Anaheim Plan Update Eyes Housing Crunch
By MATHEW PADILLA
Anaheim has big plans to ease its housing shortage, including the possible addition of thousands of new condominiums and apartments near the Anaheim Angels’ stadium.
Anaheim’s city council is set to vote Tuesday on a major overhaul of the city’s general plan that could make room for 9,000 new condos and apartments near Angel Stadium of Anaheim. The plan includes swapping strip malls for housing.
Addressing population growth is a key part of the plan. The city’s population of 330,000 is expected to grow 12% by 2025 to 370,000. The plan also attempts to improve the balance between the number of jobs and homes.
“There’s a major housing shortage in Orange County,” said Brian Judd, director of community planning and design with Costa Mesa-based The Planning Center, a consultancy that has worked on the plan update since 2001. “Anaheim is not alone,” he said.
The plan is expected to pass, according to Sheri Vander Dussen, Anaheim’s planning director. She said council members and staff previously discussed parts of the plan, and the council already approved a land use proposal that was used as a guideline.
Anaheim’s last general plan overhaul was in 1984, though the city has made small changes to it from time to time.
State law requires every city and county in California to have a comprehensive, long-term general plan. The plan essentially is a blueprint for growth and addresses development, land uses and traffic as well as other issues. It typically covers 20 years or more.
Vander Dussen said creating more housing for the city’s workers wasn’t the initial goal. She said the idea developed after the city held some public discussions and began looking at the trend of mixing homes with shops and businesses.
Anaheim staff members envision a major transformation of the baseball stadium property as well as the area around it. They see the area, which they’ve dubbed the Platinum Triangle, as becoming a big draw for the county with a mix of high-density housing, offices and shops.
The triangle is a V-shape area cut by the Santa Ana (I-5) Freeway and the Santa Ana River. The area could include up to 9,175 condos and apartments, 5 million square feet of offices and 2 million square feet of shops, according to the general plan update.
The area now features low-rise office and industrial buildings.
Developers could build condos and apartments, as well as shops, on the stadium parking lot, according to Anaheim’s Vander Dussen. The city, which owns the stadium and leases it to Angels owner Arturo “Arte” Moreno, or a private developer could build parking garages to replace spots taken for development.
But she said development on stadium property is years away, because the city first has to address the future of the Amtrak station on the north side.
The general plan would allow for transforming the train station into a major transportation hub. There is talk of high-speed trains to Ontario Airport, Las Vegas, San Francisco and Sacramento, as well as shuttle buses and a connection to the proposed CenterLine light-rail plan.
The updated general plan would allow housing densities of 40 to 100 units to an acre in the triangle, which translates into mid- to high-rise buildings. Anaheim officials are betting that developers will take advantage of the proposed zoning change to mixed use.
The planning director said that the city already has received four preliminary applications to build in the triangle.
Local government should tackle the imbalance between jobs and housing, said Stephen Duffy, chief operating officer of Irvine’s Western National Group, which owns apartments in Anaheim.
“Many good thinkers believe we are going to see higher and higher densities in order to create more inexpensive housing,” Duffy said.
One reason to concentrate housing around the stadium is the area’s proximity to freeways and the train station, according to the city.
But some county residents have long complained about traffic congestion at the Orange Crush,the crisscrossing of four highways near Anaheim’s southern border. A lot of new housing in southern Anaheim could mean more cars on those highways.
Or maybe not. John Lower, traffic and transportation manager with the city, said one goal of the Platinum Triangle is to get people to give up their cars and walk more or take a train or a bus. The triangle also is close to offices in the city and should include office development.
“It puts employees close to the job centers and reduces commute distances,” he said.
Another novelty of the general plan update is to allow housing on busy city streets such as Beach Boulevard and Lincoln Avenue. New homes would replace strip malls.
The goal is to concentrate stores and services at intersections and other high visibility sites, according to the city’s Vander Dussen. She said new homes would face the street but have rear access to avoid having a lot of cars pull into driveways.
“Analysis has shown that the city has too much land area dedicated to retail in terms of what the population can support,” Vander Dussen said.
She said some current dilapidated strip malls “are not a really nice front door to the residential neighborhoods.”
