Latest Fashionable Celebrity Cause Could Doom Palisadian Carveout

By JOHN HARLOW | Editor-in-Chief

Sadly for selfie-seekers, Leonardo DiCaprio, Kirsten Dunst and Chris Pine are not expected to attend next week’s critical west LA planning meeting on anti-mansionization matters.

The actors have instead financially backed the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, which is calling for a two-year moratorium on most home building across Los Angeles.

This, critics believe, threatens to undermine the exemption to similar rules that city Councilmember Mike Bonin has wrangled for Pacific Palisades

Anne Russell, a branch manager at Coldwell Banker on Sunset Boulevard, is worried: she is rounding up people who want the freedom to rebuild their homes in traditional fashion to attend the Open House meeting at 5:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 13 at Henry Medina Building, 11214 Exposition Blvd. in west Los Angeles.

“We would like to see a big turnout because if we do not support [the meeting’s discussion about the carveout], it might not happen,” she warned.

Also attending the meeting will be Christine Saponara, the lead planning officer with the city’s Neighborhood Conservation Department.

She is working within the Bonin deal with his fellow councilmembers and hashing out the details, which could reshape thePalisades for generations.

In the invitation to the open meeting, the city laid out the proposed code changes, which may baffle anyone not either a Realtor or a lawyer.

So most Palisadians will understand them, and all are invested.

“There are two new single-family zones proposed for the area of Pacific Palisades outside the coastal zone,” Saponora said. “The zone change from R1-1 to R1V1 is proposed for non-hillside areas and would regulate (restrict the redeveloped) floor area to between 55 percent and 65 percent of a lot.

“The zone change from R1-1—often referred to in the hillside areas as the Baseline Hillside Ordinance, or BHO—to R1H1 is proposed for hillside areas and would regulate floor area to between zero percent and 50 percent, depending on the slope of the lot.

“Both zones would allow flexibility in locating a new second story above the first floor.

“These proposed new single-family homes will supersede the existing R1-1—or forthcoming BMO/BHO citywide regulations due to come into law next March—for a more tailored zoning solution to preserve neighborhood character,” Saponara said.

But the pro-development forces in the Palisades—largely the 200 Realtors who work in the area, builders and homeowners in areas such as the Huntington—fear these proposed rule changes could be challenged at the meeting by development skeptics.

They tend to be based in the Alphabet Streets, where older residents have become weary of constant rebuilding despite the financial boost to their own homes such work creates, and Marquez Knolls, where single-story dwelling owners fret such rules would allow incomers to build in front of their lot and block priceless Pacific Ocean views.

In the Knolls, these concerns have been given voice by Pacific Palisades Community Council candidate Peter Zomber and his wife, Cheryl Zomber.

As a lawyer, Peter knows there is no legal right to a view, but argued that many in the Knolls deserve an exemption from the Palisadian exemption in the bigger quest for preserving neighborhood identity. In other words, planning restrictions more in line with what is expected to become law across LA in March.

City officials say there is room within the exemption for a handful of tougher and less rigorous restrictions, but they cannot “drill down” to make block-by-block code rulings—that way lays bureaucratic madness, they warn, a tradition of strange often-contradictory city building codes dating back to the 1940s they are trying to unpack.

The Palisades, which was trying to keep its head low while working out its own hyper-local issues, now finds itself in the spotlight of the wider debate over anti-mansionization policies in LA.

Last month the Neighborhood Integrity Initiative, which is expected to be keeping close tabs on next Tuesday’s meeting, submitted a petition to the City Clerk’s office signed by more than 100,000 people.

That will put their anti-development measure on next March’s local referendum ballot.

They will ask voters to freeze all proposed home and business developments that need a code exemption for two years.

It is aimed at McMansions and “mega-developments,” and is supported by celebrities such as Dunst, DiCaprio—who lives in a sprawling modern home in the Bird Streets above Sunset Boulevard—Chloe Sevigny, Garret Hedlund and Joaquin Phoenix.

Our neighbors at the Brentwood Hills Homeowners Association appear more allied to the Marquez Knolls view than the general Palisadian consensus.

They say it’s the only way forward to create a greener, cleaner Los Angeles.

Critics, however, warn, in more pedestrian tones, that in reality it will block every new development in LA, whether it be a spec house or a hospital extension.

That is because nearly every building development in LA needs some kind of exemption to current building codes.

The city is trying to update the codes so these time-wasting and expensive exemptions become obsolete but admitted that work will not be completed before 2026.

This broad-brush ballot initiative may not pass: a poll, admittedly paid for by developers, said only 37 percent of prospective voters support the initiative, with 44 percent opposing. This would represent a sea change from April, when other polls suggested two-thirds supported it.

The big question is how such an initiative would affect the Palisadian carveout.

And the big answer?

There is not a consensus—some feel it would be trumped by the carveout, others that it wipes it away. The consequences for either are troubling.

Maybe it will all become clearer at the meeting.