![\"L1040265\"](\"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/L1040265-280x420.jpg\")
The Palo Verde<\/a> has been quite a surprise.\u00a0 It shot up rapidly and has created an exceptional umbrella canopy that in the spring is covered with yellow blossoms that attract beautiful black and brown bumble bees, honeybees, wasps and birds.\u00a0 Other times of the year small finches seem to find sustenance on the bark and needle like leaves that I can\u2019t figure out.\u00a0 They make lovely small chirping noises.\u00a0 Unintentionally, we have the daily benefit of looking out onto its canopy from our bedroom on the second floor due to its location; leaving the windows open we hear the birds chirping while foraging.<\/p>\nBut this tree, like plants in our front planting strip, has rather unexpectedly become the center of controversy in our building, provoking a close scrutiny of the HOA CC&Rs \u2014\u00a0what exactly were the rules we adapted when we each bought our unit from the collective pool of ownership?\u00a0 The CC&Rs had been found on the internet and adopted without too much close reading, and upon scrutiny revealed a series of potential \u201cviolations\u201d one member of the HOA is concerned about, as will be explained.\u00a0 The plants in the planting strip were the subjects of a neighbor\u2019s wrath last year.<\/p>\n
![\"L1040264\"](\"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/L1040264-630x420.jpg\")
Old habits are hard to change.\u00a0 The Palo Verde makes it difficult to access one of the converted garages if the designated owner of the garage wished to park in it regularly.\u00a0 That building owner \u2014\u00a0whose garage is now more difficult to access \u2014 now would like to park a car in the garage for the six months of the year during which they are absent.\u00a0 Because\u00a0the tree blocks easy access it has been cast as potentially causing \u201cadverse possession\u201d by that owner.\u00a0 Fellow building owners have offered to switch garages or to pay for off site garaging.\u00a0 The car can be parked, but it requires skill and maneuvering to do so.\u00a0 Moreover, the driveway is now lined by small boulders and is a gardening space, the back area is covered with pavers that are not well embedded in the soil, so moving a car across these areas is not easy and would damage the people centric and oriented new infrastructure.\u00a0 The owner who would like to park the car has suggested either moving the Palo Verde (now 30 feet tall), or planting another at the edge of the property and when it has grown, cutting this one down.\u00a0 Or failing compromise (that is, the acceptance of one of these options), cutting the tree down by fiat.<\/p>\n
These issues have also had repercussions on who \u201cgets\u201d to park in the remaining driveway.\u00a0 As the commercial strip on next street expands and becomes more successful, adjacent street parking is at a premium, and at times residents must park a block away.\u00a0 Such inconvenience has added insult to injury, and then generated parking claims on the driveway as well.\u00a0 To date, there has been little contention over my husband and I parking in the driveway.<\/p>\n
These trivial, but ubiquitous examples illustrate the degree to which a car-oriented infrastructure remains dominant in people\u2019s deep priorities.\u00a0 Despite good intentions, and verbal agreements (as in our case), it seems that those get swept away when it comes to one\u2019s own car needs.\u00a0 I suggest that underneath the car-priority arguments is really the way in which property rights and values are co-dependent with the car, as I will discuss below.<\/p>\n Turning to the HOA, it prohibits drying clothes outside.\u00a0 The beneficence of solar radiation in the case of our building, must be captured by our solar collectors, sent through the grid, and then sent back to us through the meter to run the clothes dryer, if the HOA \u201crules\u201d were enforced.\u00a0 Either that, or I dry clothes on racks in my apartment.\u00a0 Here again, nature in the city, in the form of direct solar energy, is not appreciated and taken advantage of in a commonsense manner.<\/p>\n Codification of energy use can be found in many subtle and hidden nooks and crannies of daily life, from HOAs to notions of the value of property and \u201cproperty rights,\u201d and implicit assumptions about how convenient automobile access \u2014\u00a0and car use \u2014\u00a0should be.