Some developers masters at community consensus.

It looks so prosaic: a two-acre landscaped park with a gazebo, slide, seesaw, swings and a reflecting pool in the Miracle Mile neighborhood.

Yet for developer Jerome H. Snyder, the compromise to add that greenery rather than high-rise condominiums was the key to his winning approval for the $180 million Wilshire Courtyard office complex. The park serves as a buffer between the 1 million-square-foot project and nearby homes.

"Jerry came up with the idea and we quickly said, 'Yeah.' It wasn't anything fancy, but that park has enhanced the quality of life for residents around here," said Lyn MacEwen Cohen, president of the Miracle Mile Civic Coalition, who was at the time president of the residents' association. "His sense of taste gels well with the community. (Residents) make a personal commitment and he does too. He was there at every meeting every step of the way."

Support from nearby residents is essential to many projects, especially in flush economic times when neighbors tend to become more discriminating about the types and sizes of projects they find acceptable.

"In the early '90s, people were more concerned about a job and a mortgage, and they weren't concerned about how big or small a tree is," said Pat Hurst, a principal with the recruiting firm Economic Development Systems. "As the economy has improved and people have more spending power, they have time to get involved (in neighborhood issues)."

Developers are thus forced to build consensus support for their projects - whether it's hiring a consultant or even going door to door.

When Jeff Lee, owner of Marina del Rey-based developer the Lee Group, wanted to build a mixed-use retail project in Venice, he asked neighbors for their input before he designed the $30 million Venice Renaissance project. Then he added a 30-foot-high Jonathan Borofsky ballerina clown sculpture on the project corner to appeal to the neighborhood's artsy contingent.

"When you do urban in-fill development, you've got neighbors who have lived there for many years, and they have pride in their community, so you can't come in with guns ablazing and say, 'We're the new kids on the block and this is what we'll do,'" Lee said.

Snyder's formula for building consensus, which includes meeting with residents one-on-one in their living rooms and taking them out to lunch, worked so well that Miracle Mile resident Cohen testified on Snyder's behalf in Santa Monica for his Water Garden project.

That project, which will consist of 1.26 million square feet of office space once its second phase is complete, wraps around a manmade lake on 17 acres at Olympic Boulevard and 26th Street. Cohen told city officials that the developer listens to the community, and urged approval of the project.

To ensure support, Snyder agreed to give the city of Santa Monica $10 million for traffic improvements. He also set aside about $1 million for a child-care center at the Water Garden, and another $300,000 for the homeless.

Like other developers, Snyder factors the cost of such tradeoffs into his budget, allowing as much as $15 a square foot.

"That's the cost of doing business. Let's face it, some developers look at neighbors as an annoyance, but we're going into their neighborhood," said Snyder. "They have rights and we impact them."

Another master at assuaging hard-to-please homeowners is developer Rick Caruso, who won over skeptics with his retail villages filled with unusual shops, meandering walkways and sculptures. The Commons at Calabasas, a 200,000-square-foot retail center developed by his company, Caruso Affiliated Holdings, received its city approvals in six months and was built in 24 weeks. That contrasts to an earlier proposal for the site that called for a 1 million-square-foot office complex.

"The reason folks didn't support the (earlier) project was that they weren't involved in the design and development," said Mark Persico, director of planning and building services for Calabasas.

Caruso said that people are reasonable 99 percent of the time, so he tries to give them what they want.

"On one of our projects, neighbors were concerned about the kind of trees that would go on the project, so we put them on a bus and drove them to the tree farm to pick out what they liked," he said.

Often, developers seek out the help of consultants who specialize in diffusing conflict at the outset.

Beverly Hills-based Michael Dieden Co., a public affairs firm, worked with Lee to provide elderly housing as a component of the Venice Renaissance project. In return, Lee received the blessing to build his 55-foot-high center, which is 20 feet higher than city codes allow.

"You want a project that people are comfortable with and that reflects the neighborhood fabric, and the only way to do that is to ask," said Michael Dieden.

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