of congestion pricing, before and after implementation, by location (Source: Stephen Glaister, Imperial College, UK, via HNTB)

Two caveats: 1) Public support may have increased further since Spring 2006, as residents have presumably adjusted to the policy and perhaps shifted their places of work/residence accordingly. 2) Southern California is not Stockholm. It is a famously polynucleated region without a dominant urban core. But the longstanding disparity between job-rich coastal counties and the more affordable but primarily housing-driven Inland Empire could pose similar challenges to Southern California policymakers in garnering broad majority support here. Indeed, there are still so many variables that it is hard to gauge who the probable winners and losers would be (more on that in a future post). But congestion pricing may be part of the long-term solution to our traffic woes.

*Of which I am a member, representing UC Irvine’s Center for Urban Infrastructure.