🚀 go-pugleaf

Stopping Playa Vista: One Last Chance in a Lifetime

by Andrew Christie

I grew up at the foot of the San Gabriel Mountains. In 1965, if you headed
for the eastern end of the San Fernando Valley, then struck northward on
the suburban streets that make the increasingly steep climb up from the
valley floor where the 210 Freeway would eventually wend its way, you would
eventually come to the end of blacktop, and the even steeper driveway of
the house my father built. Outside our front door was a slepy Southern
California sixties suburb. Out our back door and a hop over the back stair
railing, were the foothills of the San Gabriels. In five minutes, you were
in a pine forest, fording creeks, clambering through gullies, climbing
60-foot trees, crawling through sage and chaparral, emerging into sudden
clearings enclosed on all sidesas well as overhead by a canopy that the sun
could barely seep through at high noon in July. Every kid on our street
knew every inch of the terrain for three miles back.

As the sixties ended, so did those foothills, that pine forest, that sage,
those streams and gullies, and my endless summer. They were leveled and
graded, and a housing development went in, on top of a terraced dirt slope
that reared up to replace the mountains behind our house. Water sprinklers
and little patches of planted grass sprouting out of it like mange.
Boulders rolled down it at regular intervals to smash into our compost heap
and back stairs railing.

The developer said many good things about his beautiful new housing tract.
There were many sound reasons why the forest and the mountains had to go
away. I don't remember what they were -- probably because, though I was
around ten years old at the time, I knew better than to believe them.

Thirty years later, I live in West Los Angeles. My hairline has joined the
San Gabriels of my childhood in steady, ongoing recession, and much else
has changed besides, but I am increasingly struck by a sense of deja vu. I
am again hearing the glowing verbal pictures painted by real estate
developers and politicians, this time about how Playa Vista is going to be
the salvation of Los Angeles and the wonder of the age, how the developer
is going to take care of the Ballona Wetlands and its wildlife as though
they were his own children, how 700+ acres of upland habitat and open space
are going to get plowed under and paved over, but we will get more jobs, an
expanded tax base, a hightech dream business, prosperity, peace, chickens
in pots.... It's as though nothing has changed, as though West L.A. doesn't
know what development means, as though we've never heard any of this
before.

When it comes to Playa Vista, we've been hearing it for some time. In
1981, the Friends of Ballona Wetlands deemed the wetlands "irreplaceable"
and asserted that "to impact them so severely with surrounding development
that they eventually wither away would be an irresponsible act for which
not only we but future generations will pay the price." They urged that 577
acres of the Playa Vista property be preserved as wetlands, the last
vestige of a 2,000-acre marsh that once supported L.A.'s billion-dollar
fishing industry before it was destroyed by development. In 1984 they sued
developer Maguire Thomas Partners, and in 1990 they settled for a deal that
would preserve less than half the acreage they wanted, plus a 5% reduction
in projected traffic impacts (200,000 additional car trips and ten tons of
pollution per day).

Local politicians continue to hail this as a victory for the environment.
Unfortunately, one brief passage from Ralph Schreiber's study Biota of the
Ballona Region, Los Angeles rains on that parade: "Wetlands are not
isolated, independently functioning systems and are dependent on associated
watersheds and upland transition areas" (i.e. the places that Playa Vista
and DreamWorks SKG are going to be sitting on). Equally discouraging to any
attempts to celebrate this "win-win" compromise is the Environmental Impact
Report filed on Phase One of the proposed development, which predicts "the
outright elimination of most species from the developed properties" and
states that "those not eliminated outright during construction...will
eventually die or be killed" (pg. I-12, Vol X, Appendix J, Sept. 1992).

The language of the restoration agreement the Friends signed with Maguire
Thomas is such that very little is actually required of the developer. All
the way down the list of environmentally sound water treatment and
reclamation facilities, the terms of the restoration depend on someone
other than the developer picking up the tab, and virtually all of it is
optional. When the Friends cut their deal, the developer got guarantees;
the environmentalists got conditional promises that amounted to "you might
get this, but only if we get everything we want first."

But the fundamental flaw in the current deal is the way the
environmentalists allowed the debate to be framed throughout the '80s. What
could have come from the question "Should this land be developed, and if
not, what are some alternatives?" became instead "Please let us help decide
how this land is going to be developed?" The politics of mitigation
obliterated the potential of outright preservation that would result from
the purchase of the land, to be held in public trust.

That was back when the developer was tossing around casual billion-dollar
land value estimates. But the City Assessor has now valued the entire
property at slightly over $106 million. That's $20 million less than the
total cost to the city of the package of tax breaks that the city and the
MTA are handing DreamWorks to build their studio there.

Some might say there is something wrong with this picture. For these
reasons and more, Playa Vista's developers have been taken back to court.
Other local groups have sued over the proposed re-development of Marina del
Rey into a "Century City by the sea." Meanwhile, the proposed LAX 2000
expansion has nearly doubled in size. From an economic standpoint, it is
worth noting that should any or all of these plans come to fruition, all of
them targeting the same geographic region, hundreds of local businesses
will be wiped out -- either literally, by Playa Vista's 8-lane expansion of
Lincoln Boulevard, or in the traditional manner, by the overwhelming
competition in a new taxpayer-subsidized city that has sprung up across the
way. The wetlands will wither and die, and they won't be alone.

I have heard long-time Westside residents speak wistfully about what it
was like to grow up around Ballona. Camping out in the marshes, catching
tadpoles, fishing (!), following creeks back into hollows and hidden
springs. Their children are now making similar albeit, down-sized memories
-- whenever they can fin a hole in a fence big enough to slip through.

But that means nothing compared to how much money some people are going to
make off of Playa Vista. Compared to that, local residents' memories of the
natural world are merely personal. It is childhood nostalgia. It is, the
memory of our last, best connection to the earth, which must be denied and
discarded, allowed to recede into the past, until the day comes when we are
finally alone in the dark, standing on a patio, gazing at a manicured lawn,
not noticing the frogs that are not croaking because a promised riparian
corridor turned into a concrete-lined drainage ditch and was rammed through
City Council without environmental review; not noticing the birds that
aren't calling because their migration route now detours tortuously around
the spot where our condo has been built; not noticing the crickets that
aren't chirping because their feeding grounds were destroyed by a sudden
massive increase in polluted urban runoff.

We will stand and stare into that growing, silent darkness  -- maybe with
a good, stiff drink in hand -- basically content, yet wondering, along with
several million other souls, why we feel so unhappy when everything is
going so well.

Andrew Christie is a member of the Ballona Wetlands Land Trust