Good Neighbor Policy : Developers Turn Adversaries Into Allies by Involving Residents in ‘Consensus Planning’

Developer Jerome H. Snyder wanted to build an office project in Santa Monica a few years ago--the biggest development of its kind in the area.

The Water Garden would wrap 1.26 million square feet of high-rise offices around a man-made lake on 17 acres at Olympic Boulevard and 26th Street.

Residents near the site objected angrily to Snyder’s plans, fearing a glut of traffic, among other negative impacts.

Snyder, a Los Angeles-based developer who has been building in California for 40 years, knew he would have to get the neighbors firmly on his side before he could even consider asking City Hall for approval.

To turn his adversaries into allies, Snyder used what is called “consensus planning,” an approach used increasingly by commercial and residential builders who have learned the hard way that community support is vital, and that just one angry resident can delay or even block a project.

In consensus planning, a variety of strategies and tactics are employed to make the neighbors an early and important part of the planning for a project. A successful consensus effort results in the neighbors’ enthusiastic support for a building or a builder.

“The notion of a developer coming into a community saying, ‘I’m going to do this,’ those days are over forever,” said Rex Lotery, a UCLA architecture professor and head of a firm that provides planning services to private clients.

The goal of consensus planning, no matter what the project, is to “establish dialogue and identify issues . . . and work those issues through,” Lotery said. “The bottom line is resolution of these issues.”

Richard Peiser, who teaches the politics of development at USC, said, “It’s pretty much an article of faith now that a developer has to work with the community during the (government approval) process, rather than hoping they won’t become involved.”

Peiser, an associate professor of urban and regional planning and director of USC’s Lusk Center for Real Estate, said that nowadays most developers won’t commit substantial money to a project until they’re nearly certain they can get permission to break ground.

Once community groups step in, they often sue, Peiser said, and the litigation slows the approval process, driving up the cost of financing. Sometimes developers are forced to drop out and move on.

A smart developer, Peiser said, will meet with community and homeowner groups before becoming committed to a project.

Snyder, for instance, met with foes of The Water Garden, a crucial part of his consensus planning strategy.

“I went to a hearing at a school, and there was this guy--he was almost screaming,” Snyder said. “He got everybody worked up to a fever pitch. He was fabulous. . . .

“We found out who he was and asked him to have lunch. I looked at him. He wasn’t so bad. He looked at me. I wasn’t so bad. He had some ideas that made sense. He wanted to be involved in the process.”

Snyder eventually asked the man to lead a neighborhood traffic study group.

“We formed a committee of the most anti-development people who wanted to be heard” and put them together with the project’s engineers, Snyder said.

The committee came up with ways to ease the impact of the traffic, including widening existing streets and installing computerized signals.

Placing opponents of a project in leadership roles is another key step in building consensus.

“Instead of saying they’re against the project,” Snyder said, “they said if they can control the project, they would support it.”

To further ensure their support, the developer agreed to give Santa Monica $10 million for traffic improvements and arranged it so that the money would be spent in the neighborhood--not elsewhere in the city, which the residents had feared would happen.

Snyder also agreed to set aside about $1 million for a child-care center at The Water Garden, another $300,000 for services for the homeless, and he also created a job bank to give neighborhood residents a crack at jobs with the companies who will lease the new offices.

It will cost him a total of $14 million in city fees to complete the project.

Snyder, like most other builders, figures the cost of such trade-offs into each project’s budget, allowing as much as $15 a square foot for the “mitigations” or “exactions” as the developers call them. Winning consensus is “a cost of doing business” today, Snyder said.

“The fact is, we impact the neighborhoods . . . and these neighborhood associations have become very sophisticated. They want to be part of the process. They know what to ask for. They know how to get it done.”

Added UCLA’s Lotery:

“The community movement is very strong. The process now automatically includes . . . the community. It’s very time-consuming, but developers today recognize they’re in it for the long haul.”

Home builder Jack Shine, who has been building American Beauty homes for more than 20 years in the Santa Clarita and San Fernando valleys, uses consensus planning to help build support for his new tracts and speaks on the issue at home builders’ meetings.

Shine said: “We have to educate people in the communities where we build (and) convince them that we are not the problem, that we can be the solution; convince them that what we’re building is good, tell them how it benefits them.”

