Simi Considers Mixed-Use Zoning Plan : Growth: Change would allow new housing and businesses to share the same block in some areas.

Despite protests from slow-growth advocates, the Simi Valley City Council is weighing a change in zoning laws that could radically alter development in the city’s future.

The plan is to rezone large parts of Los Angeles Avenue and Tapo Street for mixed-use developments, allowing new residences and businesses to share the same block--even the same buildings.

Mixed-use zoning is nothing new in Simi Valley.

City planners, updating the General Plan in 1988, touted the concept as a way to combat the city’s shortage of affordable housing.

Recently, planners put the idea on paper, hoping that such development could improve foot traffic in the business districts while enticing developers to construct affordable housing units atop new business buildings.

But it was not until Monday night that a full mixed-use zoning plan for the two business districts came before the City Council--and immediately met with sharp opposition from neighborhood groups.

Melanie Wank of Citizens for a Safe and Scenic Simi Valley said she believes that late-night noise, street glare and traffic in mixed-use districts would disturb people in nearby apartments and condominiums.

“Some of you have or have had successful businesses, and I have to ask you--would you want to live above them?” she asked council members Monday.

“For those who want affordable housing, you’re offering noise, dangerous traffic, street glare and cramped conditions,” Wank said. “And for business owners, you’re offering parking problems, playing children (and) noise.”

Wank and others said they fear that neighborhoods of street-level businesses topped by walk-up apartments would decay like some areas in the San Fernando Valley.

“We want to be a residential community, we do not want to be a San Fernando Valley,” Fred Harrison, former president of a Simi Valley neighborhood council, told council members.

“We do not want slums created by mixed use of land development,” he said. “We live here. Developers come and go.”

But Councilwoman Dorothy Mikels and other council members said they approve of the concept. But the council agreed Monday to send it back to city planners for further refinements, and so that it can be aired in front of the city’s neighborhood councils.

Mayor Greg Stratton said mixed-use zoning could be either boon or bane for Simi Valley--he’s not yet sure which.

Stratton said residential-commercial zones would serve as buffers to allow smoother transitions between neighborhoods that are now exclusively residential or all commercial and abut each other. They could also provide for a better use of land in the districts, he said.

But Stratton said the City Council wants planners to narrow the mixed-use plan somewhat--to reduce the kind of 50-apartment-per-acre zoning now allowed, and to install tighter controls over the kinds of businesses that could be built cheek-by-jowl with residences.

“It’s got potential, but it is so different and so unfamiliar to us that I’m very nervous about it because it has potential both ways,” Stratton said. “It’s not necessarily something that can be good--it can be bad.”

City Planner Dulce Conde-Sierra said the debate now may be boiling down to whether Simi Valley should grow in its business districts or remain mostly a bedroom community.

Mixed-use buildings could improve walk-in business for merchants in those areas, give the city more flexible buffers between residential and business districts and create more affordable living units that would rent for $300 to $900 a month, Conde-Sierra said.

But Conde-Sierra said her office will refine the mixed-use plan before presenting it to the neighborhood councils next month, with hopes of bringing a finished version back to the City Council in September.

Mixed used may have its benefits, she said, “but the mixing has to be done in an intelligent, well-designed manner.”