In the past few weeks, Long Beach Development Services Director Amy Bodek has been taking heat. At community meetings, upset and angry residents have hissed, booed and yelled at her, and elected officials have come out opposing the long-wrought work of her staff. The source of their discontent is the updated Land Use Element, a document of the General Plan that she has been working on since becoming director in 2010.
That is not to say that everyone opposes the maps – but as two recent community meetings have revealed, the loudest voices are often the opposition.
The city’s director of development services, Amy Bodek, addresses a crowd gathered at the Whaley Park Community Center to hear about the proposed Land Use Element of the General Plan. (Photograph by the Business Journal’s Brandon Richardson)
Bodek came by the Business Journal’s offices with Interim Public Affairs Officer Kevin Lee on October 3, a few days after she and her staff attempted to run an open-house style meeting on the Land Use Element, only to have it commandeered by local community groups and forced into a town hall-style format.
Bodek acknowledged that negative reactions from residents were in part due to a comment she made at a planning commission meeting in August when, despite the commission’s decision to send the Land Use Element back out for further community input, she said she would be bringing it to the Long Beach City Council, anyway. The mayor was quick to send out a statement assuring residents that the element would, in fact, be going back out for more community meetings, and it since has.
In retrospect, Bodek said she would take back her comment. “Because while the unintended consequence is positive in that more people are paying attention, it did cause a lot of undue angst and that was never the intention,” she said. “The intention was to get the city council’s involvement at the appropriate time.”
After the September 30 community meeting at Veterans Park went off the rails when local community activists essentially took control of it, Bodek said city staff would allow for both one-on-one input and a town hall session at future meetings. This was the set up on October 4 at Whaley Park, but as Business Journal staff in attendance witnessed, the majority of the meeting was spent on a town hall-style question and answer session.
Bodek said some residents left the Veterans Park meeting because they were uncomfortable with the situation. “We are trying to create an environment where all voices can be heard. We are actually trying to reach people who we don’t normally reach,” she said. “We are trying to get a diversity of voices and a diversity of opinions. And loud chanting and whistleblowing does not encourage that. So we are going to give people choices.”
Since 2016, city staff has held 46 community meetings. Eighteen of those were held in 2016, and 28 in 2017, according to Bodek. These included varying types of interactions, from pop-up events at libraries to neighborhood association meetings, to study sessions of the Long Beach City Council and Long Beach Planning Commission, she explained.
The City of Long Beach has been working on revising the Land Use Element of its General Plan for the last 11 years. The effort was derailed by the Great Recession, but put back on track in 2010 when Long Beach Development Services’ revenue sources were restructured and Bodek came on as the department’s director, she explained. In those 11 years, as many as 100 community meetings have been held, according to Bodek.
The department re-emerged on the other side of the recession as an enterprise fund, with revenues generated mainly by fees. No longer reliant upon the city’s General Fund, staffing could be better allocated to focus on updating its core General Plan elements – a requirement by the state, according to Bodek.
The current Land Use Element has been in place since 1989, and its guidelines were based upon projections that extended through 2000.
“Every year, I get a nastygram from the state housing and community development department that lists all of our General Plan elements and how out of date they are. And then they quote the state law that says we’re supposed to keep our elements current,” Bodek said.
“The Land Use Element is really the city’s constitution for land use decision making. It sets up the framework for all sorts of decisions that get made on individual projects for the next 30, 40 years,” Bodek explained. “It really is meant to be a guiding document for the city. It’s not supposed to be a rigid document to where we don’t have future flexibility to deviate.”
To determine best future land uses within the city, Bodek and her staff, as well as outside consultants, have conducted in-depth analyses of demographic and economic data and projections. “We have to figure out what our population growth is going to be, what our employment numbers are, where our employment is, where do our residents work, what the bleeding pattern is for retail and sales tax dollars,” Bodek said. “And we have to figure out how to balance all of the needs of the city as best we can.”