A willingness to hear what residents say they want and to compromise are the most important elements of consensus planning, said Shine’s daughter, Robin Shine Ackerman, who works as a consensus planner and community liaison officer for her father.

“When you listen to what they’re saying, you can boil it down to a few key issues that recur,” Ackerman said. “We do it a little differently each time. Each piece of land has its own unique problems.”

No matter what the project, she said, “there is going to be a negotiation. There will be concessions made.”

Shine and Snyder, along with Wayne Ratkovich, founder of the Ratkovich Co., and Nelson Rising, senior partner in Maguire Thomas Partners, are among the more prominent Southland developers who have made consensus planning work for them.

More on these developers’ uses of, and views on, consensus planning, and the consultants who help them, in the following stories.

Public Park Built to Buffer Homes

* Wilshire Courtyard: Partners meet personally with neighborhood associations and add amenities to project to win favor with renter and homeowner groups.

Jerry Snyder and his partner, Milton Swimmer, do much of their company’s one-on-one consensus-building work themselves over breakfast, lunch, dinner or tea while meeting with homeowner and renter groups.

“When we get involved with these neighborhood associations, I think they want to speak to my partner and myself,” Snyder said. “If I send a hired gun out there, a public relations man or somebody, they’re gonna say, ‘Big deal.’

“When politicians run for office, they knock on doors themselves, don’t they?”

When Snyder built Wilshire Courtyard, a 1 million-square-foot low-rise office complex in the Miracle Mile area in Los Angeles, he limited the project to six stories and promised to exclude movie theaters and nightclubs in deference to residents who lived near the site.

He also built a public park as a buffer between the project and nearby homes and won over Miracle Mile Residents Assn. leader Lynn Cohen, who later testified for Snyder in Santa Monica. Cohen told city officials that the developer listens to the community and urged approval for The Water Garden.

In response to community pressure for “low-low cost” housing in Venice, Snyder has agreed that 120 of the 600 units in the four-story apartment complex he will build will be designated low-cost housing for 40 years. And in response to concerns about safety, he will also manage the buildings and provide extra security. “We’ll make sure it works,” he said.

To help get a community consensus for another office project in Venice, Snyder said he will set aside parking on weekends for beach shuttle parking. He’ll also help set up the shuttle service.

A few years ago Snyder and Swimmer hired Susan Fisk, a former Washington public advocacy expert, to help coordinate the company’s consensus planning. They also use consultants to devise effective strategies.

Snyder said he always approaches a project ready to consider the community’s needs and prepared to develop a plan for winning consensus.

“After starting off with an adversarial position (on Wilshire Courtyard), the park was the thing the neighbors wanted. . . . We built it. We maintain it. That was my key. . . . I walked into the city of Los Angeles with the whole neighborhood behind me.”

Snyder said he first tried consensus planning in the early 1970s.

“Along Beverly Glen, I wanted to build 800 houses in the early ‘70s. A lawsuit was filed by a neighborhood group. It was a mess.

“I met with the head guy, a writer with a beard. Absolutely anti . We had a few meetings. I realized that, in fact, the development was way too dense. We cut it way back. We made his group party to an agreement. A councilman acted as a moderator, which made him hero.

“And we cut the shopping center down and we had a better development.”

Snyder prefers to build community support for his projects by meeting with small groups.

“I find that if I go into somebody’s home and there’s eight people, I’m going to be a lot better received than when I’m in a hall with 30 people. One person who starts to scream can set off the whole tone. So, I go into somebody’s home, I’m going to present my development. There’s cookies, people are very nice. Somebody gets out of line, somebody says, ‘After all, Jerry is our guest.’ ”

“People know there’s going to be development,” Snyder said. “‘They’d like to keep it as little as possible, and they’d like to have something to say about it . . . and we recognize that.”

Developer Enlists Community Aid

* Wilshire Center area: Representatives of city government and citizens coalition combine efforts to draw up fragile agreement to revitalize neighborhood.

Los Angeles-based Wayne Ratkovich has developed a reputation as a preservationist who likes to keep a mix of foot traffic and retail outlets in projects he builds.

A prime mover behind the effort to revitalize the Wilshire Center area, Ratkovich led an innovative consensus planning effort that included representatives of city government and a citizens coalition in every step of the process.

The result, The Wilshire Center Study, completed in August, 1989, is a framework for development that takes into consideration every aspect of its impact on the central city.

