Grounds for Debate : Park Del Amo Project Nears Completion in Torrance but Deal That Preserved Madrona Marsh Still Draws Fire

It was hailed as a landmark agreement, one that would allow development of the largest tract of open land in Torrance while saving one of the last rain-fed marshes in Southern California.

In exchange for preserving the 43-acre wetland known as Madrona Marsh, the agreement permitted developers to build more intensively on most of the remaining 139 acres.

But now, five years later, as the $300-million Park Del Amo residential and office project nears completion in the middle of Torrance, there is mounting criticism of the density-for-open-space deal.

The chorus of complaints has grown louder in recent months as row after row of tightly packed, architecturally indistinct condominium townhouses have gone up on the land.

The developer says he is proud of the project, which will be home to at least 2,500 people, and points to its success with buyers as evidence of its attractiveness.

Critics’ Views

But critics say Park Del Amo is too big, too dense and too out of character with the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

“The community at large doesn’t like what they see over there,” Torrance City Councilwoman Dee Hardison said in an interview. “They ask, how could we allow something that dense, that ugly into our city?”

“It is appalling to me,” said Sam Suitt, founding president of Friends of Madrona Marsh, a grass-roots group that fought to preserve the marsh. “What was built does not bear any resemblance to what was presented to the City Council.” Instead of the lake-front condominiums, meandering paths and randomly spaced buildings that were promised, he said, “It’s barrack-style architecture.”

During years of debate about the project, Hardison said: “Everybody focused on the marsh. The concern was only saving the marsh. Nobody really paid too much attention to what (Park Del Amo) was supposed to look like. Now, five years later, we are seeing the fruits of the labor.”

Torrance Planning Director David Ferren said he frequently hears criticism of the project, particularly about “the sameness” of the buildings and their closely packed appearance. “It looks too dense,” Ferren said. “The people in the city for the most part are used to a single-family life style. When they look at this type of product, they don’t understand that it’s a different type of life style.”

And that life style will become more prevalent, Ferren and others predict, as South Bay land values and housing prices soar and builders construct denser developments to provide homes people can afford.

Indeed, whatever the aesthetics of Park Del Amo, it is selling. More than 1,060 of the project’s 1,256 condominiums have already been sold, according to the builder, Watt Industries of Santa Monica. Chairman Ray A. Watt said he is “very proud” of Park Del Amo.

In an interview, he defended the project’s density of up to 21 residential units per acre and noted that the project as built has 226 fewer units than the 1,482 units originally approved.

“It’s . . . more dense than what it used to be,” Watt cracked. “On the other hand, there are more people today than there used to be.” Watt said such density is needed to provide “housing that young people can afford.”

But it takes a substantial income to afford a condominium. Units in Park Del Amo are priced from $225,000 for a two-bedroom, 1,200-square-foot condominium to more than $400,000 for a detached three- or four-bedroom, 2,300-square-foot “patio home” with a small yard.

Only 13% of the households in Los Angeles County could afford the cheapest unit at Park Del Amo, according to the California Assn. of Realtors. The monthly mortgage, taxes and insurance payment would be $1,747 a month at current interest rates, assuming a 20% down payment.

There is no shortage of buyers, some of whom have camped out overnight or waited in line morning and night for a chance to buy one of the units before they were even built.

About 75 people showed up Saturday morning for a lottery to select buyers for 28 of the least expensive condominium units. Watt attributes that kind of demand to the project’s location in the commercial heart of Torrance, close to major employers and “that big gorgeous amenity, the Pacific Ocean, which attracts everybody.”

“We have done everything we can to keep the price affordable as much as possible. We spent a tremendous amount of time identifying what the consumer wants, and we’ve given it to them. We’re just letting the free marketplace dictate what is needed, and we are responding to serve that market.”

One buyer, Anne Hicks, grew up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula. In an interview, Hicks said she and her husband, Bryan, lived in a rented Torrance apartment for eight years to save money for a home of their own. Hicks said she checked in at the sales office twice a day for a week and a half for a chance to buy a unit in Summerwind, one of the five residential “villages” at Park Del Amo. The condominiums in Summerwind are the most densely packed in the project.

“To buy something brand new for $200,000 is incredible,” she said the other day while washing her BMW in the driveway outside her unit.

