Homes Slated for Caltrans Parcels
The weed-filled pockets of vacant land alongside the Santa Ana Freeway are making neighbors anxious. The scattered plots--about the size of tiny parking lots--have been all but left to rot. Perfect hangouts for loiterers and graffiti scrawlers.
They hardly seem like prime real estate.
Yet Santa Ana officials say people will be clamoring to live on them in a matter of months.
That’s because the city’s redevelopment agency is moving to buy dozens of the disconnected freeway-side spaces and plant a single-family home atop each one. It’s a break from the routine in redevelopment, which typically involves a community of homes or a shopping center built atop a vast, blighted industrial space.
Many of these patches are places where homes and businesses once stood but were demolished by the California Department of Transportation to make room for a wider freeway. Caltrans is now selling those parcels, and the city is gobbling them up along with a few other vacant properties elsewhere in town that will also be part of the project.
In all, about 30 homes are expected to be built on the abandoned lots.
“Many of these properties have the potential to become blighted,” said Patricia Whitaker, Santa Ana’s housing manager. “They are an attractive place for people to throw trash or for kids to assemble on their bikes.”
The properties will cost the city $40,000 to $70,000 apiece. City officials said that many of them are undesirable to free-market builders: They might be difficult to build on because of their triangular shape or are so close to traffic that builders fear nobody would pay enough to buy the home to make it worth their while. City subsidies, however, will lower the monetary risk.
The city is still acquiring properties, surveying the sites before making purchases to see whether homes can even be built. “Sometimes we start researching these places and find they have 30-foot sewer easements right through the middle of them, making it impossible to build,” said Josie Laquay, a district manager with the city redevelopment agency.
City officials said that despite the problems, the lots--and the eventual homes on them--will be attractive to buyers because they are in vibrant neighborhoods and will be priced affordably.
To keep prices down, the city anticipates absorbing the land costs.
At least some of the homes will probably fall in or below the $200,000 range. All will be sold only to families making less than 120% of the median annual income in the county--or $78,000 for a family of four.
City officials will begin recruiting builders in the coming months. Before that, however, they will journey to the neighborhoods that contains the parcels to consult residents on the types of homes they would like to see. Some of the areas are home to bungalows and other distinct architectural styles.
“We’re going to develop to the standard of what is already in the neighborhood,” Whitaker said.
Allen Baldwin, who advocates for affordable housing as executive director of the Orange County Community Housing Corp., said that although the handful of homes built won’t go far in easing the area housing crunch, he applauds the project:
“This is good for neighborhood anchoring. You are ridding the neighborhood of a dangerous vacant lot and replacing it with a new, affordable home. It makes all the sense in the world.”
