Unlike in New York City, much of which was built primarily before the automobile age, Los Angeles has remained a car-dominated city, with roughly one-fifth Gotham's level of mass-transit use. Their case against the preoccupation with “transit-oriented development” rests solidly on historical patterns. Not surprisingly, some 40 neighborhood associations and six neighborhood councils organized against the city's Hollywood plan. Indeed, the Los Angeles urban area is already the densest in the United States, and a major increase in density is sure to further worsen congestion. Equally bad, these policies often threaten the character of classic, already-dense urban neighborhoods, like Hollywood. The problem here is not that some developers may lose money on projects for which there is inadequate demand, but that this densification approach has replaced business development as an economic strategy. In fact, SCAG's brethren at the Association of Bay Area Governments, seeking to justify their ultradense development plan, recently went beyond even population estimates issued by the Department of Finance. Such inflated estimates, however, do serve as the basis for pushing through densification strategies favored by planners and their developer allies. In 2007, California's official population projection agency, the Department of Finance, forecast that Los Angeles County would reach 10.5 million residents in just three years. Similar erroneous estimates run through the state planning process. For the entire region, the 2008 estimates were off by an astounding 1.4 million people. SCAG's predicted increase of more than 800,000 residents materialized as a little more than 300,000. In 1993, SCAG projected that the city of Los Angeles would reach a population of 4.3 million by 2010. This discrepancy is not just a problem in the case of Hollywood SCAG has been producing fanciful figures for years. Not one to mince words, Judge Goodman described SCAG's estimates as “entirely discredited.” All this despite the fact that, according to the census, Hollywood's population over the past decade has actually declined, from 213,000 in 1990 to 198,000 today. The Hollywood plan rested on city estimates provided by the Southern California Association of Governments, which estimated that Hollywood's population was 200,000 in 2000 and 224,000 in 2005, and would thus rise to 250,000 by 2030. The mythology is that people are still flocking to Los Angeles, and particularly, to dense urban areas, creating a demand for high-end, high-rise housing. In particular, the judge excoriated the buoyant population-growth projections used to justify the plan, a rationalization for major densification elsewhere in the state. By dismissing Los Angeles' Hollywood plan, the judge also assaulted the logic behind plans throughout the region to construct substantial high-rise development in “transit-oriented developments” adjacent to rail stations. Goodman to reject as “fatally flawed” the densification plans for downtown Hollywood could shake the foundations of California's “smart growth” planning clerisy. The recent decision by Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Allan J.
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