The Unintended Inevitable: How Housing Fell through the Cracks in Venice Beach's Transition to Community Planning, and What It Might Take to Build an Imagination for the Future

Abstract

Today, U.S. cities large and small are grappling with housing shortages and pressure from property owners to limit development and adopt policies allowing few to no changes in their neighborhoods. Studies showing the disproportionate impact property owners have on local housing policies also provide evidence that these influences have severely impeded housing production over time. Unless changes are made, they will continue to do so, leaving an increasing number of U.S. cities with a worsening housing shortage.

This thesis studies the community planning that took place in Venice in the late 1960s and early 1970s, reflecting the deleterious effects of a hyper-local planning focus on both current and future residents. Using archival research methods and a liberatory memory framework, I attempted to trace the dynamics underlying and surfacing during Venice Beach’s community planning process in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when concerns about unregulated development and a community planning process deemed inadequate by almost all stakeholders shaped a community plan allowing little growth or change. A set of secondary sources informed my understanding of the agency community groups and leaders believed they had to influence this community planning process and track the cumulative effects of local municipalities enacting slow growth land use policy. This analysis showed that traditional planning processes, many of which have been in use for decades, privilege the sentiments of socially and economically dominant community voices. A regional approach to housing production can address the inequities produced by this dynamic — by widening our lens to think about what happens when most neighborhoods or cities in a region reject new housing production, issues with parochial planning are exposed. Efforts to set regional goals for housing and a regulatory structure to ensure those within a region contribute to it offer path toward addressing housing shortages. However, as we widen that lens beyond the loudest voices in the room, I believe we need to be vigilant not to lose the voices of the communities that have historically been marginalized by these processes and who resist oppression and plan for the future on their own terms.