City Council Chooses Huge Developments for Fox Hills, Most Other Neighborhoods Get a Pass
New zoning in Culver City — The vast majority of new density is concentrated in the city's southern tip, the Fox Hills neighborhood.
Culver City has adopted a new General Plan, a vision statement to guide the next 20 years of development and maximize the opportunities our unique city can build upon. The General Plan continues more than a century of suburban American practices dictating where changes to the built environment should and should not occur, and who should be impacted by urban change or not.
On August 26, the city approved the new “General Plan 2045” and introduced an accompanying zoning ordinance to implement it. The final plan represents an effort to plan comprehensively for the needs of the city, its residents, and its business community over the next twenty years, in which the city is expected to welcome more than 11,000 new households and 16,000 new jobs.
How are different neighborhoods impacted?
The approved plan:
Allows housing in commercial areas.
Restricts housing in affluent areas.
Ignores opportunities to maximize development near transit hubs.
Pushes developments into Fox Hills, already the most dense area of our city.
This new zoning plan rezoned Fox Hills to 100 housing units per acre, the highest rate in the city. Already, four new housing projects are in progress that will add more than 2,000 housing units. These four complexes alone would nearly double the population of Fox Hills over the next 3-5 years. A fifth project adding an additional 1,000 housing units is currently in the planning process.
Zoning Fox Hills at the city's highest rate of 100 units per acre, while declining to apply that rate to other potential residential areas, hurts balanced, transit-friendly housing opportunities in Culver City. It singles out Fox Hills as the area obligated to absorb the city's growth.
Why is housing being targeted for Fox Hills and not other areas?
Sixty years of history in Fox Hills are dictating current housing policies. Historically, Fox Hills has been Culver City's most diverse, highest-density, multi-family area, and it is seen as the part of town that can be fully developed without question. It's not a coincidence that until recently, no Fox Hills resident had been elected to the City Council. By enshrining these historical inequities in the new zoning ordinance, we're wasting a chance to create more housing city-wide, including affordable housing.
How are areas affected outside Fox Hills?
Because the city needed to plan for more than 3,000 new homes in eight years, in 2022 a prior City Council passed a housing element with more balanced density increases in every neighborhood.
But the new City Council didn’t carry those changes into the final General Plan. Instead, they reduced residential density in R1 single-family neighborhoods. Specifically, the city decreased the allowed residential floor space, or Floor Area Ratio, from 60% to 45% – a reduction in density of 25% for the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. In addition, the Council rejected a modest upzoning that would have allowed gentle density increases on commercial corridors like Washington and Sepulveda Boulevards that border single family blocks.
City staff explained that reducing density in R1 was only allowed by the state because there were such large density increases in neighborhoods like Fox Hills.
In a 2-3 vote, the City Council rejected Planning Commission recommendations to increase density outside Fox Hills. Only the two Council Members from Fox Hills supported the motion.
In other words, instead of encouraging moderate changes for every Culver City resident and welcoming affordable housing across our city over the next 20 years, the City Council reduced the residential capacity for the most expensive parts of town while dramatically increasing it in the city’s most diverse neighborhood, Fox Hills.
Recognizing the need for affordable housing
The need for more housing in our city is urgent. Development in Culver City’s corridors like Sepulveda, Jefferson, and the Metro E Line are incredible opportunities for building sustainable, practical and attractive housing in Culver City. In past election cycles, candidates spoke in favor of developing these areas, but the zoning approved by City Council prevents significant development near existing transit corridors.
Passing on opportunities to add housing in all areas of Culver City directly contributes to rising housing costs. After all, the lack of affordable housing is the result of too little new housing being added, year after year, deepening a problem that hurts people at all income levels in our city.
With affordable housing out of the reach of so many in our community, including entire generations following the millennials, we’re paying a huge price as a society. Schools depend on new families; by making the costs of having a family unaffordable for many, we’re ensuring decreased enrollments. Local businesses depend on people with disposable income to spend in our stores and restaurants.
The long term goal of Culver City is to have housing that meets the needs of its residents. That includes affordable housing of all types in all areas. Not just Fox Hills.