‘This Isn’t Streamlining.’ West Hollywood Planning Commission Guts Its Own Role on Housing Anyway.

It’s not often when all seven Planning Commissioners agree on anything. But Thursday night they did agree on one thing — don’t touch Design Review.

What was set up as a battle over meaningful public input into what gets built in West Hollywood’s neighborhoods appeared headed for defeat before a last-minute maneuver turned it around. The issue was a ZTA, a Zone Text Amendment, which is a change to the City’s zoning code. This one had been in the works since May 2025, when the City Council directed staff to find a way to speed up housing approvals and reduce the role of the Planning Commission in reviewing projects that already comply with the rules.

The stage was set. On one side, the fight to keep whatever voice residents had left after Sacramento spent years stripping local control away from cities and their residents. On the other, a City Council mandate and state housing law timelines that aren’t interested in waiting for anybody. From data about canceled Planning Commission meetings to comments about council candidates and developers’ deep pockets, the two-hour battle ended with some observers wondering what just happened.

Commissioner Lynn Hoopingarner didn’t wait for public comment to weigh in. Before residents even spoke, she went straight at Staff. Back in January she’d moved to consolidate design review with the neighborhood meeting process. What came back Thursday wasn’t that. It had morphed into an optional meeting that would have just one planning commissioner attending – not in an official capacity. Residents with no experience in design. And worse, a meeting the developer runs, with no real power to do anything about what they heard.

“Inasmuch as it was my suggestion that design review be consolidated with the neighborhood meetings, I’m trying to understand how Staff interpreted that to strip it out as not design review, but a single, effectively toothless, one planning commissioner attending an applicant-run neighborhood meeting. That, to me, is the exact opposite of what I moved and suggested,” she said.

Design Review

Long Range Planning Manager Francisco Contreras said that’s not what this was. Two commissioners at a neighborhood meeting creates a Brown Act body. Noticing requirements, agendas, the whole thing. One commissioner in an advisory role doesn’t. Staff was trying to keep community input without blowing up the streamlining. The neighborhood meeting stays. The director can still kick “unusual” cases back up to the commission. Though admittedly, Staff said the definition was vague on what constitutes unusual, and those instances were rare.

Hoopingarner wasn’t buying it. “We’ve already stripped everything else of the Brown Act out of this process,” she said. “And so you’re proposing to strip the very last element of the Brown Act and any public process out of this.” You hear the Brown Act thrown around a lot in meetings and stories. It’s California’s open meeting law. It requires that when a government body, or even a standing committee of one, meets to discuss public business, that meeting must be publicly noticed, agendized, and open to all.

There’s another problem with design review that didn’t get fully aired Thursday night. Right now, design review meetings have no public noticing. No mailers. No site posting. Nothing but a published agenda. Neighbors don’t know a project is being reviewed until it’s done. Outside of some general suggestions for a robust City website and a subscription model — neither of which was formally adopted — no remedy was proposed. If design review is going to be the last meaningful public input before a project gets approved by staff, then how would residents know?

The Data

Hoopingarner also made something else clear: The Planning Commission is not the roadblock. In deliberations she brought the receipts. Staff’s own data shows 80 percent of the time in the housing approval process is controlled by the developer and staff. Planning Commission meetings have been canceled not because the agenda was overloaded but because there wasn’t enough on it. Nothing in the record proves the commission is the bottleneck slowing down West Hollywood’s housing production.

“When did we, as a city, decide to invite Doge into our community to strip our democratic, publicly transparent processes from our own ordinances?” she said. “This isn’t streamlining. It’s a total removal of public transparency and accountability.”

Developers

The developers have always had a back door access to Staff and council,” Hoopingarner said. “We have more than one person on council and the planning commission running for office and looking for those deep pockets of those developers to support their campaigns.” The point was not to cast aspersions on Staff, but rather, underscore that residents don’t share similar access. So why eliminate even their smallest opportunity to have a voice. 

Commissioner Mark Edwards, who is running for City Council, followed her and pushed back. “Developers are not evil, because we all live in buildings that were created by developers,” he said. “And so, for us to have this narrative that developers are out to scam the system, that is not true.” He supported the amendment. The City has a moral responsibility to build housing, he said, especially for its most vulnerable residents.

