Glendale Extends Moratorium on Apartment, Condo Construction

The Glendale City Council extended its moratorium on apartment and condominium construction for the second time and instructed staff members to come back in a month with proposals to lower the city’s population density.

The council voted unanimously Tuesday to extend the moratorium to give itself more time to evaluate changes to the city’s zoning code, which would require all new apartment construction to be smaller, shorter and better looking.

Council members said that the proposed ordinance should be ready for further review by June 1 and that they would vote on it by mid-July. The ordinance would become effective 30 days after its adoption.

Moratorium Extended

The initial 150-day moratorium was adopted Sept. 27 to prevent an overflow of building permit applications during reevaluation of the city’s building and zoning codes. It was extended into April on Jan. 10.

Commenting on the proposed zoning ordinance in council chambers for the first time after more than two months of public hearings, most council members seemed satisfied with the staff proposal and asked for only minor changes.

They did say, however, that additional legislation will be required to control growth of the city’s population, which stands at 165,000 and could go up by as much as 100,000 if the zoning code is not changed. Council members have said they want a maximum of 200,000 residents, as projected in the city’s general plan.

“When we saw the ordinance, we knew it wasn’t enough. It didn’t address the basic issue, which is population growth,” Mayor Jerold Milner said.

Some Oppose Proposal

Councilman Larry Zarian proposed sending letters to neighborhoods and individual homeowners to ask them if they wanted to see their home or neighborhood downzoned, which means reducing the number of allowed units on any given lot.

Some developers, real estate agents and homeowners have said they oppose downzoning because it lowers property values.

“Let the populace decide,” Zarian said. “A lot of people want to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die.”

Milner asked staff members to look at an innovative method of limiting population growth: by limiting the size of parking garages to half the size of any given property. This, added to the proposed stringent parking requirements, would limit roughly by half the number of units a developer can build on an average lot, Milner said.

Zarian, however, questioned Milner’s idea, which would also limit the number of cars to two per unit, noted Zarian. “What about families with more than two cars?” he asked.

‘Have to Live With It’

“I’d have to tell them, ‘Tough, guys, you’ll have to live with it,’ ” responded Milner, pointing out that the city’s need to reduce traffic congestion and air pollution will have to be made a priority.

Council members Carl Raggio, Dick Jutras and Ginger Bremberg said they would support more downzoning and asked the staff to change the proposed height limitation from a maximum of three stories to an undetermined but roughly equivalent number of feet.

“I understand feet better than stories,” Bremberg said.

Raggio and Milner also asked staff members to look into requiring the creation of a “buffer area” between single-family and multifamily neighborhoods that would force apartments adjacent to houses to be no bigger than two stories.

Before the council began its deliberations, it heard a request by an attorney of a developers group that about 30 projects in the final plan-approval stage that were delayed by the moratorium be given relief.

“My client has participated in the process of reevaluating the city’s building regulations and it has done so in good faith . . . now we ask you for some kind of relief,” said Dana Sherman, attorney for the Fair Growth Coalition. Milner answered that the council will look into it.