The seriously contentious Hollywood Community Plan, currently being hammered out, moved forward with a whisper, reports the Hollywood Patch. It's the first of many community plans for the city that seek to update and standardize the zoning codes and planning priorities for the area. At the Tuesday meeting of the Planning and Land Use and Management Committee, Councilmembers Jose Huizar and Ed Reyes moved the planning document to the full Council without making a recommendation on whether it should approve it or not. The PLUM committee has been reviewing the blueprint on the future of Hollywood since late March and has heard hours of feedback from residents during public comment periods (many weary of proposed density around transit hubs and Vine St.). For the uninitiated, Hollywood's current plan is all of 12 pages long and was drafted in 1988 (pre-Hollywood & Highland Center, pre-W, pre-subway, pre-gentrification). At the Tuesday meeting, LA senior planner Kevin Keller reminded everyone how out of date the current planning document is and noted that the 2012 version is not really as scary as some may think. For one, the push is to keep single-family areas low-density and target growth around subway and bus stops. Here are some more specifics:
-- The fear of Hollywood's "Manhattanization" are overblown: the only proposed height limit increases are for a park (a technicality, he says, probably in reference to the cap park over the 101, which needs to be high for obvious reasons) and an "increase from 45-feet to 60-feet to make an area consistent with a new 60-foot height north of Hollywood Boulevard in the historic Hollywood register district."
-- The plan maintains the 1988 plans allowance for "larger scale development along the Vine corridor" (possibly including the proposed towers around the Capitol Records Building, although Keller points out that the project would still have to be approved by the City Council).
-- Traffic won't really be affected by the plan: "A full traffic model was prepared looking at 2030 conditions and working with DOT. The model does project additional traffic congestion in 2030, however, with and without the plan, traffic congestion models are essentially the same."
Ultimately, on Tuesday, Huizar advocated moving "forward without recommendation from this committee and allow for more information to continue to evolve from this point to Council and give us more insight given the sensitivity of these decisions."
· Hollywood Community Plan Moves to City Council 'Without Recommendation' [Hollywood Patch]
· Hollywood Debates Its New Planning Standards at City Hall [Curbed LA]
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