Prepare an Educated Workforce
Create a Business-Friendly Environment
Enhance our Quality of Life
Implement Smart Land Use
About this goal
Champion: Urban Land Institute Los Angeles
Build 21st Century Infrastructure
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Implement Smart Land Use
Los Angeles County must preserve an adequate supply of jobs-creating land so that current residents and their children will have a place to work and earn a decent living. The population density in the County is among the highest in the nation, placing a premium on the efficient use of the limited supply of land, particularly in urban areas. Smart land use provides adequate space for both employment uses and housing through strategies such as by-right development, infill development, redevelopment, and reuse of obsolete industrial land.
1. Maintain an adequate supply of jobs-creating land.
Create and maintain a database of County-wide, jobs-creating land to facilitate the retention and expansion of local companies as well as the attraction of new companies to the County.
Implement an employment land preservation policy that restricts rezoning of industrially-zoned land to other uses without formal consideration and recognition of: the need for adequate buffering between industrial land and incompatible uses; how and where that industrial land will be replaced elsewhere in the County; whether the proposed change-of-use development will increase land values of surrounding industrial land and/or encroach on nearby viable industries; and whether the new use will produce more high-value jobs than alternative industrial uses.
Make better use of the public sector’s real estate portfolio to facilitate jobs producing projects.
Reserve employment land (existing and vacant) for research and development uses, especially land located near research institutions and universities, using strategies such as creating community land trusts, land banking, and/ or through the creation of business, industrial, manufacturing or research and development zones.
2. Develop and rehabilitate land to meet strategic economic development objectives.
Update general, community and specific plans to enable by-right development and rectify weaknesses in the existing zoning classifications and remedy the reactive, case-by-case, spot zoning approach focused on individual parcels.
Develop, adopt and implement an incentive program to retain commercial and industrial activities and revitalize obsolete industrial land.
Create and promote public/private collaboration programs to facilitate infill development and redevelopment of brownfield sites, underutilized industrial and commercial properties and functionally obsolete buildings.
Collaborate on securing state and federal grants, other public financing vehicles, and tax incentive programs such as the establishment, renewal, implementation, management and/or expansion of Enterprise Zones, Recycling Market Development Zones, Business Improvement Zones, Redevelopment Agencies, as well as other innovative programs that facilitate community development and rehabilitation.
Reform the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) to eliminate abusive uses of the statute for non-environmental purposes, such as an existing business seeking to block competitors.