Azusa Puts Residents in Development Driver’s Seat

Azusa long might have epitomized those aging blue-collar cities that surround Los Angeles--acres and acres of tired, cookie-cutter homes springing from onetime orange groves and honeybee farms. If some force besides consumer demand modulated development, it was hard to discern.

But officials in the San Gabriel Valley suburb today are not only taking community planning seriously, they are engaging residents in ways previously employed only in tonier locales like Santa Monica and Pasadena.

In a town best known for its historic drive-in theater and rock quarries, average residents mix with city planners and urban designers to determine the future look of their town. No longer relegated to three-minute pleas before a City Council that would make all the decisions, Azusans now help design roadways, parks, housing and schools. And in a few months they will cast the crucial vote on plans that will govern the city’s development for decades.

The approach is in marked contrast to planning in most cities, where procedure calls for elected officials and bureaucrats to be left mostly to their own devices in drawing up development plans. Residents typically are summoned only to participate when the guidelines are all but set in stone.

Azusa is reforming the process, using as its laboratory the development of Monrovia Nursery, a 500-acre hillside tract in northeast Azusa and the largest undeveloped parcel in the San Gabriel Valley, besides the rock quarries that dot the area.

If the final plan for the nursery property is approved by voters in November, it will become a template for a general plan for the entire city.

Although it is unknown if the planning process will produce complete consensus among residents, city officials and land-use experts said the effort shows that it is not only more upscale communities that are capable of letting residents make planning decisions.

“What they’re doing is not innovative if you’re talking about the usual litany of upscale cities,” said William Fulton, a land-use expert and author of books about Southern California urbanization. “But it’s unusual to see a city like Azusa aggressively creating a sophisticated political environment where innovative ideas about growth can go down market to older suburbs.”

Others said Azusa’s planning ambitions show that the “new urbanism,” also known as “smart growth,” can spread beyond those affluent communities and newer, master-planned enclaves. Those terms are generally used to describe the trend toward communities that blend homes, shops, public spaces and mass transit--encouraging residents to walk and interact.

“It’s an older town reinventing itself,” said Azusa City Manager Rick Cole. “We’re not the best of the richest. We’re the best of the communities that look more like the majority of Southern California. But we’re benchmarking ourselves against the richest cities. We’re not going to be considered the armpit anymore.

“New urbanism isn’t about Starbucks, boutiques and artist lofts,” Cole continued, “but an alternative to these towns turning into what [author and Los Angeles social critic] Mike Davis warned would be ‘crabgrass slums.’”

Azusa’s challenge is to preserve its most ambitious plans in a situation where other middle-class suburbs have failed, Fulton said. Older suburbs often bend to the pressure of developers and swelling populations as they run out of open land, filling space with row upon row of nearly identical homes rather than consulting residents about what is most appropriate to shape their city’s character.

However, a more community-centered approach doesn’t come cheap. The city--which has the lowest median income of the seven Foothill communities from Sierra Madre to Glendora--persuaded the nursery owners to pay the bulk of the $500,000 cost of the extended planning sessions.

Although the price is high, it is a fraction of what the developer spent two years ago to push a 1,600-home development on the same parcel that voters rejected in a special election.

“The nursery spent $3 million to bludgeon the community into accepting its plan, and that crashed and burned,” Cole said. “The $500,000 is cheap by comparison.”

The nursery’s chief executive, Miles Rosedale, agreed.

“We’ve tried the more conventional method,” Rosedale said, “but this way we’ll be sure that our plan is one that the citizens of Azusa will be pleased with.”

The assurance is not ironclad, however. No matter how many residents vote to approve the nursery plans, there is no guarantee that some individual or faction won’t decide later to fight the development with a lawsuit or another city referendum.

Those attending the community sessions, most recently in mid-April at a senior center, seemed generally pleased with the progress. From 75% to 85% of the 200 residents present at the session agreed that the design was staying on a course they prescribed at an earlier meeting--including details such as creating an extensive network of hiking trails and echoing historical architecture in home designs.

Most residents said they were skeptical that their input would be incorporated into the project, but they soon realized that their fingerprints were all over the revised designs.

For example, when residents protested a preliminary version of the plan that had only three points of entry to the project, designers added four more to spread the traffic so that no one neighborhood would be impacted as heavily.

And designers realigned the streets after residents protested a major bulldozing of hillside terrain for the largest homes.

“Rather than being a developer-driven plan, I feel the city is making a genuine attempt to listen to the community and systematically address people’s concerns,” said resident activist Marianne Miasnik. “When you’re putting a brand-new community into a 100-year-old one, you have to be careful not to upset the balance.”

A map of the current development illustrates two neighborhoods: the Promenade, which centers on a strolling retail area and includes a 5.5-acre park and elementary school; and the Park, hillside homes anchored by a “village core” of retail stores and a recreation area.

Smaller green splotches of pocket parks dot the streets of the hillside development. The streets are aligned like haphazardly linked sausages, rather than the rigid waffle grids that dominate much of Southern California.

Although the design calls for only about 100 fewer units than the plan voters shot down two years ago, designers said the difference between the two plans is deeper than that number would imply.

The houses will have more distinctive architecture to reduce the mass-produced look of the region’s other developments, said Steve Kellenberg, a planner with the Irvine-based design firm EDAW.

Unlike typical suburban tracts, which might provide 10 design options for every 100 homes, the Azusa nursery plan envisions about 36 distinct designs of architectural and floor plans per 100 homes.

Planners expect the project to generate about 4,400 new residents in an anticipated 1,500 units, which include houses and apartments of various sizes and prices.

Those plans for diverse housing make some residents, even Mayor Cristina Cruz Madrid, wary of approving the project too quickly.

Saying that anything other than single-family houses isn’t needed, she said, “We have more than our fair share of affordable housing for the county.”

Cole knows that he will struggle to persuade residents of the need for a variety of housing.

Although he is not sure exactly how many apartment buildings eventually will be built, he said the prices will be “much steeper” than people are used to paying in Azusa.

The result has been a 45% jump in home prices over the last three years.

Until 1998, homes seldom sold for more than $200,000, according to a real estate database.

But now prospective buyers have signed up to pay more than $400,000 for homes in the city’s newest tract.