Unfinished wetlands from Playa Vista pact capture the promise, perils of California housing

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On the far western edge of Los Angeles, Ruth Galanter parked her car in Playa Vista and walked across Lincoln Boulevard. For the former LA city councilwoman, this boundary divides her long history of service to her district and the city.

On one side is a historic achievement, one that represents the possibility of growth and progress — on the other, hundreds of acres of land trapped in an exasperating standoff.

Behind Galanter as she crossed Lincoln was Playa Vista, a community that took decades to conceive, debate and construct and now serves as home to more than 10,000 people. It’s an extraordinary accomplishment in a city where housing is notoriously difficult to create and urgently needed.

Before her was a scrubby patch of marsh, land that was hard-won during the fight over Playa Vista but remains unrestored. This sort of coastal marsh is in alarmingly short supply in California, but here is being blocked, paradoxically, by those who call themselves environmentalists.

The work to create Playa Vista was an epic contest of California politics, and its current state says much about how that process works — and doesn’t. It pitted environmentalists against developers. It pulled in four mayors and a famously eccentric billionaire. It was fought in courtrooms and at the ballot box.

The story of Playa Vista is one of opposing priorities, deeply felt in Los Angeles and in many parts of California. This is a state where environmental concerns are taken seriously — where coastal protection and air quality rules are defining features of California’s modern history. But it’s also a state where the shortage of housing is contributing to skyrocketing costs of living and to chronic and widespread homelessness .

Perhaps most of all, Playa Vista offers a reminder of a principle once hailed in American politics and lately viewed with suspicion: Playa Vista was forged through compromise, overcoming a bewildering series of challenges and digressions.

Yet the equal unwillingness to compromise explains why the restoration of the wetlands remains incomplete decades later.

Degraded wetlands

Playa Vista and the adjoining wetlands are located on a stretch of land along the California coast, a few miles north of LAX, just south of the enormous apartment and harbor complex Marina del Rey.

For a millennia, Ballona Creek flowed through this property as it meandered its way to the ocean. Where the creek met the sea, the confluence of fresh and salt water formed a marsh.

Then oil was discovered, and the story of this area quickly turned to one of environmental degradation. In the 1920s, hundreds of wells punctured the marshes and the land around them. In the 1930s, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers forced the creek into a concrete channel, which prevented flooding but also deprived the marsh of water, drying out land that once provided habitat for waterfowl and spongy turf that absorbed storm surges.

In the 1940s, business magnate Howard Hughes built and tested airplanes at a facility that stretched from Culver City to the coast. But then came the biggest blow of all: When developers built Marina del Rey in the 1960s, they dumped roughly 3 million cubic yards of mud on top of the marsh, elevating it well above sea level and out of reach of tidal influence. This was before the state’s landmark coastal protection laws were enacted by Gov. Jerry Brown.

The wetlands, which cover nearly 600 acres, today are owned by the state and protected as an ecological reserve, but they still bear scars from decades of mistreatment. In 2017, the California Fish and Wildlife Department released an exhaustive environmental analysis of the land and concluded that it is “among the most degraded wetlands in California.”

The agency developed a plan to “restore ecological functions and services within the Ballona Reserve, in part by increasing tidal influence to achieve predominantly estuarine wetland conditions.” To achieve that, the report recommended scooping out the mud deposited during the Marina del Rey project and using it to build levees around the wetland.

That would lower the land closer to sea level. The report also recommended installing culverts in the channel that would allow tidal water to flood the area. It would be expensive and take years, but it would create hundreds of acres of coastal wetlands.

You might think that would please the environmentalists who have clamored to protect this property, but you’d be wrong.

‘Restoration by the teaspoon’

At a public hearing last month, critics pleaded with Fish and Wildlife to scale back the restoration plan . Longtime Playa Vista critic Marcia Hanscom and several others called for a “gentle approach to land management.”

The environmental project would require heavy equipment. That’s offensive to opponents. To them, bulldozers symbolize the harm of past eras.

No bulldozers in the wetlands, they insist. “Please allow Mother Earth to heal herself,” another speaker commented.

The problem is that Mother Earth cannot restore the wetland, precisely because it was so badly degraded by previous acts of violence against her. The concrete channel won’t open itself, nor will the 3 million cubic feet of mud relocate to Marina del Rey. That requires bulldozers.

Galanter dismisses the “gentle approach” as “restoration by the teaspoon.”

Hanscom retorts that so much time has passed that the restoration envisioned by state officials would disrupt the existing environment in the reserve. New birds and butterflies, some of them endangered, have made their homes in the raised areas created by the dredge fill from the 1960s.

“These species are part of the ecosystem,” Hanscom said at the hearing.

She’s right, but that reflects a highly revisionist view of environmental restoration. Indeed, it’s a powerful case for doing nothing at all. Imagine if a plane crashed in Yosemite Valley, and nature persisted around the wreckage. By this reasoning, it would remain there, impeding the land’s previous path.

The damage caused by the construction of Marina del Rey was far more profound than any plane crash.

Galanter has been at the forefront of protecting the Ballona wetland for decades, and she’s had it with Hanscom. Galanter sees this round of objections as performative, a chance to keep organizing and fundraising for lawsuits long after the time for fighting has passed.

She calls Hanscom “a skilled liar.” Hanscom says Galanter “is so bitter.”

The science is with Galanter. The vast majority of experts and environmental groups support the restoration as envisioned by state Fish and Wildlife. But it only takes one party to file a lawsuit, and the California Environmental Quality Act makes it easy for plaintiffs to be heard . In this case, Hanscom and other critics sued, and though they lost on almost every point, they prevailed on two . That has extended the delay and stressed budgets as the state fights the litigation and spends millions that would be better spent on restoration work.