The public sided largely with Hoopingarner. Speakers called it a voluntary surrender of oversight that Sacramento never required. “Replacing a formal public hearing with an informal neighborhood meeting is a downgrade for democracy,” one resident said. “A neighborhood meeting carries no legal weight and creates no official record.” Another put it plainly. “If this goes forward, then I just wonder why you’re all here.”

Jake Pierce from Abundant Housing LA, a pro-development YIMBY group, was the lone voice going the other way, calling the proposal a smart way to move badly needed housing.

Chair David Gregoire wanted the January draft back — the version with a 100-unit threshold. Hoopingarner wanted 25, the same threshold Culver City uses. Vice Chair Stacy Jones said the whole thing was a crisis of conscience and she wasn’t comfortable with it. Rogerio Carvalheiro said the perception problem alone was enough. Four against. Three for.

The Reversal

Commissioner Solomon saw it differently, as did Commissioner Jesi Harris. The system was already broken before this ZTA, he said. Projects sit in the pipeline for over a year before anyone gets three minutes at a microphone. “The pie is already baked at that point,” he said.

Then came the pivot. Could the holdouts live with no unit threshold — zero, every project bypassing the commission — if design review stayed? Not the one-commissioner fig leaf. Real design review. Three commissioners. City-run. Public in the room. Carvalheiro said yes to that. Jones came around. Gregoire followed.

Worth noting that’s exactly what the commission asked for back in January. Somehow it took two months and a near-defeat to get back there.

Isaac Rosen, legal counsel for the City, put the path on the table. Send the ZTA to council. Update the bylaws. Make design review city-run. Revisit the 60-day timeline.

For Hoopingarner it didn’t matter. Design review or not, the Planning Commission is out of the loop on every housing project now. Any size. Staff approves it. Residents lost. The commission lost. Solomon may have saved the vote. Whether he saved anything else is a different question.

Solomon moved it. Six commissioners voted yes. Hoopingarner voted no.

Resolution No. PC 25-1625 goes to City Council.

Nobody’s against streamlining. West Hollywood needs nearly 4,000 units by 2029. That’s real. Sacramento’s not waiting.

But the commission didn’t save design review Thursday night. It sent a recommendation asking council to save it. Whether council does is a different question.

The proposal on the table: consolidate the neighborhood meeting with design review, make it city-run, not applicant-run, three commissioners present, public in the room. No unit threshold. Every housing project that meets objective standards goes straight to staff approval. Design review is the last stop before that happens.

That’s not what’s codified. That’s what six commissioners asked council to consider.

When the Supreme Court struck down President Trump’s tariffs last month, Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence about what gets lost when government bypasses the deliberative process. His words were about Congress. They apply here too. It would be worth taping to the wall in Council Chambers: 

”For those who think it important for the Nation to impose more tariffs, I understand that today’s decision will be disappointing. All I can offer them is that most major decisions affecting the rights and responsibilities of the American people (including the duty to pay taxes and tariffs) are funneled through the legislative process for a reason. Yes, legislating can be hard and take time. And, yes, it can be tempting to bypass Congress when some pressing problem arises. But the deliberative nature of the legislative process was the whole point of its design. Through that process, the Nation can tap the combined wisdom of the people’s elected representatives, not just that of one faction or man. There, deliberation tempers impulse, and compromise hammers disagreements into workable solutions. And because laws must earn such broad support to survive the legislative process, they tend to endure, allowing ordinary people to plan their lives in ways they cannot when the rules shift from day to day. In all, the legislative process helps ensure each of us has a stake in the laws that govern us and in the Nation’s future. For some today, the weight of those virtues is apparent. For others, it may not seem so obvious. But if history is any guide, the tables will turn and the day will come when those disappointed by today’s result will appreciate the legislative process for the bulwark of liberty it is.”

Three commissioners in a room with a developer and a neighborhood. That’s deliberation. One person in an advisory role at a meeting the developer runs is not. Streamline all you want. Just not at the cost of the last voice residents have left.

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• West Hollywood City Council Advances Housing Approval Reforms
• West Hollywood Planning Commission Approves Hayworth Avenue Project Despite Affordable Housing Concerns