2 Big Apartment Projects Spur Similar Concerns of Neighbors

From the street, the two huge new apartment projects appear to have nothing in common.

One is in the busiest part of Woodland Hills and consists of large buildings with modern styling and tall, trendy-looking metal roofs.

The other is in the quietest neighborhood in Calabasas and has small buildings with a traditional Mediterranean look and roofs of Old World mission tile.

But that’s where the dissimilarity of the two developments ends. The two projects are taking shape six miles apart in the West San Fernando Valley.

Each is the largest apartment development ever built in its community.

Each is being financed by public bonds through “affordable” housing programs that broke new ground with the City of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County.

Same Developer

Each is being built by the same Beverly Hills-based developer.

And each has neighbors worried about hundreds of newcomers moving into their neighborhoods.

The Woodland Hills project is the 1,279-unit, $153-million Warner Center Apartments under construction on the southwest corner of Canoga Avenue and Burbank Boulevard. Its first units are scheduled to be rented this month.

The Calabasas complex is the 698-unit, $60-million Malibu Canyon Apartments being built at the northern dead end of Las Virgenes Road. Rental of its first phase has begun.

The projects are being built by Alan I. Casden, a veteran of apartment construction as well as publicly funded housing developments in the county.

Casden is using $144 million worth of City of Los Angeles revenue bonds to finance the Woodland Hills project, advertised as “luxury” apartments. In exchange, he has promised to reserve 256 of the units for low- and moderate-income families.

He is using $47.5 million worth of Los Angeles County Housing Authority revenue bonds to help pay for the Calabasas project. In return, he will set aside 140 units as affordable rentals.

Formula for Determining Rent

Rents for those units will be set by a formula pegged to annual family income. A family of four or more with a total income of no more than $26,550 will qualify for a three-bedroom apartment for $576 a month.

In contrast, unregulated three-bedroom units will rent for $995 a month in Calabasas and for a higher, as yet undetermined amount in Woodland Hills.

Bond financing for the projects was approved separately by city and county officials in 1985. It allows tax-free bonds to be sold and the revenue used to finance low-interest loans to pay for the construction.

Both bond issues raised eyebrows when approved, however.

Several Los Angeles City Council members complained that prosperous Woodland Hills, where the cost of homes and condominiums starts at about $150,000, was not a proper place to allocate housing subsidies.

Calabasas residents protested that the Las Virgenes Road site was a poor place for modestly priced rental units because it is about a mile from the nearest bus line and nearly four miles from the closest supermarket--isolation that would be a hardship for families with only one car.

Officials who administer the bond financing program for the city and county contend that both sites are appropriate places for low-income housing, however.

“I don’t think it’s an abuse of taxpayer money,” said Ralph R. Esparza, acting director of the city Community Development Department’s Housing Division.

“We’re going to have 256 tenant households there that wouldn’t have had the opportunity to live in Woodland Hills . . . in the lap of luxury.”

Charles B. Taylor, a finance planning manager with the county’s Community Development Commission, said the fast-growing Calabasas area will not leave the Las Virgenes Road area isolated from services for long. He said the county was lucky to get affordable units reserved there while bond money was available and a developer was willing.

“There’s going to be future development out there and it’s going to be high-priced,” Taylor said. “You have to keep in mind that, had we not participated, this project would have been built anyway.”

The projects were the first large low-cost apartment developments for either the city or the county. Until their approval, developers who were willing to reserve 20% of their units for low-income families in exchange for the low-interest loans from the bond revenues built only a few dozen units at a time.

Both the city and the county will check the income qualifications of families signing up for the affordable units. Public assistance agencies will refer potential residents to the apartments, officials said.

Most fears that inexpensive housing might correspond to slum-like housing have evaporated as neighbors have watched the two projects take shape.

‘They Look Nice’

“They look nice,” said Ruth Abel, who lives in a hillside neighborhood that overlooks the Warner Center apartments. But she said she is worried about traffic congestion.

“I don’t have a problem with the affordable housing aspect of it,” said Bob Gross, a neighbor and a vice president of Woodland Hills Homeowners Organization.

“Any community can afford to have some set-aside low-income housing. It’s essential. Every community has low-income people who should have a chance to grab the ring, to live with dignity.”

Gross said residents are worried about the project’s effect on traffic in the congested Warner Center area. He said there is widespread doubt that many of the new renters will be Warner Center employees who will walk or ride bicycles to work as urban planners who designed the Warner Center concept speculated.