“There was no precedent for this consensus planning approach. I was nervous at first,” Ratkovich said recently.

“It was a very fragile agreement. But we decided very soon that we wanted to improve the quality of life in the area. That was our common bond. Once we had that common tie, it was quite easy; none of us wanted this agreement to blow up.”

Ratkovich uses a number of consultants to help him build community support for his projects, including the Wiltern Theatre and Chapman Market restorations.

Three years ago, as he laid the groundwork for a mammoth Long Beach project called The Pike, a 15-year, $1-billion commercial, retail and residential development, he hired consensus planner Sharon Browning, a former clinical psychologist, to conduct personal interviews and identify community concerns and neighborhood leaders.

Ratkovich also hired Casey & Sayre, a Malibu-based public and governmental relations firm that specializes in real estate clients, to mount a get-out-the-vote campaign in Long Beach to get signatures on petitions backing The Pike.

The company identified individuals willing to testify favorably at state Coastal Commission hearings and even offered to drive them there. It also created a variety of promotional materials, including a newsletter to build support for the project in the business community.

Although some community groups have tried unsuccessfully to block the project with lawsuits, Ratkovich’s plan has been approved by the city of Long Beach and the California Coastal Commission.

Ratkovich links consensus planning to his company’s overall market strategy.

“We’re (using consensus planning) now in San Clemente, and we’ll do it most every place we go,” he said. “The developer is there to serve the community. If he serves it correctly, he will make a profit. . . .

“It takes some of us a little bit longer to get over the notion that our development rights, our property rights are supreme, that . . . if we want to build a hotel or a shopping center that drowns a neighborhood in traffic, that’s their problem, not ours.”

Ratkovich said consensus planning helps developers work more effectively in an increasingly litigious environment.

“We go into a community and we try to find a constituency we can serve,” he said. “We’ve always felt that if we didn’t have a constituency for our development, that people didn’t want it, there’s no point forcing it on them.”

“If you search for what they really want and need, and you can figure out a way to provide it, he said, “they’re not anti-development, they’re not anti-profit, they’re not ‘anti’ anything. They’ll be supportive of you.

“We’re learning how to build good, sensitive, humane cities in a free-market economy,” he said. “That takes a little learning. We try to build things that integrate well into what’s already there.”

Partner Returns All Phone Calls

* Playa Vista: Developer is trying to win over community that resisted development by listening to the neighborhood leaders and boiling down their objections to two main issues.

Nelson C. Rising, senior partner in charge of Maguire Thomas Partners’ development of Playa Vista, a 900-acre residential, retail and commercial project just south of Marina del Rey, is using consensus planning techniques to try to win over the same community groups who shot down earlier plans for the area.

A 1986 attempt by Howard Hughes Properties to develop Playa Vista was denounced by some opponents as a “rotten, stinking sellout of community interests.”

Said Rising:

“A lot of the things we now have to do as developers in California are because a generation or two ago, developers did pretty much what they wanted. The result has led to things people aren’t terribly pleased with.”

Community resistance to the 1986 proposal boiled down to two basic objections: the project had too much traffic-generating commercial development and it was crudely planned.

Reduced height of planned high-rises, more residential space and less commercial, an on-site nature center and a plan to preserve waterfowl and fish are part of the compromise that Rising has been negotiating to win community consensus for Playa Vista.

There are environmental issues, he acknowledged, “that we as responsible developers, responsible citizens should be concerned about. . . . It’s a very good way to do business, to find out what people think.

“If the people around a project aren’t pleased by what we’re going to do, then maybe, just maybe, the tenants we have won’t be pleased either,” he said.

A former corporate lawyer, Rising has been meeting for months with community, environmental and business groups to negotiate on issues stalling the project, including preservation of bluffs and wetlands on and near the site.

Consensus planning takes time, as the Playa Vista project demonstrates. Rising said his company planned to spend two years just planning the project and building community support before seeking permission to build.

Rising said he returns every phone call and answers each written inquiry from community and neighborhood groups, environmentalists and others as he works to build community consensus for the project.

Maguire Thomas also hired Casey & Sayre to help build community support for the project.

Casey & Sayre vice president Sidney Knott said the firm has built a mailing list for McGuire Thomas of 25,000 names, including residents of Westchester, Marina del Rey and Playa del Rey, and produces a direct-mail newsletter on the project.