Like other Park Del Amo buyers, Hicks knew firsthand that prices of most single-family homes in surrounding neighborhoods are far higher. She said she had no reservations about buying a unit before it was built. “The demand is so high, we knew we’re not going to have any trouble selling it.”

By the time the couple moved in last November, the price of their unit had jumped $35,000. “We totally believe we paid for the location,” she said.

‘Close to Everything’

Former Torrance Mayor Ken Miller, a real estate agent, agreed that geography is the key to Park Del Amo’s success. “The location of that development is just perfect for people,” said Miller, who has not been involved in any Park Del Amo sales. “It’s close to everything.”

Coldwell Banker real estate agent Susanne Ganley, who has sold units at Park Del Amo, said the project has proven attractive to buyers because it is “a nice place to live.”

Ganley said the units are in great demand because they are affordable compared to homes in Torrance. She said buyers like the security of a private, gated community and the location near their jobs. “A lot of people work in the Torrance community and don’t want to commute,” she said.

Another Park Del Amo resident, who would not identify herself, complained that the walls are too thin, the driveways too narrow and the units too close together. But, she said, “We have to live somewhere.” And she expressed pleasure with the recent rise in prices at the project. “It’s the law of supply and demand,” she said. “There is such a housing crunch. Every square foot is going to be built on. You’ve got the jobs here.”

The surplus of jobs and shortage of housing in Torrance is reflected in Planning Department statistics that indicate there were 103,462 jobs in the city at the end of 1987 and only 52,919 housing units.

Bill Klement, president of the homeowners association of Springwood, another of Park Del Amo’s villages, said the buildings, grounds and recreational facilities are well-maintained. “The pool is warm. The Jacuzzi is hot. I enjoy what you call the good life.”

Wants to Build More Units

The residential part of the project has been so successful that Watt wants to build 226 more condominium units on land originally intended for office buildings. But he said the commercial part of the project has been hurt by a high office vacancy rate in the South Bay and Park Del Amo’s distance from freeways. (The Harbor Freeway is 2 1/2 miles away.)

“The commercial part has never really taken off like we thought it would,” Watt said. Only two office buildings have been built, and a third, a Southern California Gas Co. office, is under construction. The office buildings and nearby Marriott Courtyard Hotel account for less than half the commercial space originally approved for Park Del Amo.

With a surplus of office space and a shortage of housing, Watt and other developers are responding with densely configured residential developments. Land in Torrance costs as much as $1 million an acre, so most developers are getting more out of the land by building condominiums or “patio-style homes”--houses with one wall built on the property line, leaving a small patio area.

Watt is planning nearly 100 homes on a nearly 15-acre site in west Torrance once occupied by the Torrance Drive-In theater. Across Torrance Boulevard, another developer has built 87 condominium units on 3.2 acres in the Pacific Terrace project.

A third developer, Arthur Valdez, recently obtained permission to build 52 patio homes on a nine-acre former school site near Hawthorne and Lomita boulevards, but only after he bowed to pressure from neighbors and scaled back the project from the original 174 units.

Limits Urged

“The trend is and has been for as long as I can remember that the more urban the area is, the higher the density,” said Jerry Gates, president of Watt Homes.

Suitt, the marsh preservationist, has a different view. “People have to realize there are limits,” he said. “The land isn’t getting any bigger with the population.”

He said Park Del Amo has become “a symbol . . . of the impact of development and density in general.” As long as that kind of intense development continues, Suitt said the South Bay faces a dark future of greater and greater density, traffic and congestion.

Critics of Park Del Amo often ask, “How did you ever allow them to do that?” according to Planning Director Ferren. The answer is not a simple one.

The 182 acres bounded by Madrona Avenue, Sepulveda Boulevard, Crenshaw Boulevard and Monterey Street made up the largest piece of open land in Torrance when a real estate partnership first proposed a residential and commercial development in 1973.

Madrona Marsh, a seasonal wetland fed by winter and spring rains, occupied the western edge of the property. Oil wells worked the marsh and much of the adjoining land. Farmers grew strawberries, corn, pumpkins, tomatoes and green beans on the agricultural land farther east across Maple Avenue--where the condominiums now stand.

The Del Amo Fashion Center directly west had become Los Angeles County’s largest shopping mall, and increasing property values made the vacant land a prime candidate for development. To protect the wetland, the Friends of Madrona Marsh group was formed in September, 1973, and throughout the rest of the 1970s it urged the city to seek federal and state park funds to buy the marsh. But Torrance’s early efforts to obtain outside funds were unsuccessful.

