Can ULI Unite Warring Communities and Developers?

Gail Goldberg is the executive director for the Urban Land Institute.

LOS ANGELES—Los Angeles communities and developers are at odds over city growth, and a new community-driven ballot measure aimed at halting the “mega” developments in Los Angeles, is pushing the issue. While the two groups are at odds, the Urban Land Institute says that the real issue is a flawed master plan and the absence of an approval process. The planning group has stepped in to find a solution to the problem, and its first course of action is to bring the two sides together to agree: the current system is shot.

Before ULI can begin to find a solution, though, it needed to identify the major problems. “People have to understand that there is not just one problem but there is a set of problems that need to be solved if we are going to have a predictable planning process,” Gail Goldberg, executive director of the Urban Land Institute Los Angeles, tells GlobeSt.com. “For ULI, before we started to talk about the solutions, we decided first to make a clear statement about our belief that we need a comprehensive planning process in Los Angeles to set a vision for the future of the city, and we need city plans to establish predictability. The process is broken and it doesn’t work for anyone.