Southern California city takes the driver’s seat

Collaborating with a landowner, the City of Azusa attracted national firms to design a a transit-oriented community on one of the largest undeveloped infill sites in the Los Angeles region. In a region where the Playa Vista project in Los Angeles is the only example of large-scale, new urban development — and it is still an open question to what extent the final incarnation of that project will be characterized as New Urbanism — the Azusa project could become a regional model. The city has picked design firms EDAW and Torti Gallas & Partners/CHK to work together on a master plan for a 500-acre site now occupied by a nursery. Azusa City Manager Rick Cole says that some aspects of the vision may not be “pure” New Urbanism, but emphasizes that the city’s pro-active stance is a big break with common practice in Southern California. “We entered into an unusual but very productive arrangement with the landowners,” in which the landowners funded the master planning while the city began a community planning process that established a set of broad principles for the use of the site. A national design competition yielded a pool of preliminary concepts and the city picked four finalist to submit more detailed plans. Two of the four firms, Torti Gallas and Lennertz Coyle & Associates, are explicitly new urbanist. The third, EDAW, has moved in that direction while resisting the New Urbanism label, and the forth firm, Forma, designs conventional communities with a strong emphasis on integrating technology. “The competition was a way to start from scratch and clear away the bad taste left by a previous developer-driven proposal,” Cole says. This conventional project was narrowly approved by the city council but rejected by voters in a referendum. This time around, community members got involved early and helped assess the final four proposals. “EDAW and Torti Gallas scored highest with the community,” Cole says, “and since the firms were compatible, we decided that they could do a better job together than individually.” EDAW, with its extensive experience in Southern California, has the primary responsibility for the overall project and will take the lead in designing the residential neighborhoods located closest to the San Gabriel Mountain foothills. Torti Gallas will focus on designing and coding the mixed-use neighborhoods near the planned light rail station, as well as providing guidance for coding remaining neighborhoods. “I expect we’ll meet somewhere in the middle,” says EDAW principal designer Steve Kellenberg. The firms’ overall concept plans contain some distinct differences, however. In the purely residential sections, EDAW uses what Kellenberg calls the “Olmstedian Romantic suburb concept,” with curvy, east-west-oriented streets and long blocks that conform to the topography. The Torti Gallas vision shows more finely grained neighborhoods on a modified, primarily north- south street grid. The mix of housing types within blocks is more pronounced in the Torti Gallas plan — EDAW proposes the use of “mini-super pad housing increments.” Kellenberg explains that master developers in Southern California typically avoid the business of selling improved lots and instead deliver graded “super pads” to builders, who then take care of infrastructure improvements. “It reduces the capital outlay for the master developer, but leads to neighborhoods with large tracts of identical houses.” The “mini-super pad” concept is a move toward the finer grain of new urban communities — the increments are much smaller to encourage greater variety in home design — but still familiar enough to fare well in the local market place. Three-hundred of the 500 acres are developable — the city wants to preserve the remaining 200 acres in the foothills. The project will likely have 1,500 to 1,700 residential units and neighborhood-oriented retail in conjunction with an office campus in the form of a town center near the rail station. A light rail connection from Los Angeles to Pasadena is scheduled to open in 2003, and Azusa would be a stop on the planned extension of that line from Pasadena to Claremont. The final master plan is due in April and will become part of the city’s general plan slated for adoption in the fall. “We will not use the usual intermediate step of a specific plan, but go directly to entitlement under the general plan,” Cole says. “We don’t want to take it completely out of the context and have it drag on for years.” The project is subject to approval from the city council and eventually Azusa voters. After that, a developer will have to be found to make the project a reality. Cole notes that the public mood has changed profoundly since the previous development proposal was rejected. “The absence of a developer, particularly a ham-fisted developer, has drained the toxicity out of the process. Secondly, the community has moved from a near-obsessive fixation on density to a much broader focus on quality development,” he says.