Creative Zoning Suggested to Get Child-Care Units

City planners from throughout Southern California on Friday discussed how to use creative zoning regulations to develop new facilities for child care, the homeless and the handling of toxic wastes--all the things residents don’t want in their back yard.

“Cities currently are planning for failure,” said Elizabeth Deakin, a Berkeley-based urban planner who is also a researcher at UC Berkeley, at the conference in Anaheim.

“Until recently, zoning has been used to exclude. It has been concerned about order, about compatible building styles . . . but not very much about the other things. . . . Now, we have to concern ourselves with the social and economic impact,” Deakin said.

“The big challenge is to not create boutique neighborhoods in higher density residential areas,” she said.

70 Attend

More than 70 urban planners and community activists from Orange County and from surrounding cities from Glendale to San Diego attended Friday’s meeting of the Orange County Chapter of the American Planning Assn. at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim. The purpose of the conference was to consider how zoning can be used to solve social and environmental problems such as the lack of child-care facilities, housing for the homeless and the handling of toxic materials produced by local industry.

In the past 5 years, Irvine officials told the gathering, their city has used zoning to promote creation of child-care facilities both at school sites and in business complexes. City officials estimated that more than 25% of the cities’ school-age population from kindergarten through 12th grade are children who are so-called “latch-key kids,” who would otherwise go home to unsupervised households.

Conference participants stressed, however, that they are using zoning incentives, rather than mandatory rules, to create additional child-care facilities. In the Irvine business complex, developers have been granted density bonuses of 1 1/2 square feet of commercial space for every square foot of space dedicated to day care.

“Setting aside land for child care was tantamount to heresy” a few years ago in Irvine, said Betsy Mathis, a child-care consultant and member of Irvine’s finance commission. “Now we have a system of developer incentives. . . . Now there is no argument about the need.”

Mathis has helped plan child-care sites for the Santa Margarita Co., developer of the Rancho Santa Margarita planned community in south Orange County.

John Buzas, manager of current planning at the Orange County Environmental Management Agency, said county zoning policies are changing in order to promote child care.

But again, Buzas stressed that the zoning changes are permissive rather than mandatory and simply make it easier to accommodate child-care facilities in new and existing developments. “Developers are realizing that child care is essential in their communities in order to sell them,” said Buzas, chairman of a county child-care task force.

Planners attending the conference said that while child care is a major public concern, residents worry about noise and parking problems that accompany large child-care facilities. And they noted that finding sites for facilities to house the homeless is even tougher.

Difficult to Find

“I can walk around with a million dollars in my pocket all day long, but trying to attain a site for one of these things is extremely difficult,” said Scott Mather, chairman of the Orange County Homeless Issues Task Force.

Lowering zoning restrictions for multiple tenant buildings will help solve the problem, Mather said, adding that once such facilities are established, they usually are indistinguishable from surrounding homes or apartments.

Planners said that some of the obstacles to facilities for the homeless include parking requirements and rules against increased residential density.

“I know planners are in a difficult position,” said Maya Dunne, a senior planner for the city of Irvine and former director of the Orange County Housing Commission. “They often feel that they don’t have the political support to do anything. But planners may anticipate failure before it actually occurs.”

If housing for the homeless creates a public backlash, toxic waste handling is an even tougher problem for planners. Zoning to allow toxic waste disposal sites, even with strict health and safety requirements, is nearly impossible politically because of public reaction, planners said.