The real estate partnership’s initial development proposal was withdrawn because of citizen opposition and lack of financing. But in the early 1980s, the battle for the marsh intensified when the property’s owner, Santa Fe Land Improvement Co., an arm of the Santa Fe Railway, teamed up in partnership with Watt, Del Amo mall developer Guilford Glazer and office park builder Shurl Curci. Santa Fe also operated oil wells on the land.

In January, 1981, the partnership--known as Torrance Investment Co.--proposed building 2,500 residential units, including a 10-story senior housing building on land directly north of the marsh. High-rise office buildings were planned for the eastern part of the property. Only 10 acres of the marsh would be preserved.

The plan generated a storm of protest from defenders of the marsh, who packed public meetings to warn that the development would inevitably destroy the wetland. Within a year, the developers had scaled down their plans to 1,700 residential units, including four-story senior citizen housing, and seven-story office buildings. The proposal included an offer to sell 15 acres of the marsh.

The Torrance City Council approved the scaled-down project in February, 1982, overruling the city’s Planning Commission, which had rejected the plan because it would not provide enough senior housing or preserve enough marsh.

The council’s action sparked public outrage. Within three weeks, an initiative campaign collected more than 14,000 signatures to overturn approval of the project.

“The proposal was so absurdly out of scale that it generated opposition itself,” Suitt said. “People were just enraged. Within 48 hours, we knew we were going to prevail.”

Then-Mayor Jim Armstrong said protection of the marsh became “an emotional issue. It became a rallying point. It was an early omen, a forerunner of a concern . . . about growth and density, which we now have full force.”

Mayor Katy Geissert, then a council member, said the fight over Park Del Amo was “a classic land-use struggle between development rights and community desire.”

Geissert said preserving the marsh became “a symbol of community values. There were people who didn’t know the difference between one bird and another” but who still wanted “a peaceful place in the middle of this city untouched by development.”

Voter Reaction

So strong was the wave of public concern about the project that two weeks after its approval, voters swept onto the council Mark Wirth, a member of Friends of Madrona Marsh. Faced with the prospect that a referendum to overturn the approval would be successful, the new City Council reversed itself in June, 1982 and rescinded its approval of Park Del Amo.

Once again, the developers were forced to lower their sights.

Determined to reach a compromise, Watt entered into private negotiations with Friends of the Marsh and two homeowners associations on a deal that would preserve the marsh and allow the project to proceed.

“In my judgment what was being requested by Friends of the Marsh was reasonable and we should recognize it and work it out with them,” Watt said in the interview.

Others in his development partnership, including Glazer and Santa Fe, resisted the idea of not building on the marsh, Watt said, but he persuaded them that “it would be best just to let me resolve it and work out the numbers to where everyone could live with them.”

The deal called for the developers to donate 34.4 acres of marsh to the city of Torrance and sell 8.5 acres for $1.5 million, which the city obtained through a state wetland preservation fund. The figure was far below the land’s market value.

Opposition Concedes

In exchange, the Friends and the homeowner associations agreed not to oppose construction of 1,482 residential units and 850,000 square feet of office space on the remaining land.

“We essentially concluded that this was probably the best we would be able to do,” Suitt said.

With the deal set, the City Council approved the compromise package and Park Del Amo was born in late August, 1983, amid much back-slapping.

But for three more years, Torrance battled with the development partnership over terms for transferring ownership of the marsh to the city. It wasn’t until September, 1986, that the dispute was settled in private discussions between Geissert and Watt and construction of most of the condominiums was approved.

Throughout the struggle, Watt and Glazer contributed--sometimes in large amounts--to the campaigns of six of the seven Torrance City Council members.

“Our philosophy isn’t asking something special for us,” Watt said, “but just supporting what is best for the total community.”

Apart from campaign contributions, what raised the most eyebrows during the Park Del Amo deliberations was the decision of longtime Torrance City Manager Edward J. Ferraro to join Watt Industries when he retired in January, 1983.

Was ‘Principal Player’

Suitt still is critical of the role Ferraro played while city manager. “He was responsible for putting the development on a fast track. He greased the wheels at City Hall. We knew the developers got copies of everything we sent to City Hall. . . . He was the principal player in those days.”

