By Dick Platkin : citywatchla – excerpt

PLANNING WATCH – If you still believe that the worsening housing crisis is caused by a housing shortage, and that it can be solved by gutting zoning laws so real estate speculators have a free hand, you should look at LA’s Hollywood neighborhood for a reality check. In Hollywood the rampant construction of new, high-rent, high-rise apartment buildings has totally discredited these planning policies. They have increased housing costs and traffic congestion, forced residents into homelessness, demolished low-priced housing, reduced population and transit ridership, and taxed old infrastructure. Quite a list of trickle-down accomplishments!

The panacea of zoning deregulation, in Hollywood’s case parcel-level entitlements that City Hall reflexively grants to developers, has led to flipping and the construction of expensive apartment towers with high vacancy rates. The imagined benefits of trickle-down planning policies, advanced by ambitious academics, LA Times editorialists and guest columnists, and major city planning departments, has been disproven in Hollywood… (more)