Lancaster, Palmdale United in Concern About Multifamily Buildings

A ban on new apartment construction isn’t a debate in the Antelope Valley--it’s reality.

The cities of Palmdale and Lancaster have imposed moratoriums on apartment construction in recent months, although officials in both cities say there have been relatively few units built in recent years.

With the economy and the local housing market on the rebound, officials say they are getting more inquiries from prospective apartment developers and want to review zoning plans now before problems arise later.

“It’s a moratorium to allow us time to evaluate all of the implications of multifamily housing,” Lancaster Mayor Frank Roberts said.

The Lancaster City Council in February imposed a moratorium on apartment construction that expires in January, while the Palmdale City Council in March adopted a yearlong ban. Lancaster’s measure exempts senior housing.

Roberts said his city’s moratorium was prompted in part by its past troubles with apartments.

In 1992, Lancaster spent millions of dollars to buy and raze blighted apartment buildings in a project called Operation High Desert Storm, which targeted a residential area on Cedar Avenue between avenues H-8 and H-12.

Both Roberts and Mayor Jim Ledford of Palmdale say the idea is not to prohibit apartments entirely but to plan where they will be. Although plenty of land is available for new construction, they say, just having land available is no reason to fill it with apartments.

In Palmdale, Ledford said, developers were allowed to build too many apartment buildings in the downtown area. A bad situation became worse during the recession, he said, when owners could no longer afford to pay as much for management and maintenance of their properties.

“That accelerated the deterioration of the buildings, which accelerated the deterioration of the downtown,” he said. “We need good land-use planning to prevent the kind of impacts in the future that we’ve had in the past. We’ve spent four or five years trying to clean up our downtown, and part of the problem has been the concentration of [apartments] and how those projects were managed and maintained.”

Ledford said a big part of the problem was that Palmdale permitted too many apartment units per acre and didn’t pay attention to where the complexes were being built. The city amended its general plan in 1993 to reduce the maximum allowable number of units per acre to 16 from the previous maximum of 35, but Ledford said it’s time to study other aspects of the issue in addition to number of units per acre.

“Our intention is to go through our general plan and reevaluate the conditions for approval of multifamily projects, as well as to look at the parts of the city where it might make the most sense to build them,” he said.

Ledford acknowledged that another impetus for the moratorium was concern among area homeowners.

“People who have put their entire life savings into a home are very much concerned about the impact multifamily housing might have on their neighborhoods,” he said.

According to statistics from the California Department of Finance, multifamily residences represent slightly more than 20%, or about 8,000, of the 40,000 housing units in Palmdale and about 34%, or 14,300, of the approximately 42,000 housing units in Lancaster.

Besides apartments, the multifamily figures include condominiums, townhouses and duplexes.

What’s the right mix of houses and multifamily units?

“There is no magic number,” said Laurie Lile, Palmdale planning director. “Some cities probably have much higher proportions of multifamily based on their general plans, but others develop a higher percentage of single-family housing.”

Lile said the Planning Department expects to make a recommendation to the Palmdale City Council within several months regarding the future development of apartments.

“We’ll be looking at questions like whether it’s better to disperse multifamily housing throughout the city or to cluster it in certain areas,” Lile said. After the planners make their recommendation, she said, the City Council will decide if a general plan amendment is warranted.