Simi to Loan Development Funds to School District : Growth: With the help of the city’s $300,000, hopes are that a 36-acre cornfield will become a residential neighborhood.

Frozen midway in its evolution from rural crossroads to urban core, the junction of Alamo Street and Tapo Canyon Road seems like a half-formed neighborhood.

City Hall stands on Tapo Canyon Road opposite a cornfield. That field faces a strip mall, which looks out over a dusty stand of eucalyptus trees, which in turn looks back at a dusty, trash-strewn lot next to City Hall.

On Monday night, the City Council nudged the neighborhood toward its future.

The council voted 3 to 0 to lend $300,000 in development money to the Simi Valley Unified School District, which hopes the 36-acre cornfield it owns will become dozens of homes. Councilwoman Sandi Webb, who lives near the field, abstained and Councilman Bill Davis was absent.

“It is a very important intersection to us, and obviously we’ve treated it as that,” Mayor Greg Stratton said. “It’s clearly a civic center area. But whether that’s the city center--I don’t know whether people look at it quite that way.”

Many residents regard Simi Valley as a city without a center--a hodgepodge of mixed development clustered around a bedroom community that grew haphazardly until the City Council put a leash on development in the early 1970s.

Since then, council members have focused on guiding growth in and around the Tapo Canyon-Alamo intersection. City Hall stands adjacent to the Simi Valley Library and the East Valley Courthouse.

But at the first brainstorming session for Vision 2020--Stratton’s grass-roots plan for plotting Simi Valley’s future--several residents said the area should be transformed into the city’s downtown.

And with several developments already in the works, the neighborhood seems well on its way:

* A $10-million police headquarters is scheduled to be built by 1997 on the dirt lot closest to the intersection.

* Ninety-one single-family homes are springing up several hundred yards west of the southwest corner, where once stood orange groves and eucalyptus trees.

* A developer in Westlake Village is working on building a pedestrian-oriented shopping center on 15 acres of land abutting the homes.

* Kaiser-Permanente has indicated some interest in building a medical office building on three acres nearby.

And then there is the school district’s vacant cornfield.

Planners often have been forced to bow to homeowners in nearby older neighborhoods who have been leery of anything that might destroy their rural peace.

School district officials once proposed building a high school on the field. But taxpayers refused to pay for it.

Then, the district tried in the early 1990s to create a mixed-use commercial / residential development. But neighboring homeowners swiftly shot that down in hearings, saying they did not want to live so close to commerce, traffic and noise.

Now district officials intend to proceed cautiously--with the help of the city’s $300,000 loan--on a path toward developing a residential neighborhood, which would include apartments for the elderly on six acres. The loan will pay for consultants who will study the best use for the land that would also win neighborhood approval.

The earlier commercial / residential plan “was perhaps overly ambitious,” acknowledges district Supt. Mary Beth Wolford.

Wolford said of the loan: “It will enable us to make some expert decisions on what direction we can move in. I think it’s a jewel of a piece of property right in the center of our community.”

Simi Valley residents have been picky about how the neighborhood develops, Assistant City Manager Donald Penman said.

“We view the intersection as a real important one in the community,” he said. “That’s why everyone’s real interested in seeing that the remaining development that occurs in this area will be of real high quality. . . . It can be a real focal point to the community.”