{
  "id": "1999-april-flirting-with-disaster",
  "slug": "1999-april-flirting-with-disaster",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-april-flirting-with-disaster.html",
  "year": 1999,
  "month": "April",
  "monthNum": 4,
  "headline": "Flirting with disaster",
  "kicker": "IGNORED RESTRICTIONS",
  "author_name": "T. Christian Miller",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "Los Angeles Times",
  "summary": "A Los Angeles Times investigation using mapping and data analysis revealed that Los Angeles County politicians allowed developers and campaign contributors to violate growth restrictions in the Santa Monica Mountains, resulting in homes built in excess of limits that were twice as likely to suffer damage from natural disasters while taxpayers footed the repair bills.",
  "keywords": [
    "development",
    "violations",
    "mapping"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Government & Politics",
    "Health & Environment"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Maptitude",
    "Excel",
    "SPSS",
    "mainframe"
  ],
  "full_text": "The Santa Monica Mountains are one of Los Angeles' most spectacular natural features. The range stretches through the heart of the region, rising high above the city sprawl. It's where the famous – from Johnny Carson to Axl Rose – build their ego mansions.\n\nIt's also where county politicians have routinely allowed developers and campaign contributors to run roughshod on environmental and growth restrictions, according to a recent Los Angeles Times analysis.\n\nFlouting those restrictions not only hurt the mountains but also stole from the public's pocketbook. Homes built in excess of the area's growth limits stood better than twice the chance of being hit by one of the natural disasters that plague the region – earthquake, flood and fire. Usually, state and federal taxpayers picked up the repair bill.\n\nMapping reality over design\n\nThe story began with a simple question: Who built all the homes in the mountains, and how did it happen?\n\nFrom the beginning, it was clear this would be a mapping project, albeit one with a depressingly large scope: 20 years of development approvals covering more than 35,000 parcels of property.\n\nTo start, we paid a consultant to scan in the area's growth plan, an outdated, 20-year-old document created when the bulk of the undeveloped part of the mountains was declared a national recreation area. The complicated map had more than 5,000 polygons, each representing different use and density classifications.\n\nAt the time of the original plan, the idea was to hold down building density. That map, we figured, showed how the mountains were supposed to look. The next step was creating a map that showed the reality: all subdivision approvals since 1978.\n\nThat turned out to be a trickier task. The Los Angeles County Assessor's Office wanted $80,000 to sell the GIS information outright. Instead, we rented time on the assessor's mainframe, then watched as one of his assistants created a special file showing the outlines of the subdivisions in our area of study.\n\nOnce we had the two maps, we imported them into Maptitude, a low-budget, though effective, GIS program. Then we overlaid the two. The growth-plan map showed proposed density. Our new map showed actual density. The overlay, the heart of the project, showed the subdivisions that violated the growth restrictions – 40 percent of the nearly 100 subdivisions.\n\nTimely contributions\n\nFrom there, we began reviewing the individual subdivision approvals, combing through musty files in numerous city halls and planning departments for the names of the developers, engineers, consultants and attorneys involved in the high-density projects. Using laptops loaded with Excel, we created our own database to track them, eventually inputting about 2,500 names.\n\nWe ran those names against the Times' in-house database of political contributions, which has been continually updated since 1984. The results were not surprising: Nearly all of the developers and businessmen involved contributed to the campaigns of various supervisors in charge of the area.\n\nSince the link between developers and county supervisors had long been known, we decided to take the story one step further. To do that, we obtained the case-tracking database from our planning agency, which included the dates of public hearings and planning commission votes going back 15 years.\n\nWe then compared the dates in that database with the dates in our political contribution database to determine that, in many cases, contributions came within the day and weeks of key votes on the projects. After approval, when the developers had gotten what they wanted, the money tap shut down.\n\nHarmed habitats\n\nNext, we decided to check the damage from the developments. From the county's Flood Control District, we obtained water-level data for various streams in the area, data they had kept continuously for 30 years.\n\nUsing SPSS, we then charted the increase in high-density area homes against an in-",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-6",
    "extracted_at": "2026-07-05",
    "verified": true
  },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-april-flirting-with-disaster.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-april-flirting-with-disaster.json"
}