City Planner Wrestles With L.A.’s Bureaucratic Sprawl : Government: Con Howe, veteran of New York’s City Hall, has been hobbled in first year by the budget crisis.

Twenty-three days after Con Howe arrived in Los Angeles as the city’s planning director, many of the neighborhoods he was still exploring were savaged by the flames of the riots. In the months that followed, his ambitious plans to restructure the Planning Department were torched by the city budget crisis.

For the new planning chief, it has been the worst of times and the worst of times.

In his first year on the job, Howe has gained a reputation as a talented man stuck in a near-impossible job. It remains to be seen whether Howe, proven skillful in the centralized rough and tumble of the New York City bureaucracy, can master the diffuse power structure of Los Angeles.

There have been victories, to be sure. Howe is credited with reaching out to community groups for ideas and for encouraging coordination among the various city departments concerned with planning and development. And he has sought to impose objective planning standards on what previously were purely political decisions.

But the Planning Department staff has been slashed at a time he has sought more help, and it is still unclear whether Howe can overcome the parochial concerns of individual City Council members to create a unified vision of the future of Los Angeles.

“For me, the hardest challenge has been how to get things done in this government,” says Howe, referring to its decentralized structure. “(And) it’s real hard in the current budget situation to develop initiatives. . . . But it’s no use whining about the budget. You have to make the most of what you have.”

Even before Howe arrived, a city study as thick as a telephone book described the potential quagmire he was headed for: a bureacracy of Dickensian backwardness, seriously demoralized, technologically in the Dark Ages and politically manipulated by competing City Council members.

The job of director of planning in Los Angeles was “the laughingstock of the planning profession,” planning critic William Fulton wrote last year. “Twenty years of laziness and inattention must be undone. . . . The mystery isn’t who’ll get the job. It’s why anybody would want it.”

Howe notes wryly that he had not read Fulton’s op-ed piece before accepting the job. He had dealt with gibes, though, from East Coast friends: Director of city planning in Los Angeles. Isn’t that something like being head of the snowplowing department in Miami? Or of farm policy in Manhattan?

But Howe saw the sprawl--both of the city and its power structure--not as a joke but as a challenge. He came into office with far-ranging plans to expand the department from a largely reactive, paper-pushing zoning bureaucracy into a more assertive agency fostering economic development as well as rational physical planning.

His experience in New York, a metropolis that has developed a muscular economic development program in response to the city’s decline, was widely considered an asset in Los Angeles, where until recently the city government tended to assume that sunshine and palm trees were enough to attract jobs.

Now, says Howe, “I definitely want people to think of the Planning Department as an economic development agency.”

But instead of expanding the staff with economists and social analysts that the city audit said were sorely needed, the department’s staff has shrunk by 20% over two years, with half of that occurring since Howe’s arrival. Layoffs of 21 more staff members appear likely later this year.

Howe has been able to fix some, but certainly not all, of the flaws detailed in the 1991 report on the department. He has acquired a few more computers and introduced a less-hierarchical management style. The Kafkaesque signs directing people to rooms that did not exist have been corrected. Most of the dust-covered junk crowding the halls has been removed, although Howe admits he has been unable to get all the peeling walls repainted.

Howe has won widespread praise for being accessible to the public, for focusing on the economic problems of the inner city and for breaking down walls between his department and others.

“He’s doing a great job. He’s come out to the community to meet with us. He realizes planning has to be from the bottom up,” says Juanita Tate, executive director of Concerned Citizens of South Central L.A. “He’s been very successful in realizing we (in South-Central and Southeast Los Angeles) are different (from homeowners groups on the Westside) but that we have to be treated equally.”

Since coming to office, Howe has brought about a minor revolution by initiating weekly meetings with the heads of the Community Redevelopment Agency, the Housing Preservation and Production Department and the Community Development Department. “Planners have to be the glue that holds the other departments together so they go in the same direction,” he says.

In Los Angeles, such cooperation has been rare. The 1991 city study noted, for example, that two years ago, the Planning Department had no ideas on paper for developing the areas around Metro Rail stations.

Says Tate: “His coordination of housing and transportation and community development, that’s never been done. . . . Taking the egos of the white males heading the departments and making them be concerned about minority communities, that’s monumental.”

Some of the first fruits of the new cooperation may lead to Howe’s first major showdown with the City Council. Today, the council is scheduled to vote on the recommendations of this task force on how to distribute $49 million in federal funds the Clinton Administration has earmarked for Los Angeles as part of its $16-billion national economic stimulus package. In the past, that money would have been divided among council districts according to the demands of council members rather than under a cohesive plan for the city as a whole.

