Residential Zoning to be Addressed at June 14 City Council Meeting

The move was prompted by residents who addressed the Council on residential zoning and the lack of affordable housing in Culver City.

Many residents, including members of the group “Culver City for More Homes,” told the councilmembers it was hard for many people who work in Culver City to find housing while others maintained increasing density would help to resolve the housing issue.

On its website, the grassroots group said it is devoted to “making housing more plentiful, affordable and equitable for everyone while protecting renters and unwinding the town’s historic legacy of redlining and restrictive zoning.”

“The advocates who called for this conversation organized very openly and so there were many opponents,” Mayor Alex Fisch posted on twitter after the meeting. “Much of the opposition made me very hopeful—people haven’t thought about the consequences of reserving the majority of urban space is reserved for cars and one specific form of housing.”

Fisch continued: “People are new to thinking about this. For example, they haven't encountered the term ‘exclusionary zoning’ and assume that it's an activist framing, instead of the literal description used by the United States Supreme Court in Euclid v. Ambler.”

Fisch noted people “think that ‘greenlining’ has something to do with land speculation instead of being associated with investment in redlined communities and sharing of opportunity in high resource neighborhoods.”

The opposition is “fearful of change and have strong feelings of nostalgia for a time when the consequences of our past land use choices were not yet studied and understood,” the mayor said, “and they haven't been exposed to that understanding of consequences.”