Torrance Council OKs Development Plan for Former School Site

With the lukewarm consent of homeowners, the Torrance City Council has unanimously approved a plan for 52 single-family homes and a 43,500-square-foot office building on the site of the former Meadow Park School and adjacent parking lot.

Val-Co Enterprises of Torrance will build the project on the 9-acre former school site and on 2 acres of the adjoining lot at the northwest corner of Lomita and Hawthorne boulevards. The 2,300- to 3,200-square-foot homes will sell for more than $600,000.

“This has been a long process with lots of ups and downs,” Val-Co President Arthur L. Valdez told the council after it approved his plan Tuesday night. He said his firm had revised the project several times to gain support from the 250-member Southwood Riviera Homeowners Assn.

At its October meeting, the homeowners association finally approved the project after Valdez announced a 43% reduction in the number of units in the project, said Edward Wooley, the association president.

“What we have is minimumly acceptable, and we do not oppose it,” Wooley told the council. However, Wooley said in an interview later that the homeowners would have preferred retaining the lot as open space for public use.

Former association President Jim McEntire agreed. “We are not exactly deliriously happy with the compromise,” he said. “But we felt we could accept it.”

When the project first came before the Planning Commission in September, it included 36 patio homes, 54 townhouses and a 40,000-square-foot office building. After more than 150 association members objected to the proposal, saying the high density of residential units did not conform with the surrounding neighborhood, the commission unanimously rejected the project.

Valdez said he met with homeowners several times to negotiate a reduction in the density of units. The latest project has about the same size lots as other homes in the neighborhood, city officials said.

Construction will begin in about two months and is expected to be completed by 1990.

After the decision, Mayor Katy Geissert criticized the process that allowed the lot to be sold to a developer before it was properly zoned.

Torrance Unified School District sold the 9-acre school site to Valdez for $8.4 million in 1976, while it was zoned for public use. Valdez made a variety of development proposals--early in 1988 he asked to build 174 condominiums--before satisfying the neighbors and then the council.

Geissert said the city should have rezoned the lot for low-density residential use before allowing it to be sold. That would have reduced the negotiations among the developer, neighbors and city officials, she said.

“You were put in a tough position” by having to negotiate what could be built on the lot when it had lacked zoning for development, Geissert told Valdez.

During the meeting, Councilman Mark Wirth said he was disappointed that the houses would be sold for more than $600,000.

“The children who went to that school aren’t going to be able to afford to live there,” he said.