Morton Thomas, who rents a Warner Center town house next to the apartments, said he has postponed the planned purchase of his condominium until he has a chance to gauge the apartment traffic. “It’s frightening to think of what it could be like,” Thomas said.

Watching Traffic Patterns

City planners will also closely watch traffic patterns once the newcomers move into the apartments, said Jim Dawson, staff land-use specialist for Councilwoman Joy Picus, who represents the Warner Center area.

City planners say Picus has closely monitored the apartment project since development of the site was proposed in 1977. Picus is credited with persuading the former owner of the site to cut the development density to half of what was called for in a previous city master plan.

Traffic flow from the apartments will be factored into two major traffic studies that are getting under way for the Ventura Boulevard and Warner Center areas, Dawson said. Those studies will help determine traffic management strategies through the turn of the century.

Dawson said updated traffic statistics for Warner Center are being gathered to replace estimates made in 1978 when an environmental impact report for the site was prepared.

That environmental assessment, now all but forgotten in a cardboard box at a city warehouse, predicted that development would have a significant effect on traffic, but an effect that could probably be handled with the widening of two streets near the site and installation of a traffic signal at Burbank Boulevard and Owensmouth Avenue.

School Boundaries

The report also forecast that the development might require that local school attendance boundaries be shifted “to maintained balanced school enrollments among nearby schools.”

The widely heralded slump in West Valley school enrollment has changed that, however.

“We don’t know how many children we’ll get from those apartments,” said Darell Hughes, a counselor at nearby Parkman Junior High School. “We were trying to guess the other day. But we don’t see any problem. We’re only about two-thirds full now.”

Officials at Las Virgenes Unified School District, which operates Calabasas schools, are trying to predict how many children will come from Malibu Canyon Apartments.

District Supt. Albert D. Marley said his staff has devised a formula.

“We studied a large apartment complex in Thousand Oaks and came up with a set of factors,” Marley said. “We know it will have an impact. We just don’t know how much.”

The environmental impact report for the Calabasas project sheds little light on the situation because it was written early in the development application process, when 824 units were being proposed.

Density Lowered Twice

The density was lowered twice after that because of complaints from neighbors. The county’s Regional Planning Commission dropped it to 765 units, and county Supervisor Mike Antonovich further reduced it to 698.

Calabasas residents who opposed the project claimed that the apartments would be built in a potentially dangerous flood plain. During county hearings, they also objected to its density, arguing that 400 units would be less ugly and more appropriate for their semi-rural area.

Completion of the first phase of the apartments has erased some of those fears, Calabasas residents say.

“They didn’t do such a bad job,” said Jeff Taub, president of the local residents group, Malibu Canyon Park Homeowners Assn. “The colors are reasonable, the buildings are in different directions and shapes. I was surprised.

“People’s first thought is, ‘There sure are a lot of them.’ But the second comment is, ‘But you know, it’s not really as terrible as I expected it to be.’ ”

Neighbor David Brown, president of Las Virgenes Homeowners Federation and an opponent of the project, said there are not enough jobs in the region to support occupants of 698 units. He said he remains concerned that the project will not be fully occupied.

Concern Over Trend

“If they have trouble renting them, I’m afraid they’ll then have trouble keeping up the project,” Brown said.

Brown said he and other homeowners are concerned that the project could signal a trend for other landowners to turn ranchland in the area into high-density multifamily housing projects.

The apartments are viewed positively by Hans Hanson, co-owner of the 500-home neighborhood’s lone convenience market. Hanson said he is more than doubling the size of his 960-square-foot store and putting in a walk-in cooler to handle the expected rush of business from the apartments.

Some in the neighborhood complain that Casden’s representatives failed to reveal that they were also planning the large affordable city project in Woodland Hills when they applied for development permits from the county.

Will Smolen, vice president of Casden Co., said his firm “did disclose we were getting involved in another project” toward the end of the county hearing process. That timing was because “we got involved with the Warner Center project very late in the process,” he said. Another company had initiated the project in 1977.

Extra Amenities

Smolen said both projects have turned out to be “very good-looking” developments. Both have design features and recreational facilities not found in other reasonably priced housing projects, he said.

Space for plenty of on-site parking has been set aside in both projects, Smolen said. There are about 2.25 parking spaces a unit in Calabasas and about 2.5 spaces a unit in Woodland Hills--ratios more often found in condominium projects than in apartments, he said.

“We think Joy Picus, and everybody else, is going to be pleased,” he said.