Space Wars : Parking Is the Prize in Dispute Over Congestion in Miracle Mile

The talk these days on Cloverdale Avenue is about parking--or the lack of it.

Manhattan-like conditions have become a way of life there, and on Cochran Avenue and Detroit Street as well. Early in the morning, bleary-eyed tenants come out of buildings to move their cars, and avoid getting a ticket.

Even so, for the unlucky or the lazy who don’t leave home fast enough, tickets and wheel clamps are common sights in this Miracle Mile area of Los Angeles, north of Wilshire Boulevard.

Some residents say it’s so bad that they think twice before going out. “I don’t want to lose my parking place,” Lynne McQuaker Kavner explains.

Writer Diane Matthews won’t disclose the location of the parking spot she found, behind a local business, because, she says: “The place will be deluged.”

Howard Colburn, an artist, contends most people never get to park in front of their buildings and usually end up two or three blocks away. That makes life a series of little choices, he says, such as what to do with the groceries when you get them home:

Grocery Bag Drill

“Do you park the three blocks away and go back and forth carrying bags?” he asks. “Or double park, run the groceries in for a few minutes and risk a ticket?”

A number of factors have led to the parking crunch, including six large apartment buildings under construction within a few blocks of one another on Detroit and Cloverdale, adjacent neighborhoods being closed off by gates or “permit parking” and the fact that most of the older apartment buildings on those streets dating back to the 1920s and 1930s have few or no parking spaces of their own.

“We’re boxed in,” Colburn said.

Now, several tenants have organized to try to fight yet another group of nearby homeowners who have petitioned the city for a preferential permit parking district, north of 3rd Street.

With the adjacent Park La Brea apartment complex preparing to gate its streets and three other residential permit parking districts already in the area, Colburn, who heads the loose-knit Citizens for Adequate Parking, asks: “Where do we go?”

But residents north of the apartment buildings say they have problems of their own, mostly unrelated to the tenants. Expanding businesses on Beverly Boulevard or La Brea Avenue prompted their request, they say, after employees and valet parkers started using residential streets for parking.

Driveway Blocked

“Our driveway was constantly blocked,” said one resident, Dodee Carroll, who started a petition drive for restricted parking a year and a half ago on Poinsettia Place because of traffic from El Coyote Restaurant. “If we did get in, we couldn’t get out.”

Speech pathologist Jules Getlin on nearby Detroit Street began collecting signatures there to escape vigorous city enforcement of current two-hour parking limits, valet parking from the nearby City Restaurant on La Brea and graphic or auto businesses that store their vehicles on that street.

“I end up parking two or three blocks away,” he says.

Eventually permit parking officials in the city’s Department of Transportation drew the proposed district with boundaries from 3rd Street, Beverly Boulevard, Highland Avenue and Gardner Street. It is likely to come to a City Council vote before the end of the year.

If tenants and homeowners north of 3rd Street, who ended up in a rancorous disagreement over the proposed district in a public hearing last month, agree on anything, it is that neither has enough space. And both blame the city for the lack of planning that has put them in their separate predicaments.

“Uncontrolled growth has gotten a hold of our area,” says Diana Plotkin, a homeowner north of 3rd Street who is president of the Beverly Wilshire Homes Assn. “La Brea has now become one of the ‘in’ places to be, and commercial development is not required to provide adequate parking.”

‘Getting Progressively Worse’

Permit parking is a “dreadful” solution, Carroll said, because it is inconvenient, requiring $15 annual fees per car for residents and $1-a-day permits for guests. “But the area’s getting progressively worse, and this is the only solution offered us.”

Getlin says he sympathizes with the tenants to the south, but blames “overdevelopment” there for their problems and asks: “What do we do? It’s not fair to make us a ghetto of cars.”

Councilman Nate Holden, chairman of the city’s Transportation and Traffic Committee, says permit parking, which parking officials say exists in 27 areas--most in Hollywood and on the Westside--can only be a “quick fix. . . . For the permanent goal, parking structures are the answer.”

But none is in the offing for the Wilshire area.

“These people have suffered tremendously,” says Tom LaBonge, a deputy for Councilman John Ferraro, who represents the area where the apartment dwellers live, noting that permit parking “has a domino effect around the area.”

Residents Complain

To help the tenants somewhat, LaBonge says Ferraro’s office has been prodding the Department of Transportation to relax some local parking restrictions.

This week, Robert Takasaki, transportation engineer for the Hollywood Wilshire district, said the department was preparing to shorten red curb zones in the area, relax parking restrictions on the north side of 6th Street, and open an off-street public lot in the area for nighttime parking by the tenants.

But tenants also complain that the area is rebuilding too fast, with no thought of the existing residents, and they say they have found no official support to address that problem.

“It’s maddening that the city allows six construction sites at one time,” says John Caire, an apartment manager on Cloverdale, because it means parking spaces are lost to lumber, dumpsters, trailers and other equipment.

“The builders have usurped half the residential parking,” Kavner says. “The parking situation which was already bad has now become untenable.”

But as long as a builder meets code requirements, “there’s nothing to prohibit” simultaneous construction projects in a small area, says Russ Lane of the city Department of Building and Safety. A builder “could put up 100” projects at once, Lane says.

Zoning Decisions

Indeed, four more buildings on Cochran and Cloverdale have been sold and appear to be slated for redevelopment, according to information from property records and city officials.

The new construction is the result of zoning and planning decisions made in the 1970s. The city designated the Miracle Mile section a “regional center” and zoned the adjacent neighborhood of apartments for “high medium” residential density, meaning 40 to 60 units per acre.

To some tenants, the parking problems are symptomatic of changes they dislike, and they are not mollified by the fact that the new buildings, under current city regulations, will have parking for their tenants.

“This has changed the character of the neighborhood,” tenant Joe O’Donnell said of the construction. “It’s really sad. It’s one of the great neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a great mix of people.”

Local people say higher rents in the new buildings, evictions because of earthquake upgrading or other renovations have removed many elderly people who were once the staple of the neighborhood. They also often lived alone and had no cars. The tenants taking their places tend to be young, with roommates, each with cars that need parking.

Jeff Fader, owner of 12 older buildings in the area with little or no parking, believes that parking may end up being the determining factor in whether existing landlords sell out to developers. He opposes the proposed permit parking district north of 3rd Street, for example, because his tenants use the area for parking.

“They can’t stay in this confined area,” Fader says. “If I can’t rent my apartments because people can’t park their cars, I go out of business.”