Planning official looked at L.A. and decided to take a bite of Big Apple.

WHEN Con Howe took over L.A.'s planning department more than a decade ago, the city was segregated into a vast patchwork of communities walled off for specific purposes.

Housing could only be built on residential blocks, malls contained in commercial zones and manufacturing confined to industrial areas--with relatively little bleeding in between.

"There had always been a presumption in L.A. that you wouldn't, or shouldn't, build housing in commercial zones," said Howe, now the director of the Urban Land Institute's Center for the West.

Still, Howe held an unconventional view that Los Angeles wasn't dissimilar to New York, where he had been a city planner for nearly 20 years. Outside Manhattan, the two cities were similar physically and in infrastructure--and even more alike when it came to economic, ethnic and racial characteristics.

Regulatory barriers

The only difference, Howe believed, was that New York and other East Coast cities had allowed neighborhoods to be diverse in uses and interconnected, while L.A. had thrown up regulatory barriers, sometimes unwittingly.

But public sentiment was changing. When the city began debating who would take over the planning department in 1991, discussions centered on developing housing along the city's commercial corridors.

Howe embraced the vision and began looking through the city's building codes and zoning ordinances to see what needed to be changed. "The city had been talking about mixed use for quite a while," he said, "but all our policies and our framework didn't support that vision."

The city's codes were streamlined and commercial land re-zoned to allow residential development. Owners of empty office buildings were given the right under the so-called Adaptive Reuse Ordinance to convert the structures into apartments--breathing life into buildings that had been without tenants for decades.

L.A. allowed developers to build more units in return for building projects near mass transit and including affordable housing.

Peter Well worked with Howe for seven years on the city's planning commission, many of those years as the board's president, and he credits the former planning director for L.A.'s recent success at encouraging mixed-use development.

"During my tenure, Con flawlessly ran the department through a period of dynamic change in the city," Weil said. "All through these positive, but sometimes tumultuous, changes, Con was a committed professional and a true gentleman. He navigated the politics of the building of the city, without becoming political."

The planning department targeted vast stretches of commercial thoroughfares like Wilshire and Ventura boulevards and Vermont Avenue that could handle the increased density and were riddled with low-rise retail.

Taking advantage

"Think about the way Los Angeles is laid out and you realize it's a city that's crisscrossed by hundreds of miles of commercial corridors," Howe said. "There's not enough retail activity in the world to keep those corridors active and fully vibrant."

It didn't take long for developers to take advantage of the changes. Within five years the pattern of development in Los Angeles had been irrevocably altered.

In 2000, the year after Adaptive Reuse went into effect, just roughly 21 percent of housing permits were for commercial areas. Last year, nearly a majority of new housing permits were for projects in commercial zones.

Howe believes the trend will only continue to accelerate, especially if land prices keep rising sharply.

"I think it's an evolutionary process and I don't see any negatives at the moment or on the horizon," he said. "Wherever you see land values are very high, you'll see more intense use of land with more combinations of uses."

Without Howe's leadership and vision, Weil believes it would have been nearly impossible for the current housing renaissance in downtown and Hollywood to take place. "It's an impressive story of achievement that deserves to be told," he said.

Visionary Con Howe

Born: St. Louis, 1949

Position: Director, Urban Land Institute's Center for the West

Accomplishments: As L.A.'s Director of Planning from 1992-2005, he was instrumental in stream lining development, helping spur mixed-use and guiding L.A. redevelopment after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake.

Quote: "My attitude has always been if you can get the market to build according to your plans, then you get out of the way--the faster the better."

ANDY FIXMER Staff Reporter