Reality Check on Growth - Script

A visioning exercise in sponsored by USC's Lusk Center for Real Estate, the Urban Land Institute of Los Angeles, and the Southern California Association of Governments challenged participants to consider where to locate Southern California's projected 6 million new residents.

October, 2002 | Running Time 8:42
Copyright USC Lusk Center, ULI Los Angeles

Script:

Voice-Over:
On October 10, 2002, ULI, Los Angeles, a district council of the Urban Land Institute, and the USC Lusk Center For Real Estate convened nearly 300 Southern California Leaders to undertake an audacious task. "Reality Check on Growth", an unprecedented envisioning exercise gave regional stakeholders an opportunity to collaborate and creatively address the looming issues of projected growth in Southern California. This envisioning exercise has the support and cooperation of several forward thinking organizations in Los
Angeles.

• ULI Los Angeles
• USC Lusk Center for Real Estate
• Southern California Transportation and Land Use Coalition
• Southern California Association of Governments

Mark Pisano:
"My name is Mark Pisano. I am the Executive Director of the Southern California Association of Governments. On behalf of all the organizations who put on this event we invite you to envision the future of Southern California ... where you think growth should occur, what quality of life you desire, what economic opportunities we should provide. This exercise will change the way you look at Southern California. You will appreciate the enormous challenges we face ... challenges that seem almost insurmountable. But with your input, your creativity and your suggestions we will in fact, define a Southern California that works for all."

Voice-Over:
The rules and format of the exercise are designed to force the participants to face and plan for the future.

Speaker: Raphael Bostic, Director, Casden Real Estate Economic Forecast, USC Lusk Center
"So the first question is how many new arrivals are there? And we are going to ask you to work with a number of six million new residents in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area."

Speaker: Keith McCarthy, Councilmember, City of Downey
"Part of this realization is that this six million growth is not necessarily an influx of population but growth from within--that is, people having kids."

Speaker: Raphael Bostic, Director, Casden Real Estate Economic Forecast, USC Lusk Center
"But it represents a 33 percent increase in the population over the next 20 years. So if you think we are crowded now, we have a lot more people coming here."

Speaker: Stuart A. Gabriel, Director & Lusk Center Chair in Real Estate / USC Lusk Center for Real Estate
"In this visioning exercise, we are going to ask you to address a couple questions. Where will we put the anticipated growth in regional population? No less than the future of economic growth and quality of life of our region is at stake."

Voice-Over:
Each table of guests will now start their process of planning for and placing new residents. The organizers intentionally grouped the guests in a diverse fashion. For instance, environmentalists, developers and social activists are grouped together at each table and they must find agreement on where we might locate the homes and workplaces for the coming six million.

Speaker: Bill Bogaard, Mayor, City of Pasadena
"We have a very mixed and qualified group to help us figure out where six million people--which is an assumption for purposes of this exercise but it seems like a reasonable assumption to work with--over the next 20 years will be living and working and how long will their commutes be?"

Voice-Over:Each table was given an assortment of colored chips. Each color represented a specific number of home or jobs in different land use densities. These chips will be arranged on the maps, and then taped down when the participants have decided on their final placement. The initial and possibly most difficult work was for all opinions to be considered

Workshop participant comments:
"...take the example of Ventura County. They don't want density. It is absolute bologna."

"I think the probability that we are going to be able to push a lot of density into areas that don't want it isn't very good."

"I think that we need more verticality and that we need more density."

Speaker: Denis Bertone, Mayor Pro Tem, City of San Dimas
"When public officials have to make decisions they are going to be aware of the point of view of others that are involved in that decision. They are not just going to be pushing one point of view."

Voice-Over:
While each participant had to place six million residents in the form of chips, they were allowed to do limited trading between the low, medium and high-density chips to create what they felt would be the best possible use of land and transportation resources. The banker keeps track of the trades and keeps the overall population numbers consistent.

Speaker: Ray DiGuillo, Mayor, City of Ventura
"There was no way we could put all of those yellow chips on the map. And there was hardly any discussion at all about going to higher density right away. There was not a lot of argument or whatever we clearly understood that that was one of the solutions that hasn't been adequately addressed. But quite honestly we traded our chips in right away."

Moderator:
"Thank you. I assume everyone is finished. If you have a few high density chips left over just stick them on Catalina or something. I don't know. They have to go somewhere."

Voice-Over:
While the guests adjourned to lunch,the maps were gathered up and taken to the computer facility for tabulation. Numbers were recorded and double-checked, and then taken for computer entry. The computers have been
programmed to reduce and format the data for all forms of comparisons and analysis.

Speaker: John Wilson, Director, USC GIS Research Laboratory
"So now we are looking at what everybody did as a group. I took the grid cells and distributed where the six million people are going to go. Of the six million people, L.A. is destined to get half and Riverside is destined to get about 20 percent.

So we can see down there on the south coast a cell that ranked eighth in terms of population growth and 22nd in terms of job creation. There are other places on the map where agreement was reached and other places where there are substantial differences.

Another popular place is Palmdale that ranked 17th in terms of population growth and 3rd in terms of job growth."

Speaker: Daniel Mazmanian, Dean and Professor, USC School of Policy, Planning, and Development
"This is a moment to set the compass anew. Working together, we must recapture control of our fate."

Speaker: Stuart "Rick" Mork, Senior VP and CFO, The Newhall Land and Farming Company.
"Remember that everyone at the table has an equal voice. Even the relatively shy people versus the more aggressive people. Just remember that everyone has an equal voice."

Speaker: Dan Garcia, Senior Vice President and Chief Compliance Officer, Kaiser Foundation Health Plan and Kaiser Foundation Hospital
"The common denominator in local policy and land use is fear. And that fear is based on fear of change."

Speaker: Ed Reyes, Councilmember, City of Los Angeles
"When one city chooses to neglect its responsibility to build housing, it really creates a burden on other cities."

Speaker: Cristina Cruz Madrid, Mayor, City of Azusa
"I would like to look at a method by which opportunities are evenly distributed."

Speaker: Mike Feinstein, Mayor, City of Santa Monica
"That is where we are right now in terms of Smart Growth in California: not whether we should do it, but how we do it. And that's what we learned by having all stakeholders at the table."

Speaker: Ruth Galanter, Councilmember, City of Los Angeles
"I have to say that my definition of Smart Growth is what everyone supports until someone tries to do it and that may be the result of having been an elected official for a long time."

Speaker: Felicia Marcus, Vice President and COO, The Trust for Public Land
"The real trick is going to be facilitating it in a way that makes people feel comfortable, informed, engaged, respected."

Voice-Over:
Long range regional planning can be difficult to grapple with.
Organizations like USC Lusk Center for Real Estate and Urban Land Institute have employed this exercise to bring fresh energy and awareness to the issues.

Speaker: Mitchell Menzer, Esq., ULI Los Angeles; Partner, O'Melveny & Myers, LLP.
"Our committee proposes that the state as a policy foster regional planning on a comprehensive basis--very much along the lines of the exercise that took place here this morning--that would be designate and develop long-term plans for areas where growth would occur and particularly Smart Growth and higher density growth and set aside on a long -term basis those areas that will be conserved and where development will not occur."

Speaker: Gary Hunt, USC Lusk Center; Partner, California Strategies, LLC.
"If we are going to address any of the issues that are going to be raised because of this growth, we are going to have raise issues like this which again brings all of the stakeholders together to the table and gives them an opportunity to understand the issues, understand the problem and work together to reach some sort of consensus or agreement on what the solutions are. And once that is done there is going to have to be the political will to bring about the changes to implement what the visioning session has developed."

End