Why California’s historic housing law gave activists a new reason to battle the bus

For years, Burbank residents, business owners and elected officials have been squabbling over a plan to run a speedy new bus line through the middle of town.

The North Hollywood to Pasadena Bus Rapid Transit project is slated to carve a bus-only corridor linking the eastern edge of the San Fernando Valley to the western extent of the San Gabriel Valley while connecting two of LA County’s most well-trafficked rail lines. To do so, LA Metro plans to take away a lane of traffic and a ton of parking spaces along most of the 18-mile route, which includes much of a four-lane stretch that runs through downtown Burbank.

Ever since the agency floated the project in 2017, a vocal coalition of ticked-off Burbankers, Glendalians and denizens of the northeast L.A. neighborhood of Eagle Rock has been protesting, petitioning and (unsuccessfully) suing to block, delay or revamp the plan.

Now, with the sweep of his pen, Gov. Gavin Newsom has turned this long-simmering battle over a bus into a full-fledged war over housing, local control and the future of the single-family neighborhoods.

Earlier this month, Newsom signed a law allowing apartment buildings to sprout up within a half-mile of major public transit stations. That includes stops for select bus routes that run frequently, get priority at stop lights and have their own lanes.

The purpose of the law is to locate new housing close to publicly funded transportation, funneling more would-be riders onto those systems, while minimizing the traffic, pollution and climate impact of new residential development.

But the law also applies to future transit projects that have reached a certain point in the planning pipeline — including the NoHo to Pasadena bus line.

Susan O’Carroll, a planning and environmental consultant and Burbank resident, said she has long had issues with the bus plan. Now that its development carries the promise of a neighborhood-spanning zoning overhaul, the stakes feel much higher. The bus, in effect, will “destroy the single family neighborhoods on either side” of the route, she said.

The only way to stop the apartments now, she said, is to stop the bus.

The brewing battle in Burbank is an unintended consequence of Senate Bill 79, a law that pro-housing advocates, public transit boosters and many environmentally-minded urbanists lauded as a historic victory for sustainable planning. That law represents the culmination of a legislative trend, in which California has relaxed minimum parking requirements and allowed for more affordable housing and accessory dwelling unit development on lots close to bus and rail lines.

But even supporters of transit-oriented development recognize that it can sometimes result in “perverse” political incentives, said Amy Lee, a transportation researcher at UC Davis, who recently published a paper on how California city governments responded to a 2022 law banning local parking requirements for housing near transit.

When housing and transportation are tied together, for opponents of new residential construction, “logically, a response is to just say, ‘OK, we’ll just reduce the transit,’” she said.

That might mean scrapping a project altogether. In the case of the Senate Bill 79, it could also mean campaigning to put a bus back in the flow of car traffic or slowing down a commuter rail system, so as to skirt the specific thresholds that would trigger a rezoning.

Density-averse city governments may also exploit ambiguities in the law. For example, if a bus only gets a dedicated lane on part of its route, as is the case with the line designed to cut through Burbank, is rezoning triggered at every stop along its route, none of them or just those where the bus has its own lane?

Turning contentious local disputes over new bus or rail lines into even more contentious rezoning battles also just has a way of turbo-charging the politics of both. “It’s chummed the waters,” said Lee.

A barrier to LA's transit boom?

It’s not that the backers of the new law didn’t see this coming.

The statute purposefully limits rezoning to projects that have already entered a regional transportation improvement plan — a short-list of projects that have already received a short- to medium-term funding commitment.

“If, in a few weeks, the Orange County Transportation Authority says they want to do a street car project from Fullerton to Disneyland, that wouldn’t be eligible,” said Marc Vukcevich, state policy director for Streets For All, which co-sponsored Senate Bill 79.

Further out, projects can still trigger changes to zoning once they are added to one of those transportation short-lists in the future, but only if they are part of a region's longer-term capital plan as of the end of this year.

The pipeline of such projects isn’t especially full in most of the state’s major metro areas. The Bay Area’s transit system isn’t growing much these days. Nor is San Diego’s, where the city has upzoned most of its major transit hubs anyway.

The Los Angeles metro area is a notable exception.

In 2016, county voters backed a sales tax hike to fund public transit improvements. With relatively little public transit infrastructure on and in the ground, LA Metro has a subway, light rail and bus rapid transit boom in its planning pipeline. All of those projects may trigger rezoning under the new housing law and so “have a chance to be impacted by the NIMBY politics of housing,” said Vukcevich.

Beyond Burbank

O’Carroll and other opponents of the NoHo to Pasadena project have called upon LA Metro to conduct another environmental review of the bus line. The first one, drafted back in 2020, didn’t take rezoning into account. That leaves significant land-use changes that would result from the bus line unexamined and unpublicized, she said.

Burbank’s city council has, for its own part, repeatedly voted to ask LA Metro to leave the bus in the regular flow of traffic along its route through the city.

It might be too late.

In a written statement, LA Metro spokesperson Missy Colman said that the agency will continue to “closely coordinate with the cities of Los Angeles, Burbank, Glendale and Pasadena” as it finalizes the design “in accordance with the Metro Board approved project.”

What the board approved is a route with a bus-only lane. Construction is scheduled to break ground before next summer. The pressing deadline of the 2028 Olympics could make further delay especially unpalatable.

“The Metro board would have to basically take the unprecedented step of stopping a project that has already begun,” said Nick Andert, a documentary filmmaker and public transportation advocate.

But with so many bus and rail projects in the pipeline across Los Angeles County, the extra-heated politics of Burbank’s new bus may be a preview of what’s to come.

Massive plans are in the works. New rail from the San Fernando Valley to the affluent neighborhoods around UCLA. A subway extension running south out of Hollywood. A bus rapid transit line connecting South Los Angeles to the neighborhoods east of Hollywood. All are controversial in their own right, said Andert. Throwing in the prospect of new apartment buildings could give local elected officials extra reason to dissent.

“Cities can really slow down permitting for certain things if Metro doesn’t work with them hand-in-hand and address their concerns,” he said.

'They have no idea what's coming'

Backers of the new zoning law say they hope such controversies will be isolated and short-lived. Once neighborhoods start getting rezoned beginning next July, it will likely take years for developers to start swapping out single-family homes for apartment buildings en masse. Significant, neighborhood redefining densification could take decades in any given location, if ever happens.

“Call me an optimist — or maybe ludicrous — but I think the general public will understand that housing is not the end of the world and that development happens on a really long time frame,” said Vukcevich.

It might be some time before irate homeowners along the NoHo to Pasadena bus line reach such levels of equanimity.

Lisa Cusack, a Glendale homeowner and local GOP activist who sits on the town’s historic preservation commission, said she was late to begin organizing against the planned bus route. It was only after this year’s zoning law advanced out of the state Senate that she realized the full implications of the proposed bus line and launched a petition and website to “save Glenoaks,” the major thoroughfare that will serve as its main route through town.

“I’ve been going around talking to neighbors and they have no idea what’s coming,” she said. When Senate Bill 79 was still floating through the Legislature, the “threat” of densification was a little abstract. Now that Newsom has signed it into law, the pitch to her neighbors is much easier to make — the only way to stop the coming zoning changes is to stop the bus.

“People are only now starting to find out,” she said.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.