\u00a0 At the same time, California\u2019s laws \u2014\u00a0SB 375<\/a> and AB 32<\/a> \u2014\u00a0are desperately attempting to reduce GHG emissions by reducing vehicle miles travel and car dependency.\u00a0 And there are many calls for climate appropriate landscaping, pollinator refuges and biodiversity friendly habitats in cities due to the drought, and disappearance of pollinators and local biodiversity.<\/p>\n I do not believe the hostility to the Palo Verde, hanging clothes outside, or to our planting strips is out of ill will or ill intention per se<\/i>. \u00a0It emanates from a historically informed and culturally passed on sense of order and priority.\u00a0 It also is a reaction against something different that does not fall into the existing codes, norms and conventions.\u00a0 What if our building co-owner wanted to sell?\u00a0 Would the prospective buyer be put off by not being able to easily park his or her car?\u00a0 Would they be offended by the sight of drying clothes (actually the clothes line is in the driveway, and not visible from the back yard).\u00a0 Would the prospective buyer see the planting strip as unattractive, hence not willing to pay \u201cfull market value\u201d for the unit?\u00a0 These are unknowable, and there might even be the exact opposite effect \u2014\u00a0a heightened value for the unit.<\/p>\n Creative solutions like using a commercial parking garage for overnight parking has not caught on in this part of the world, though in places like Paris, they are a normal matter of course since the city was built pre-automobile.\u00a0 Walking a couple of blocks with packages, children or pets, is simple part of the course of a normal day in pre-auto cities. Concentrating the car in common parking structures, reducing parking requirements and enhancing yet more transit opportunities and bicycling, would free up the car-devoted space in back areas for plants, gardens and human leisure, and facilitate the creation of complete streets.<\/p>\n But in the city of the car \u2014\u00a0Los Angeles \u2014\u00a0the culture shift is difficult.\u00a0 Los Angeles was built during a time of abundance of land, energy, water, building materials.\u00a0 We were profligate, though now, perhaps counter intuitively, L.A. is (depending on the source), either the first or second most dense metropolitan area of the United States.\u00a0 Our transit ridership is right behind Chicago.\u00a0 Our transit system is huge, growing and heavily used.\u00a0 Bike lanes are being built and there are more bike riders.\u00a0 People are planting edible plants in parking strips and fighting their cities (there are 88 in Los Angeles County) as well as their neighbors.\u00a0 Change is happening, but it is a slow, step-by-step, person-by-person, building-by-building effort.<\/p>\n Seems like there should be a better way; do we really have time for this process?<\/p>\n Here are a few suggestions that are suitable to Los Angeles:<\/p>\n \u2014 Create \u201calternative\u201d HOA CC&R boilerplates accessible on the internet and fully vetted by the legal community that explicitly encourage drying clothes outside and disallow cars in common areas, encourage gardening including landscaping planting strips.\u00a0 Such restrictions are common, and are preventing people from behaviors more appropriate to a changing climate<\/p>\n \u2014 Dramatically reduce city parking requirements.<\/p>\n \u2014 Require commercial parking garages to offer neighborhood parking from 6 pm \u2013 10 am.<\/p>\n \u2014 For the Southwest region in general, forbid planting of lawns and require installation of indoor and outdoor water meters.<\/p>\n \u2014 Legalize garage conversions.<\/p>\n \u2014 Work with the nursery industry to phase out water loving outdoor plants.<\/p>\n \u2014 Create city policy to encourage planting pollinators and to create habitat refuges.<\/p>\n Rules, codes, conventions and habits emerge from particular times.\u00a0 In the U.S., as people had more appliances and energy was inexpensive, people bought washing machines and clothes driers (this was also a result of clever and instant marketing by appliance makers, and energy utilities to grow their markets).\u00a0 Gradually the perception grew that hanging clothes outside was\u00a0unsightly.\u00a0 (I recently spoke to a colleague who told me that in new housing developments in Jakarta, outside clothes drying is now banned).