Council OKs 4,400-Home Development

The City Council voted unanimously Monday night to build homes for more than 10,000 people on the city’s largest undeveloped expanse of land.

The project, called Holly-Seacliff, is expected to cover 768 acres in the northwest section of the city. The land is mostly covered by oil wells scheduled to be phased out over the next 15 years. Holly-Seacliff would change the industrial look of that part of the city into an attractive “city within a city,” according to city planners.

Mike Adams, the city’s director of community development, said, “This is the largest planned community ever--the largest ever in the history of the city.”

Adams said that while about 80% of the acreage is owned by the project’s private developer, the Huntington Beach Co., there are several other landowners in the area. “What we are doing is making a plan for all of these landowners, and this area will be developed over the next 15 years,” he said.

A central point of debate during both a public hearing and council discussion Monday night was how many housing units should be built at Holly-Seacliff. Adams urged the council to approve about 5,000 residential units--a combination of single-family homes, apartments and condominiums. But council members decided to keep the number of new housing units to about 4,400, which is also what the planning commission recommended.

In urging the higher number, Adams warned the council that the state is pressing all cities to build more affordable housing for lower-income families. He said he did not expect Holly-Seacliff to have low-income homes, but that building more moderate-priced houses there would allow some families to move to new housing, thereby making less expensive homes available, “via the ripple effect,” in other parts of the city.

Holly-Seacliff is generally bounded by Ellis Avenue on the north, Huntington and Main streets to the east, Yorktown and Clay avenues to the south, and the bluffs west of Edwards Street on the west.

Advocates of the project have said that one of its most attractive features is that Holly-Seacliff would give Huntington Beach at least four more new parks. The plan calls for 92 of the 768 acres in the project to be open space. That open space would be devoted to parks, according to Mayor Thomas J. Mays.

Despite city assurances that Holly-Seacliff would not cause traffic or environmental problems, the citizens’ group Huntington Beach Tomorrow has said it has misgivings. “I see large problems,” said Loretta Wolfe, president of the group, which says it advocates “managed growth.”

In an interview, Wolfe added: “This growth will bring an infrastructure problem--things such as water availability and sewer capacity. The sewers are already at max in that area, and Coast Highway, which is the main link to the freeways from that area, is already overloaded.”

In counterpoint, Mays has said, “Holly-Seacliff will convert basically degraded land covered with oil wells and make it into one of the most beautiful areas of the city. . . .”