This time, the heads of city departments worked out criteria for judging housing and other construction projects proposed for funding, and, along with the mayor’s office and the chief administrator’s office, sifted through $600 million in requests.

What Howe has done--helping choose projects without regard to council district lines--is fulfilling the kind of nonpolitical role the city audit recommended for the planning director. But it will not be easy.

“It’s a role they’re not used to seeing the Planning Department play,” Howe says.

Some council members are upset that the process did not include them. Councilman Mike Hernandez complains that the projects chosen in his district were not the best ones to foster job growth and says that although the task force avoided playing to individual council districts, it instead reflected the interests of the mayor. Councilman Nate Holden is angry that not a single project was recommended for his district.

“(Howe) should have come to us and asked us about what we wanted. Today I’d score him an F,” Holden says.

Unlike some elected officials, Gary Squier, the appointed general manager of the department of Housing Preservation and Production, welcomes Howe’s role. Howe “has been aggressively seeking out relationship and collaborative opportunities. It’s been very refreshing. After the civil disturbances, he’s been the leader of the pack of four (departments),” Squier says.

“He’s good at being a convener. He is mild-mannered and doesn’t try to overpower you,” says Squier of the soft-spoken Pittsburgh native, who is 43. “He’s pragmatic, focusing on what makes sense. He works toward a consensus and is not confrontational.”

For Howe, coordination with other departments is more than idealism. “It’s a survival technique,” he says. Compared with other agencies, the Planning Department lacks money, clout and the power to implement policies.

“The Planning Department has so few tools; basically we only have regulatory power of zoning. If we expect to have our plans implemented, we have to work with other agencies,” Howe says.

Howe points to Wilshire Center as an example of an area where the Planning Department has ideas but needs help from other departments and the private sector. The department is trying to revive a privately developed plan for revitalizing the once-glamorous district, which has lost institutions including Bullocks Wilshire, the Ambassador Hotel and the Sheraton-Town House. “There are many other things (besides zoning) needed to reinvigorate the district that aren’t in the Planning Department’s budget or purview,” says Howe. How much Howe will be able to accomplish depends largely on how much priority the new mayor puts on planning, says William Christopher, coordinator of Plan L.A., a citywide consortium of homeowner and tenant organizations.

Planning issues have gotten short shrift in the mayoral campaign because of voters’ overwhelming concern with crime and public order, and many people would sooner spend dollars on police than planners. But the city’s survival, Christopher insists, depends on seeing that the failure to plan a city with equitable amenities and economic opportunities contributes to crime.

“The issues facing the Planning Department are as important as (those facing the) police: If we lose planners today, we’ll need more police in the future. The lack of planning leads to a situation where you have to have more police.”

Homeowner groups, developers and preservationists generally give Howe high marks for effort and potential but say the recession-slowed pace of development and the budget crisis really have not allowed him to show whether he has the right stuff.

Just what would Howe do if he could?

His vision of Los Angeles is not, as some homeowners feared when they heard a New Yorker was coming to town, a West Coast Manhattan of skycrapers casting shadows over beloved bungalows. Howe, who has settled with his wife and two children in Westwood, considers the strength of Los Angeles its many fine residential neighborhoods--exactly what many natives most value.

What is wrong with Los Angeles, he says, is its deteriorating commercial strips. The city seems ugly to many because the long stretches of mini-malls and characterless stores along its major streets give no hint of the often lovely residential lanes hidden just a block behind, even in poorer parts of the city.

Calvin Hamilton, the city’s head of planning for two decades until the mid-1980s, is remembered for his vision of a city that preserves low-density areas by clustering tall buildings and economic activity in numerous centers, such as Century City and downtown.

If Howe has a vision--and it’s one that is still developing in his mind--it seems to be of vibrant corridors linking those centers now isolated by oceans of undifferentiated sprawl.

In order for this city of tree-lined boulevards, efficient mass transit and thriving street life to emerge from present-day Los Angeles, the city has to realize that it is no longer an adolescent town that can leave planning to chance, Howe says.

“The city has entered a different stage because it’s by and large a built city,” he says. “The issues are reinvesting, transportation and economic development. It’s not a boom town with a lot of raw land. Los Angeles at this point in its history is becoming more like the larger, older cities in the issues it has to face.”

Howe says he is confident that he has the experience and ideas to deal with the city planning issues, even though the decentralized power structure makes implementing them difficult. He says he does not expect to remake the city overnight.

“I see myself in this for the long term. I didn’t expect quick and easy solutions.”