The Land Use Element’s guidelines must allow for the construction of 7,048 residential units by 2021 and factor in a estimated population growth of 18,230 by 2040. These are state projections and requirements.
Asked if the state mandates population growth or if communities can decide how they would like to grow on their own, Bodek responded, “That brings us to an interesting perspective on the state and their current push on housing bills. They are taking away local authority.” She elaborated, “There are a number of steps that the state has taken over the years as a legislature to take away some of the local control that does not allow us to make those decisions independently.”
Bodek’s department is about to release an analysis of rental rates in the city that will include other key housing statistics, some of which she provided in advance to the Business Journal.
“Fifty-nine percent of [residents in] our city are not homeowners. That’s a huge percentage. Countrywide, the average is 35% renters,” she said. “So the other issue we have is overcrowding . . . . We still do not have enough housing stock to deal with the people who already live here.”
In recent years, about 12% of homes in Long Beach were overcrowded, with more than one to a room, and 5% were overcrowded with 1.5 or more persons per room, Bodek reported. About 16.2% of renters reported experiencing overcrowding, while 6.1% of homeowners reported it.
“We have to look at housing choice for everyone. And this idea that everyone wants a single-family home as an ownership option is not the trend,” she said. “We have nothing against single-family homes or neighborhoods. I mean, we just permitted two single-family neighborhoods in the last year, despite lawsuits,” she noted, referring to new communities moving forward in Northwest and Northeast Long Beach.
One of the common misconceptions about the document is that it outlines future developments and planned projects, according to Bodek. “So we have said, and that’s one of our facts or misconceptions – is that we are not bulldozing neighborhoods. Or churches,” she said.
While land use maps show increased heights allowed, for example, at retail centers adjacent to neighborhoods, Bodek explained that these represent maximum allowed heights for a total area, not a future planned building.
“I will use Los Altos as an example. Even though I think Los Altos is showing a five-story height limit for where the Target center is, that doesn’t mean that the five stories would go right to the edge,” Bodek said. “Those [decisions] come when actual [project] submissions occur. And then we look at edge conditions and we say, first of all, what’s your land use. If it’s going to stay retail, there is never going to be a five-story retail project there,” she explained. “But if you’re going to allow housing . . . again, we won’t put five-story housing next to a single family neighborhood. But we might put a three-story next to it and a five-story in the middle [of the area].”
While Bodek attributed some of the angst of residents to misconceptions about the element, she also noted that some societal changes could be at play. She reflected, “I think that society is in a period of great change and we are confronting that on all levels: locally, state, nationally and on the world stage. And I think that change is very difficult. And people handle it in different ways.”
Mayor Robert Garcia has come out against the Land Use Element as proposed, as have councilmembers Stacy Mungo and Daryl Supernaw. Prior to the September 30 community meeting at Veterans Park, Garcia sent out an emailed statement that in part said, ““There’s too much density, especially adjacent to neighborhoods that are suburban and residential.”
Bodek said the mayor was “hoping to diffuse angst” by sending out the statement. “We have said these maps are subject to change. But the real place that that change is going to happen ultimately is at the city council level. And so the mayor put that statement . . . with our full knowledge that that statement was going out in order to reduce any angst that may occur,” she said.
The current Land Use Element includes revisions and updates based on feedback from the public and from the planning commission. Bodek said the document may be revised further based on feedback gathered at community meetings. “The more specific you can be, the more helpful it will be to us,” she said of public comment on the document. “What we have been hearing is, ‘We don’t like height and density.’ OK, well what does that mean to you? . . . . Can you write that down for us? That’s all we want. Just write it down. ‘I would be comfortable with Los Altos being three stories.’ ‘I would not be comfortable with Los Altos being anything but retail.’ Whatever that statement is, that’s what we need.”
Based upon major trends in comments, the map will be revised and then sent back to the planning commission, Bodek explained. Eventually, the city council will make the final decision on the document.