LA's formula for growth

Interesting background and outlook on LA's urban development

Los Angeles ran out of raw land more than 20 years ago and therefore had to move beyond the traditional suburban ideal of single-family homes on tree-lined streets. So it, along with older suburbs stretching from San Fernando to Westminster, is doing what cities have done throughout history -- building up instead of out to accommodate the housing needs of a growing population and an ever-changing set of construction and space requirements for businesses.

This isn't always pretty. But the end result is what L.A. needs to be -- a more urban city....

In the 1970s, when L.A.'s suburbs began sprouting, the city adopted, in 1974, an innovative general zoning plan that called for high-density development around 38 centers in the city, connected by transit, that would absorb most of the growing population. These centers would allow permanent preservation of the vast fields of single-family houses located between them.

The "centers concept," as it was called, was the brainchild of Calvin Hamilton, city planning director from 1964 to 1986. At a time when planning orthodoxy argued that cities had to be "mono-nuclear" -- built around one extremely dense center, like Manhattan -- L.A.'s plan was nothing less than revolutionary. Hamilton's visionary plan acknowledged that L.A. was "poly-nuclear" -- a place with many centers, of varying sizes, all of which had to be strengthened for the city to accommodate new growth.