The firm has also used a variety of other communications tools to encourage community and environmental groups to “tell us what you don’t like” about the project’s preliminary plans, Knott said.

Obtaining “measurable support in writing” for the project and “developing a public/private partnership” to be used in its execution are the dual goals of Casey & Sayre’s consensus planning service.

“City officials really can only support or deny a project based on a public consensus,” Knott said.

“It’s a political reality of today. In the last five years, it’s been harder and harder for developers to get their projects through. Government now says before we’ll take a position, show us you can get community support.”

And, she said, developers realize that “bad feelings will impact the viability of a project. You’ve got to get people to lease the space.”

Said Rising:

“Development in . . . Southern California requires a community consensus. We are in an era where people are concerned about what’s going on around them. They are interested in finding out what is going to happen.”

“We know we can’t please everybody because the community doesn’t agree on every issue, but there’s a real desire on our part . . . to come up with a workable solution.”

Smaller Tract, Bigger Homes

* Valley sites: Father and daughter team helps eliminate conflict between the developer and the community, and between the community and local government.

Jack Shine of American Beauty Homes, who builds homes in the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, hired a former New York political organizer--his daughter, Robin Shine Ackerman--to work full time for the company a few years ago to develop consensus with community and neighborhood groups.

As part of the consensus-building effort for one development, Shine has agreed to reduce the size of a tract and enlarge the size of some homes in response to community concerns about altering the rural life style of the area.

“We build consensus and then we go before the government agencies for approval,” Ackerman said. “We do it because it’s worked for us so far. It just seems like the right thing to do.”

Home builders face their own consensus planning challenge: persuading suburban residents that increasing density is not a bad thing.

Shine and Ackerman say that properly conducted consensus planning can eliminate a lot of conflict between the developer and the community, and between the community and local government.

“Basically, government doesn’t want to deal with controversy--they shouldn’t have to,” Shine said. “We go to the community and it’s amazing how much discussion is generated. Many times people have legitimate concerns: water, sewers, traffic--construction traffic.”

“People want their quality of life to remain intact,” Shine said. “They understand more people get born and have to have places to live, but they don’t want them living near them. Everybody wants everybody to go elsewhere. They want the problems taken care of by someone else.”

In the Santa Clarita Valley, Shine and Ackerman said they have knocked on doors to seek support for a project.

After writing to homeowners describing their plan to canvass the neighborhood, five two-person teams visited 531 homes to ask residents to support a new tract.

Shine said he and his assistants used brochures to help them explain to homeowners what they planned to do. “They were surprised and pleased we would take the trouble, that we cared enough to ask them their opinion,” he said.

The outcome of the door-to-door effort: 110 signed letters of support.

Shine said he or Ackerman usually meet with all the appropriate organized community groups when he works on consensus planning for a project, but he always seeks out the important “silent majority,” too.

He has found that people who don’t belong to groups do respond positively to plans for a new project if given the chance.

The key to effective consensus planning, Shine said, is one word: communication.

“Open a dialogue,” he advises Southland developers and others, and have faith in the process.

“If you listen, and people are talking to us logically, we can figure out a way to alleviate the problem or significantly alleviate the impact of it. If you make a good-faith effort, fundamentally, people are fair-minded.”

Helped Relocate Trailer Residents

* Huntington Beach: Ex-lawyer utilizes consensus planning techniques and has attitude of willingness to negotiate on $350-million hotel resort.

Robert Mayer Corp. of Newport Beach is building a $350-million hotel “resort destination” complex overlooking the ocean in Huntington Beach. Mayer Executive Director Steve Bone, a former international copyright lawyer, came to real estate development only a few years ago, already aware of the value of consensus planning.

“I came with the point of view that I was prepared to negotiate,” he said. “The days are over for developers of larger projects or even neighborhood projects to do things without acknowledging the ill affects of development.”

A case in point:

During preliminary preparation for Mayer’s luxury hotel project, media reports described in detail the impending ouster of about 200 elderly residents of a trailer park located on the project site.

The situation presented a classic consensus planning challenge. Bone spent a year working out a deal with the residents individually, and a public relations firm generated high-profile publicity for the compromise, hoping to ensure City Council support for the project.

Approval was unanimous.

Even more attention to consensus planning at the outset might have eliminated the dispute, said Donna Hahn of InterCommunications Inc. of Newport Beach, the firm hired to help resolve it.

