Planners Recommend 50% Cut in Density : Housing: If adopted by the City Council, the ordinance would reduce the number of allowable apartments, condominiums and townhouses from 40,000 to 20,000.
Despite opposition from property owners and reservations expressed by all its members, the Glendale Planning Commission on Monday narrowly approved a plan to reduce by half the number of apartments, condominiums and townhouses allowed in the city.
The commission voted 3 to 2 to recommend that the City Council adopt the sweeping density reductions covering every part of the city zoned for multifamily housing.
The commission also voted in favor of a proposal to create the zoning designation of “transitional area” between single- and multiple-family neighborhoods. In transitional areas, apartments and condominiums would have to be set back farther, could be no more than two stories and would require approval by the city’s Design Review Board.
To become law, both ordinances must win the votes of four of the council’s five members. The council will have a hearing on the proposal Feb. 27.
If approved, the ordinance would allow four units on a typical 50-by-150-foot lot in a high-density zone instead of the eight now allowed. The capacity of the same lot would be reduced from six units to three units in medium-density zones and from four units to two in the lowest multiple-density zones.
City officials estimate that the ordinance would reduce the number of potential undeveloped units from about 40,000 to 20,000.
The commission action came after four public hearings in which some residents supported the proposals, saying they were necessary to preserve Glendale’s quality of life.
But a majority of the about 250 people who attended the hearings opposed the proposed ordinances on grounds that they would lower their property values and deny them the right to develop their properties to the same degree their neighbors had.
The City Council asked the planning staff to draft the growth-reduction ordinances after several failed attempts at growth control following a population surge that began in 1986.
In the past four years the city’s population has grown from 155,000 to at least 170,000. Recent surveys suggest that number might be closer to 190,000. For the first time school overcrowding, traffic congestion, parking shortages and gang activity have become chronic problems in Glendale’s increasingly dense residential areas south of the Ventura Freeway.
The council adopted a moratorium on apartment construction in September, 1988, but the courts generally uphold such moratoriums only up to two years, James Glaser, the principal planner, said Monday.
City officials have said they fear that unless some kind of growth-control measures are in place by the end of the year, a flood of building-permit applications will follow the lifting of the moratorium.
In an attempt to forestall the potential problem, the commission endorsed a proposal that did not completely satisfy any of its members. All five commissioners said they would have preferred to implement a neighborhood rezoning plan, which would reduce allowed building density on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis--a strategy that the City Council also supports in principle.
But Glaser told the commissioners that such a process would take at least 18 months, putting its implementation far past the moratorium’s projected expiration date.
Commissioner Gerald Briggs, who introduced the ordinance, said the commission’s support of the plan was contingent on the City Council’s prompt initiation of a community rezoning plan to allow for differences between neighborhoods.
Commissioner Claudia Culling and Chairman Gary Tobian voted in favor of the ordinance. Commissioners Lloyd Boucher and Don Pearson opposed it.
Boucher said he opposed the zoning reductions because they could be modified soon by a neighborhood rezoning plan. “I prefer to vote on a zoning change once, so people don’t get changed again and again,” he said.
Pearson said he opposed the measure as “too drastic a reduction” and feared it would unfairly penalize the single-family homeowners whose houses are already boxed in by large apartment buildings.
Even the commissioners who voted for the proposal held little hope that the ordinance would do much more than provide the city with an interim control until the neighborhood plans are completed.
“We are just buying time,” Briggs said. “If we don’t do it, we’ll have an explosion of multifamily construction.”
Tobian said he would vote for the ordinance because he couldn’t think of an alternative, given the time constraints.
Cullen voted for the proposal after suggesting several alternatives to it that would have provided relief to single-family homeowners in high-density neighborhoods.
Glaser said the transitional zoning proposal is aimed at diminishing the impacts of living in a house next to large apartments--such as increased traffic, parking and loss of privacy.
It was adopted on a 3-1 vote, with Pearson voting against it because he said he needed more time to study the proposal. Boucher left the meeting a few minutes before the vote.
