With a housing project proposed at Orangethorpe and Placentia avenues, city planners are asking the community and City Council what else they may want to do in that southwestern part of town.
Would there be community support to change zoning to encourage more residential and mixed-use development in the 19 acres up against the 57 Freeway, bordered by Orangethorpe, Placentia and Crowther avenues? Maybe more high-density housing and creating a more walkable streetscape?
Placentia Director of Development Services Joe Lambert and his planning staff recently hosted the community to workshop ideas and now have a survey on the city’s website, taking input for what’s been dubbed Specific Plan 5.
Placentia recently went through a similar visioning process for its Chapman Corridor — the City Council approved the end result of that two-year process in the fall for one of the key gateways to the town. It sets development and design standards to stimulate and guide future projects to help create the environment the community wants for that high-profile stretch.
“I learned some lessons,” Lambert said. “With Chapman Corridor, at the very end, though we did outreach, the community at the very end came out and had a lot of questions.
“It ended up being successful, I’m glad everyone came out,” Lambert said, but the changes being made at that point were well into the planning process. “So this time, what I’m trying to do is a first workshop and this survey first, and then I want to present to our City Council what we hear from the community before we go any further.”
“And then we’ll be asking the City Council some questions: What would you like us to do? Because we have some big questions,” Lambert said. “So I’m trying to be a little bit more organic.”
After more of a vision is created, Lambert said the planners would then go back to the community with what was created “based on everyone’s input,” before starting the approval process through the Planning Commission and council.
A key corner in this part of town has a long-time car dealership that has closed. While Lambert and his planners were encouraging the city to try to land another dealership or a hotel to generate revenue, the council approved a different sort of revenue source, a housing project — initially for 250 units, now being proposed instead as 75 townhomes.
So, “in light of that project’s approval,” what should the vision for that part of town be, and should it even be expanded to bring in some of the more industrial area to the west.
“We’ll see what the community thinks, and we’ll see what the council thinks,” Lambert said. “Even myself as the director, I don’t know what direction we’re gonna go here, but at a minimum, the hope is as new development comes in, we can get a consistent landscaping on the streets, get more of a theme going.
“If you look at Crowther Avenue,” Lambert said about a nearby neighborhood that has seen a lot of revitalization in recent years, “you’ll see what can happen with good planning.”
The survey and more information can be found at placentia.org/1121/Specific-Plan-No-5-Update. The deadline is April 16.