Ferraro, now a builder in San Diego, acknowledged his role. “I put everything on a fast track because it was a major piece of property,” he said. “You don’t treat several hundred acres like a city lot.”

As city manager, “I was responsible for the development of the city,” Ferraro said. “That was my job. . . . I always considered myself the development guy for the city of Torrance.”

Ferraro said he did provide copies of material from Friends of Madrona Marsh to the developers on occasion and insisted: “There is nothing in my role that I am ashamed of.”

But Suitt said Ferraro should have disqualified himself from any involvement with processing of the Park Del Amo project as soon as he knew that he might go to work for Watt. “If that wasn’t a conflict of interest, then the term has no meaning,” Suitt said.

Ferraro denied the charge. “I didn’t do anything.” He said he never appeared before or lobbied Torrance officials on Watt’s behalf. “I never made a phone call. I didn’t lean on anybody.”

He described Watt as “Mr. Torrance” because of his role in building more than 5,000 homes in the city. Watt built his first house in Manhattan Beach in 1949. He has since built $6.8 billion worth of residential and commercial projects in California and other states.

Watt hired Ferraro to handle time-share developments in San Francisco and Palm Springs.

“He was interested in learning the development business,” Watt said. “He knew the processing that took place in municipalities and we had property in different communities that he felt he could work at. There was never an intent for him to become a permanent employee. He was interested in learning more about the builder’s role and then wound up being one himself.”

Echoing other observers, Ferraro said the “atrocious” density of Park Del Amo came about because “the emphasis was purely marsh” during consideration of the project.

Councilman Tim Mock said the deal was simple. “We gave them greater density if they donated the marsh.”

An environmental impact report said that in addition to adding people and removing open space, construction of the project would worsen existing traffic congestion even with the street and signal improvements that were required. The report said the project also would generate air pollution and noise.

Benefits Weighed

Torrance decision-makers saw a greater good.

“The development of the property . . . will result in numerous public benefits,” the development agreement said. “The city’s housing supply will be increased significantly. This new housing will be designed to meet the needs of first-time home buyers and young families. The commercial office development will expand the permanent employment base of the city. The entire project will increase the city’s tax revenues. The mixed-use nature of the project will allow persons to reside and work in the same area, reducing the impacts on traffic congestion, energy consumption, and air quality.”

Torrance officials, while privately critical of what has been built, to this day defend the deal that allowed Park Del Amo to be built.

“It was the best decision the council could come up with in terms of preserving Madrona Marsh,” said Mock.

Geissert said: “It was probably as good a deal as we were going to get. We had a substantial dedication of land. We had an opportunity with state money to buy eight acres at a greatly reduced price. The time seemed right for what appeared to be reasonable development of the land.”

But Geissert said what was built “looks much denser than I ever expected it would.” Although the density is far less than Torrance’s densest neighborhood--the apartment complexes along Anza Avenue that contain 43 or more units per acre--she said the Park Del Amo project is so big that it makes the development seem “much more dense.”

She noted that “the community doesn’t like it, the residential aspect. Generally the comments are that it is too dense.”

Hardison said the project was sold to the community on the basis of senior citizen housing, but none was ever built after it proved to be uneconomical.

Geissert called the senior housing pitch “a sham.”

Ironically, Councilman Wirth, who was elected because of his opposition to overdevelopment, praises the project. “It’s so much less than what could have been there,” he said. “It provides drastically needed housing. It’s residential, not commercial. It’s something that allowed us to preserve the marsh.”

Uncomfortable for Residents

Wirth acknowledges that it is uncomfortable for longtime Torrance residents to drive down Sepulveda Boulevard and see Park Del Amo where once there were farms and fields. “It’s not the Torrance that many of us remember.”

The councilman said he too hears a lot of critical comments from people who “are not comfortable with the uniform look” of the condominiums. “It seems like everything is the same.”

Planning Director Ferren said many in the city are not happy with how Park Del Amo turned out. “I don’t think it’s something we are going to jump up and down with pride and beat our chest over,” he said.

THE PARK DEL AMO DEVELOPMENT VALUE: $300 million* POPULATION: 2,500* SIZE: 182 acres, including marsh RESIDENTIAL: 1,256 units built 1,482 units approved COMMERCIAL: 355,600 square feet developed 850,000 square feet approved

* Estimate

Sources: Watt Industries, Environmental Impact Report