At the hearing, a state official said Fish and Wildlife is looking for money just to complete a revised environmental impact report, never mind the project itself. The state hopes to have a revised report next year, but department officials are not making any promises.

They’ve learned from experience.

There’s something dispiriting about a 30-year fight to create a wetland that’s been blocked by self-proclaimed environmentalists. There’s something equally paradoxical in that it’s an environmental law giving opponents the avenue to sue. CEQA is vulnerable to this type of protracted struggle, blocking freeways and subdivisions yet also, in this case, a wetland.

Ballona’s friends

To the east of this wetland in waiting is another story, one that is just as complicated but that has produced something real and consequential and once felt improbable. In Playa Vista, 10,000 people reside among 29 parks, a movie theater, grocery stores, places to shop and an elementary school.

“It is a source of enormous wonder to me,” Galanter said.

The modern struggle over this property began with Hughes, who died in 1976 without a will. His Culver City property extended all the way to the coast, and was controlled by his holding company, Summa Corporation. In the ensuing years, Summa and other developers proposed a series of extravagant plans: High rises, hotels and a regional mall were offered as future attractions.

Many of those plans assumed the decimation of the wetlands at the property’s western edge.

Those proposals triggered a response. Led by Ruth Lansford, an environmental advocate of uncommon tenacity and intelligence, Friends of Ballona Wetlands was established in 1978. It quickly became the major protector of the wetlands — and the principal foe of Playa Vista as it was originally conceived.

In theory, that should have drawn the lines of the debate, with the nonprofit on one side, the developer on the other and government agencies as neutral arbiters. Instead, elected officials lined up behind the developer and were rewarded with campaign contributions.

Politics, as it so often does, responded to money.

So the opponents turned to the courts. The Friends of Ballona Wetlands filed suit in 1984, the first of dozens of lawsuits that bogged the project down. Lansford also took her fight to the ballot, and in 1987, she recruited a brash young activist and urban planner to take on incumbent City Councilwoman Pat Russell, a supporter of Playa Vista.

That upstart challenger was Galanter.

After a tightly contested campaign, brutally interrupted by a knife attack on Galanter in her Venice home — she was stabbed in the head and neck — the political newcomer not only survived but won the race. Galanter was elected by critics of Playa Vista, and the project’s days of clear sailing through the council came to an abrupt end.

Galanter did not, however, use her position to shut down the project. Instead, she imposed certain requirements. Galanter bluntly informed the proponents that her support was contingent on the adjacent communities being persuaded back to the table. The developers also needed to protect a larger swath of wetlands and include civic infrastructure, including a police station and school.

Developers balked. But as they soon discovered, Galanter was a stubborn, even cantankerous, opponent. She stood firm. The developers eventually relented.

The project gradually morphed. The high rises were dropped, as were the regional mall and hotels, creating more space for housing. Playa Vista was transformed from “overwhelmingly commercial to overwhelmingly residential,” Galanter said.

In 1990, Friends of Ballona Wetland and then-developer Maguire Thomas reached a settlement. The environmental group secured hundreds of acres of additional wetlands as well as money to restore those areas. In return, they dropped their opposition to the overall project and its density goals. “Foes of Playa Vista Project Become Its Friends,” read a Los Angeles Times headline .

In 2003, the first residents moved in. With that, new facts on the ground overtook years of anticipation. Traffic did not overwhelm the westside of Los Angeles. Stores opened and prospered. Residents, including families, bought units and sent their kids to the local school, the one Galanter had demanded and remains a source of pride.

Business came, too, and with it, jobs. Google set up shop , camping in the building where Hughes once built his ugly duckling, the Spruce Goose . YouTube, Facebook and Yahoo all opened offices. Promoters touted it as “Silicon Beach.”

Despite all that, the community remains exclusive. Though Playa Vista’s condos are cheaper than most homes on the Westside, they are expensive by any objective measure (the smallest units go for about $1 million).

“Low-income housing is the biggest failure of this project,” Galanter conceded.

Private interests win the race

Some of what made Playa Vista possible was luck. Had Russell beaten Galanter in 1987, the project almost certainly would have been built — and possibly faster. But hundreds of acres of wetlands would have been destroyed. There would be no school and probably fewer parks. Playa Vista might have featured a regional mall and major hotels.

It exists in the shape it does today almost entirely because of that closely fought election.

Galanter, too, could have approached her mandate differently. She disappointed some activists who wanted Playa Vista stopped at all costs, and today’s Los Angeles City Council overflows with members who opt for ideological purity over compromise and progress. It is strangely but undeniably true that Galanter, an ardent environmentalist elevated by the project’s staunchest opponents, is the person most responsible for Playa Vista existing at all.

Perhaps one final lesson of the struggle has been the divergent outcomes for the private and public interests at play. The commercial and housing development is what angered the public, but it eventually got built. The wetlands are what the public wanted, yet they remain stalled.

As frustrating as it is, the private sector is often nimbler and more responsive than local government — so public hearings drag on, as do lawsuits with petitions and the like. Meanwhile, developers build.

Today, Playa Vista is a community, born in a city where it is hard to build a single apartment building, much less homes for 10,000 people. It is imperfect, to be sure, but it is a breathing neighborhood where residents live and work and, yes, raise families.

Los Angeles needs more such places — so much of California does. Playa Vista is a reminder of what’s possible. The unfinished wetlands on the other side of Lincoln Boulevard are reminder that it’s far too difficult.

This commentary has been updated to reflect the correct spelling of Marcia Hanscom’s name.