A sign planted by Legado Redondo opponents in the Redondo Beach Civic Center traffic circle. Photo
It was the year of mixed-use development battles in Redondo Beach.
Two separate, nearby projects along Pacific Coast Highway in South Redondo were the sharp focus of many residents, who conflated the projects based solely on their status as mixed-use projects.
One passed muster, one was stopped in its tracks, and both left local leaders considering ways to make sure that battles like the ones that took place this year never happen again.
The Legado Redondo project, heard for the first time by Redondo’s Planning Commission in March, was a consistent target of community activist organizations. Notably, Save the Riviera, a collection of Redondo and Torrance residents who live in the Hollywood Riviera, Riviera Village and the Avenues, banded together to flood Planning Commission meetings with signs, t-shirts and impassioned speeches. The mass of outcry against the project often caused meetings to stretch long into the night.
In its original design, Legado housed 180 residential units and 181,373 square feet of new development on the land that currently holds a now-shuttered Bristol Farms grocery store at 1700 S. Pacific Coast Hwy. Subsequent redesigns ultimately decreased the number of residential units to 146, and the amount of commercial square footage to 23,764, with the addition of nearly 6,000 square feet in office space.
The project’s most recent iteration also changed the architectural scheme from a modern, glass-and-concrete design to a mediterranean design, in keeping with neighbors’ wishes.
However, changes came too little, too late for the community, many of whom felt as if the developer didn’t care how the project would impact the surrounding neighborhoods.
“This thing looks to me like a subway station in downtown L.A.,” said Carol Perry at the March meeting. “We aren’t L.A. We’re a beach community, and we want to preserve that lifestyle.”
Other residents complained that they didn’t get the mailers Legado claimed to have sent to the project’s neighbors.
A later Planning Commission hearing in July found that Legado’s outreach plan began in South Redondo’s District 1 before jumping to North Redondo Districts 4 and 5.
“To me, it makes no sense to seek support of the project in North Redondo,” said then-planning commission chair Nick Biro. “I think [we] were stunned by the strategy to gain support at the other end of town, and that’s where we called it.”
By “called it,’ Biro meant the commission’s direction to staff to determine legal findings to deny the project.
In November, the commission pulled the trigger, denying Legado a conditional use permit on the merits of the 149-unit project put before them in July. Legado made an effort to introduce their smaller, 146 unit design, but were stymied by missed deadlines and incomplete submissions.
As Community Development Director Aaron Jones said in the November meeting, the project was missing elevations, as well as “any number of 10 other things it would take in order to have the project before this commission.”
That night, Legado demanded an up-or-down vote on their project, after noting that the commission can discuss and vote on the merits of the 146-unit project without staff’s review.
Biro said that he understood, but countered, “How can we discuss it if you haven’t bridged the gap to get a staff report that presents your project?”
Now, the Legado Companies have filed an appeal before the Redondo Beach City Council. They hope to share the same fate as the nearby Sea Breeze Plaza project, at 1914-1926 S. Pacific Coast Highway.
Sea Breeze, proposed by Cape Point Development, is a 52 residential unit project, with 10,552 square feet of commercial space on a 1.49 acre lot. Despite community opposition to his project, which was not quite as feverish as Legado’s, the Planning Commission approved the project, issuing a conditional use permit.
Arguments against the project from nearby residents, including significant concerns about additional area traffic and worries that an entrance/exit from an alleyway just off of Prospect Avenue, didn’t sway the commission, who felt that Sea Breeze had done enough in redesigns and concessions to mitigate the issues set forth.
That brought District 2 councilman Bill Brand into the fray. Brand filed an appeal of the commission’s decision, bringing Cape Point Development head Nick Buchanan before the City Council.
During a July meeting of the Council, Buchanan said that his vision was to fill the project with young professionals, young families, empty-nesters, first-time homeowners and people who “want to be close to where the action is.”
Despite Brand’s attempts at striking the project down in a September meeting, including comments that staff didn’t live up to a request to find findings for denying the project, Sea Breeze moved along, as Brand’s appeal was struck down on a 3-2 vote.
“[The developer has] satisfied everything we have,” said District 5 councilwoman Laura Emdee in September. “The problem is that residents are upset with zoning, with different requirements for massing, traffic and density that need to be revisited.”
Two weeks later, the council revisited mixed-use zoning discussions, voting 3-2 for city staff to write a temporary moratorium on the zoning while planning ordinances were revisited.
“Mixed-use in Redondo Beach, in my view, is broken,” Brand said, saying that the density of residential units is a health and safety issue in his argument for a moratorium.
But an emergency moratorium resolution requires a 4/5 vote of the local legislative body to take effect. Opposition from Emdee squashed Brand’s insistence that infrastructure costs for new residences are too great, and that underperforming commercial developments are an “immediate threat” to the community.
“Right, but that isn’t a current or immediate threat. We’ve known about that,” said Emdee, who also expressed concern that the city’s approval of the Sea Breeze project undermined arguments for a moratorium.
The notion of a moratorium was eventually, without a vote, “placed back in the toolbox” for the council to use at a later date, if necessary. In the meantime, however, council and staff would look to identify changes toward mixed-use zoning, following determinations made at the city’s strategic planning session.