\u00a0 And these ideas became codified in Covenants, Codes and Restrictions (CC&Rs) of housing developments, similarly to the requirement for lawns.\u00a0 These have been widely discussed over the past several decades, but no alternatives seem to have emerged.<\/p>\n CC&Rs, a soft infrastructure of rules, create hard infrastructures on the ground: more natural gas lines, or electricity provision to dry clothes; more need for water infrastructure to keep lawns green and more fuel to maintain those lawns with mowers, blowers and edgers.\u00a0 City rules require garages for cars, and increase the amount of urban space devoted to the automobile rather than to other uses, like plants and trees. \u00a0There are no provisions for sharing existing parking rather than building new, individual parking for each building. \u00a0The alternatives exist, but the fear of the reduction of property values that people perceive as protected by these rules, makes change difficult.\u00a0 Unless all property owners are subject to the same rule changes, individuals will find change risky and will resist it. \u00a0But new rules would create a level playing field, and new habits would form.\u00a0 A new normal would develop.<\/p>\n We can do this, we just need the framework to facilitate the change.<\/p>\n![\"L1040253\"](\"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/L1040253-280x420.jpg\")
Similar reactivity to nature replacing car space is found in the note from the neighbor about our plants in the front planting strip.\u00a0 The 8 foot tall Echium<\/a> attracts pollinators, like the Palo Verde; its blue flowers are the admiration of others of our neighbors.\u00a0 And in a drought-prone region, our planting strip vegetation needs little water while the Palo Verde seems to have found plenty of water by itself.\u00a0 But the Echium makes getting in and out of a parked car more difficult, and is seen to obstruct general access.<\/p>\n![\"L1040254\"](\"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/L1040254-630x420.jpg\")
These incidents make me aware of profound difficulties in changing neighborhoods to less car dependency and the car rights mentalities, as well as instituting plant pallates that are out of the ordinary.\u00a0 Our neighbor was clearly advocating we recreate the planting strip lawn to be more in harmony with the rest of the street.\u00a0 Our building neighbor is more divided about things.\u00a0 Acknowledging the beauty of the tree and the pleasantness of the back area, the owner is attempting to finesse a situation that probably cannot be. \u00a0We can have the tree and plants, or remake a car infrastructure, but not both. \u00a0This is hard to admit.<\/p>\n![\"L1040268\"](\"http:\/\/www.thenatureofcities.com\/TNOC\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/05\/L1040268-630x420.jpg\")
While my examples may seem petty, they are emblematic of the attitudinal issues, reinforced by 20th<\/sup> century codes and conventions and infrastructure, that make current cities hard to change.\u00a0 We have coevolved hard and soft infrastructures that reinforce one another to harden pathways that then reinforce each other.\u00a0 Soft infrastructures include the rules \u2014\u00a0street widths, sidewalk widths, planting regulations, parking provisions and regulations.\u00a0 Hard infrastructures are the product of those soft infrastructures, but then reinforce them because they become normalized and an architecture of dependence gets erected upon them.\u00a0 These include the conflation of car access with property values.\u00a0 The challenges of the 21st<\/sup> century will include unraveling the knot of this reinforcing interaction between hard and soft infrastructures in our urban areas.\u00a0 To make friendly spaces for nature, the most obvious open space is that devoted to cars.\u00a0 Car infrastructure \u2014\u00a0parking lots, parking garages, parking garages, parking spaces, streets \u2014\u00a0create multiple negative externalities.\u00a0 These include polluted run off, lack of permeable filtration areas, heat islands, unwalkable urban spaces, not to mention facilitating cars that produce air pollution and GHGs; the list is long.\u00a0 To reduce energy use in urban areas, we must also begin to use readily available nature\u2019s services like direct sunlight to dry clothes!<\/p>\n