Anaheim Planning Commission meeting for Januarly 18, 2023

The Anaheim Planning Commission has a scheduled meeting on January 18, 2023 at 5:00pm in the city council chambers. The agenda for the meeting is available online.

There are two items on the agenda, an application for a liquor license and an application for a new condo community.

Item 1 - Liquor License - 1020 North Euclid Avenue

Item 1 on this week’s agenda is an application for an Alcohol Beverage Control (ABC) license for a new grocery store at the corner of Euclid and La Palma. The staff report can be found online.

This new store is currently being built out in an existing retail building that had previously been a Ralphs grocery store. The ABC license would only allow for sales of alcohol for off-site consumption, and not allow people to drink the alcohol at the store.

Requests for ABC licenses only come before the planning commission if its for business located in a census tract that has a high concentration of existing licenses or if it’s in a police reporting area that has a higher crime rate than average for the city. This is dictated by state law, and is not something that the city has a lot of control over other than to approve or deny the application.

With that said, public hearings for liquor licenses are largely pointless and the law should be changed so they’re not required. I’ve never seen one of these applications be rejected. On top of that, the standards for what triggers a public hearing don’t make much sense.

The crime stats are based on the average for the city, but do not take into account whether the city has high or low crime overall. Also, there is no tie between the type of crime and alcohol. For this application, there were 164 crimes including 68 thefts, 25 vandalisms, and 51 drug violations, which don’t seem to be the types of crimes that are exacerbated by alcohol.

Additionally, the number of permitted licenses without a hearing in each census tract doesn’t take into account the type of development in each tract. Census tracts are small, and ones like this one incorporate part of a major commercial area, whereas others are primarily residential. Strangely, the residential tracts can have more licenses because they have more residents. That just seems backwards.

Coming back to this specific project, the application was on the December 5, 2022 agenda. For some reason it was continued to this meeting for more study. I’m interested in understanding what needed additional study for this application.

Item 2 - Condo Development Application - 2219 West Orange Avenue

Item 2 on this week’s agenda is a collection of actions for the development of a new 24-unit condo community located on Orange Street just west of Brookhurst. Ten percent of the units will be affordable to moderate income buyers. The staff report can be found online.

This application includes a General Plan Amendment, Zone Change, Conditional Use Permit (CUP), Tentative Tract Map (TTM), and certification of a Mitigated Negative Declaration (MND).

The site currently is home to Faith Lutheran Church. The church is going to subdivide their property, keeping the main church building while demolishing the existing preschool and daycare buildings.

Due to the space limitations of the site, the developer is proposing reducing some of the setbacks and building separation below what is required by code. They are achieving this partly through a density bonus agreement they get as part of the affordability restrictions, and partly through processing the CUP, which allows for consideration of the smaller setbacks. As stated in the staff report, “this is consistent with modifications granted previously to similar projects.”

In fact, everything about this project appears to be consistent with other approved projects. Every time a project comes before the Planning Commission or City Council and is approved, it’s a policy failure. Our General Plan and zoning code should clearly identify what we want built in our city, and make it easy for developments that meet those standards to be approved.

Applications for this project were originally submitted in 2021, and it has taken more than a year to get to a hearing for approval. While not every part of this application could be approved at the staff level, Anaheim could reduce the number of asks projects like this are making.

The only part of this project that is required to come before the commission and council for consideration is the Tentative Tract Map. All of the other requests should be consistent with the City’s code. So how can the City modify its code to ensure projects that are routinely approved can move forward without a public hearing?

The existing General Plan land use designation for this site is Corridor Residential, which allows for “single-family attached housing fronting on arterial highways and incorporating a rear access drive or service alley” at a density of up to 13 units per acre. The General Plan should allow for much higher densities and many more building types along the city’s arterial corridors. The Corridor Residential land use should be consistent with the requirements of the newly enacted AB 2011. If this proposal was consistent with the land use designation of the site, then the project would be eligible for a Class 32 exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA) for urban infill projects, which would mean the MND would not have been required.

The zoning designation for this site is Transitional, which is often used between two zones where the city doesn’t really know which way the parcel will go. In this case, the site is between the commercial uses on Brookhurst and the residential uses on Orange. The city should eliminate the use of the Transitional zone, and should rezone these properties to be consistent with the General Plan. The use of the Transitional zone requires that a zone change be considered before anything is developed on these sites.

An example of parallel sidewalks. Even my son said, “That sidewalk configuration is stupid, why don’t they just make one bigger sidewalk.”

City standards require that a private sidewalk is provided on the interior of the site, even when that sidewalk runs parallel to the public sidewalk. This is a complete waste of land and resources. This project includes two sidewalks along the frontage with Orange Ave., separated by a short wall. This makes the experience of walking along the public sidewalk worse because it makes for a more boring walk than if the homes were closer to the street. With this project being so close to Brookhurst Ave., which has significant amounts of retail and transit, this should be a site where we’re maximizing the walkability for not only the residents that will live here, but those that live nearby.

Detail of proposed street frontage with double sidewalks.

Additionally, the space for the sidewalk and wall force the buildings further back into the property. In this case, there is an additional eight feet of setback along the street frontage. Without this, the buildings could be shifted eight feet towards the street, removing the need for any modification to the setback requirements along the northern property line adjacent to existing single-family homes.

The developer for this project did some outreach to the neighboring community beyond what was required by statute. I’ll be interested to hear if anybody has any public comments about this project.