To help fix the city’s “broken planning system,” the Los Angeles City Council voted unanimously today to require regular updates to its tragically outdated community plans, which spell out what can and can’t be built in each of the city’s neighborhoods, from Pacific Palisades to Downtown LA to Granada Hills.

The vote will trigger the creation of a new ordinance that mandates the community plans be updated every six years. That’s a big departure from how the plans are handled now. Over the past decade, just four of 35 community plans have been updated.

“We have a broken planning system and the lack of updated community plans is central to that,” said councilmember Mike Bonin.

The archaic plans are often blamed for leading to haphazard, piecemeal development, or what Bonin called “a culture of speculation.” Real estate developers regularly buy land, hoping they’ll get city permission to either rezone it or build bigger or taller than what the plans allow.

“It breeds and festers a battle for the soul of our neighborhoods,” Bonin said. “It’s unhealthy and it leads to bad planning.”

More reforms The City Council also voted Wednesday on a couple of other changes to “bring accountability and transparency” into the city’s planning system. Developers will no longer have free rein over who gets to write their e nvironmental impact reports—instead, they’ll have to choose from a list of city-approved consultants. EIRs assess how a development such impacts as traffic, views, and noise, and they identify ways to offset those effects. This closely mirrors another provision of Measure S.

nvironmental impact reports—instead, they’ll have to choose from a list of city-approved consultants. EIRs assess how a development such impacts as traffic, views, and noise, and they identify ways to offset those effects. This closely mirrors another provision of Measure S. Instead of applying at will for exemptions to the city’s general plan, developers will have to apply during two, one-month long windows each year. By looking at all the requests together, “they may be considered more comprehensively.”

That battle will come to a head March 7, when voters take up Measure S, a ballot measure that would temporarily freeze some real estate development. The measure also aims to reform the city’s broken planning system, in part by requiring that the community plans be updated every five years.

Councilmember Jose Huizar told the City News Service that he does not support Measure S, but he credits it with bringing some of the city’s planning issues “into the public debate.”

In Granada Hills, having an updated community plan hasn’t stopped resistance to new development, said councilmember Mitch Englander, who represents the neighborhood.

“Updating community plans won’t fix everything,” he said.

Residents there fought plans for a big, 440-unit apartment complex that they said would be out of character with the neighborhood, even though it complied with the community’s plan, which was updated just last year.

The apartment complex “didn’t need a zone change, a variance, any new conditions,” Englander said, but “the community game unglued for good reason. No one expected this would be done at this site.”

“The reality is the real fix is community participation,” he said.

Updating the plans can be contentious. A 2012 effort to update the Hollywood Community Plan resulted in a lawsuit from residents who didn’t like the plan’s density and building heights.