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UCLA professor Laura Lake is undertaking a wholesale rewriting of Westwood's community plan in an attempt to scale down what she sees as "helter-skelter" growth in the congested district.
Planning consultant Ruth Galanter, who lives in Venice, is trying to unseat City Councilwoman Pat Russell in the 6th District and dreams of slowing development in that populous Westside area.
Urban planner Madelyn Glickfeld is keeping a vigil over a new coastal plan for Malibu, which she and others fear could allow the County Board of Supervisors to more than double the population of that quiet community.
Los Angeles Valley College professor David Brown is lobbying landowners, trying to persuade them to join an effort to double the 56,000 acres of parkland that has been saved from developers' bulldozers in the Santa Monica Mountains.
Meet a few of the city's self-declared "quality-of-lifers."
They are a loose collection of planners, professors, environmentalists, attorneys and politicians who share a belief that densely packed areas such as the Westside and the San Fernando Valley are facing neighborhood ruin and that rural oases like Malibu and the mountains could be the next casualties of overbuilding.
What drives them is a belief that they can alter decades-old practices that have granted developers a liberal hand in creating the city.
Last November's landslide voter approval of Proposition U, which limits commercial growth in many areas, was cheered by the activists as proof that people are primed for change.
"If it goes too far and too many people are crowded in here, people are going to take power into their own hands, and Proposition U is that message," Glickfeld said.
"I hope the County Board of Supervisors is listening up, too, because it hardly ends at City Hall," she said. "We'll tackle a statewide initiative, we'll do it in the courts, we'll do it by running for office . . . we will stop this incessant chant of build, build, build."
Politicians who support environmental issues say the quality-of-lifers wield more political clout than the slow-growth advocates of the 1970s, who were often viewed as elitists and radicals.
"They aren't somebody who hung out at Stanford, is named Muff and wears button-downs," Assemblyman Tom Hayden (D-Santa Monica) said. "They aren't that kind...