Council to Consider Apartment Complex

The Thousand Oaks City Council on Tuesday will consider whether to allow a developer to build 108 apartments in an industrial area, an issue the city’s Planning Commission deadlocked on last Monday.

Shapell Industries of Beverly Hills wants to build the apartments at the southeast corner of Lawrence Drive and Rancho Conejo Boulevard.

For the development to take place, the City Council would have to amend the land-use portion of the city General Plan from industrial to high-density residential for that 6.6-acre area.

Planning commissioners voted 2 to 2, which results in a “no action” vote on whether to amend the General Plan for the development. City planning officials had recommended the change.

Commissioners Linda Parks and Ronald Polanski opposed it, while Commissioners Forrest Frields and John Powers supported it. Commissioner Marilyn Carpenter was absent.

Parks and Polanski questioned whether apartments belonged in an area surrounded by industry, and they noted that the apartments would conflict with Thousand Oaks’ policy that no more than 20% of the city’s housing stock should be apartments.

Currently, about 25% of the housing in the city is multifamily dwellings, but that number is expected to go down soon as more single-family housing is built, according to city officials.