“The developer really needs to analyze the negatives and prepare for it,” Hahn said. “Why not bring (consultants) in on the ground floor so they can have the facts to tell the client the good, the bad and the ugly, to identify sensitivities in the community.”

Bone said he approaches his consensus planning efforts as an outsider, just as he approached his international copyright work. He tries to understand each community’s customs and procedures, and works to learn how decisions are made.

“How you present your facts and to whom you choose to present them” are key factors in building consensus for a project, Bone said. “You need different ways to get a point across. You need to adapt.”

With the hotel project, he applied his own touch to standard consensus-planning techniques, hosting a cocktail party for 600 as a forum for exposing “the facts of the project” to the community.

And, Bone said, in an effort to develop community consensus, he asked local officials not to come to the party.

“We wanted their constituencies to go back to them and tell them what they thought about the project rather than the reverse,” he said.

Consulting Firm Identifies Players

* Paper Chase: Specialist provides developers with reports that identify who the ‘players’ are in the community and suggests what trade-offs are needed for their support.

Sharon Browning is a former clinical social worker and public affairs specialist who runs a Pacific Palisades-based consulting firm that provides reports that she calls “community ascertainments” to developer clients. The reports identify community leaders and groups and help find ways to involve them in the governmental approval process.

The ascertainments, which may resemble a classic case study, provide information on who the “players” are in a community, what their agendas are, and even what trade-offs might be offered in exchange for their support.

Her clients have included the Irvine Co., Leisure Technology, Johnson Wax Development Co., Loyola Marymount University, St. Vincent Medical Center and the Ratkovich Co.

Ratkovich hired Browning three years ago to lay the groundwork for his $1-billion, 15-year development project in Long Beach, The Pike.

While some developers, including Snyder and Rising, say they prefer to collect some of their community-based consensus planning research directly from community leaders themselves--”unfiltered” by a consultant--Ratkovich appreciates Browning’s local interview approach.

“We used Sharon to give us a lot of information at the beginning of the process,” he said.

Along with a “community ascertainment” study, Browning may also provide a developer with a blueprint for action, with strategies and techniques for approaching areas of disagreement and suggesting areas of compromise.

Browning said her method is direct. She meets with opponents of development and asks them “straight out how they handled previous issues they were concerned about, what worked, what didn’t work. And you’re always straight, always open, always honest.”

In the city of Orange, she devised a consensus planning strategy that helped the Irvine Co. proceed with plans for Irvine Park, a business park that threatened to disrupt a heron rookery.

Browning worked with Sea & Sage Audubon, a conservation group, and the developer to adjust the development parcel to preserve the birds, to set aside 5,300 acres for a regional park and to save a grove of oak that would have been uprooted by the project.

Firm Works for Win-Win Projects

* Consultants: Partners ease conflict at the outset by looking for a range of things the developer can provide, such as elder housing, in exchange for community support.

Julie Gertler and Barbara Meyer, the two founders of Consensus Planning Group, a North Hollywood-based consultancy, came to their new field several years ago after working for years in community groups themselves.

They figured there was a better way for developers and community groups to resolve their differences than “each side beating the other over the head,” said Julie Gertler, who was a field deputy to Los Angeles City Councilwoman Joy Picus in the mid-1980s.

The process of building consensus is loaded with opportunities for acrimony, Gertler said.

“Citizens have a goal; city staff, elected officials and developers have their own goals, and everybody comes in with their own expectations. . . . They get frustrated, and frustration leads to conflict.”

To help ease conflict at the outset, Gertler said she looks for a range of things the developer can provide in exchange for community support. In an area where elderly housing is involved, a gang-reduction project or a security training project can help develop “a win-win down the way,” she said.

Gertler and her associates work with key community groups and elected officials so that a project will end up “reflecting what people are comfortable with.”

She said developers use consensus planning because they know it’s the way “to make their projects happen.”

“The best case,” she said, “is where (consensus planners) are brought in early enough so we create a climate where conflict doesn’t exist. It’s good for business to avoid polarization. That makes it more difficult to get approval for a project.”

Gertler and her staff also look for ways to smooth wrinkles in the governmental approval process and deliver to developers the community support they need.

The ability to bridge the gap between a developer’s business goals and a community’s needs is the key to success for consensus planners.

“Communities have gotten smarter,” said Peiser of USC. “They know the difference between good development and bad.”