San Pedro Plan Would Cut Residential Growth

A San Pedro residents panel, ending more than a year of study and debate, has recommended a series of measures to strictly limit high-density residential development in the community after a decade of rapid and controversial growth.

In a report issued Wednesday, the San Pedro Community Plan Advisory Committee called for downzoning nearly half of the community’s residential areas, designating part of downtown a historical preservation area and establishing a design review board to oversee development.

Further, the 25-member committee issued detailed recommendations on design and construction, traffic and parking, and other issues in the community, where years of anger over rapid development resulted last December in interim restrictions on new multifamily housing.

“We’ve had the fever, it broke, and now we’re moving toward a cure,” committee Chairman Noah Modisett said. “These recommendations will help bring San Pedro back to health.”

The committee’s 23-page report was submitted Wednesday to Harbor-area Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who appointed the group early last year and must now decide which of its recommendations she will shepherd through City Hall.

Although Flores reserved comment on the recommendations until she has read them, she acknowledged that she has been briefed over the months on aspects of the committee’s work. And, she said, she knew of nothing in the report that she could not support. “I have to look at it in detail,” she said. “Some things are new. But I don’t know of anything . . . that I’d have a problem with.”

Likewise, committee members and others familiar with the report said they expected the group’s findings to be supported by most of the community, including builders.

“I think (the report) will be readily accepted by the community and that includes the development community,” said Mario Juravich, Flores’ planning deputy for San Pedro. “A number of builders have told me they think limits will improve the community and, in turn, improve the value of property.”

But not all of the committee’s members were prepared to embrace the report and its recommendations. “In the long run, it will help slow the development. But it does not go far enough,” slow-growth advocate Shanaz Ardehali-Kordich said. “A lot more needs to be done to protect single-family sections and older neighborhoods.”

If approved by Los Angeles City planners and the council, the recommendations would mark be the first major revisions in five years to the 1980 San Pedro Community Plan. The plan has drawn fire in recent years because it allowed high-density development that transformed the once-quiet single-family community with new apartment buildings and condominiums during the 1980s and boosted the population by 22%.

To slow the trend toward multifamily housing and stabilize population, the committee outlined a series of zoning and land-use recommendations that would slow the growth of San Pedro’s population, which stands at almost 80,000. With the changes, several committee members said, there would be enough housing for about 90,000 residents.

By contrast, the 1985 rezoning of San Pedro permits enough development to accommodate a population of 104,000, and the community’s 1980 plan would have allowed San Pedro’s population to reach as much as 241,000.

Specifically, the committee’s report, based on a block-by-block review of residential neighborhoods, calls for downzoning an estimated 40% to 50% of the community, including large sections of the Point Fermin, Leland Park and Barton Hill neighborhoods.

The most significant change would occur with properties zoned RD-1.5, a designation that permits one housing unit for every 1,500 square feet of lot space. In San Pedro, where the average lot size is 5,000 square feet, the RD-1.5 zoning allows at least three units to be built on a single lot, and even more units--because of density bonuses--if adjacent lots are combined. Under the committee’s plan, almost half of the properties zoned RD-1.5 would be downzoned to R-2, to allow no more than two units on a lot, or R-1, which allows only single-family housing.

The report also carefully distinguishes between certain blocks of the same general area, recommending zoning that is consistent with a specific street or neighborhood. In Point Fermin, for example, the predominantly single-family properties bounded by Gaffey, 36th, Carolina and Shepard streets would see their zoning switched from RD-1.5 to R-1. However, an area just to the north, bounded by Gaffey, 36th, Carolina and Hamilton, would be rezoned from RD-1.5 to RD-2, because some multifamily housing has already redefined that area.

“Before we made our recommendations, we literally drove around the community and looked at the character of each street, what was there,” said Leron Gubler, executive director of the San Pedro Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the subcommittee on zoning and land use. “It was a subjective approach. But there was no way to develop any sort of formula that would be fair. We just looked at each street and talked over the zoning until we took a vote.”

The objectives, Gubler and other committee members said, were many, including preservation of single-family neighborhoods, encouraging high-density housing along major streets, and retaining a mix of housing at the end of certain blocks or at specific intersections.

In addition, the committee recommended the same density but taller height limits along Beacon Street south of 9th Street, creating a special zoning category to encourage yet tightly control the construction of condominiums in Old San Pedro, and blocking further residential development, in favor of commercial development, along Harbor Boulevard north of 3rd Street.

Although the zoning and land-use recommendations are the heart of the committee’s report, they represent only a portion of its vision for San Pedro.

One potentially significant recommendation calls for specific design criteria for future development. The criteria, according to Modisett, range from simple suggestions such as more landscaping to meatier recommendations that would discourage “box-like” construction and limit building heights in most cases to 30 feet. The height limit would not apply to the San Pedro coastal zone, already governed by stricter state and local guidelines.

To regulate the appearance of future development, the committee recommended formation of a seven-member design review board empowered to review projects before they are considered by city planners and the council. Board members would include at least three licensed architects as well as at least one landscape architect, building contractor and officer of the San Pedro Historical Society.

That specific recommendation may face more obstacles than others outlined by the committee, in part because design review boards in other Los Angeles city communities have been struggling to resolve controversies in development.

“There are only a limited number of design review boards so far in the city, and the process is not working well,” Don Taylor, supervising city planner for San Pedro, said Wednesday after scanning the committee’s recommendations.

The city Planning Commission and Planning Department, Taylor said, are examining alternatives that would accomplish the goal of design review boards--namely to protect a community’s interests and the development rights of builders.

Notwithstanding that potential snag, Taylor said the advisory committee’s effort to slow development in San Pedro is significant.

“This is the first time I can think of that a citizens advisory panel suggested such a communitywide reduction in multifamily housing,” Taylor said. “We hear the complaints about development in other communities, particularly in the San Fernando Valley and on the Westside, but we don’t see this.”

Other recommendations by the committee include:

* Establishing a historical preservation zone in a portion of Old San Pedro, from east of Pacific Avenue to the waterfront, between 9th and 17th streets.

*- Tighter regulations on traffic and parking, including more off-street parking spaces for new apartment and condominium projects.

* Coordinating planning decisions with Rancho Palos Verdes to assess their effect on Harbor-area traffic.

* Appointment of a new advisory committee to review other long-range community issues, including the Port Master Plan and its impact on development along the north end of Harbor Boulevard.

* Assuring that the residents of Rancho San Pedro be protected from any development that displaces them from the low-income housing project.

* Discouraging any rezoning or other actions in Barton Hill that would encourage gentrification of the neighborhood.