Flores Speech Today May Include Call to Limit San Pedro Apartments

A grass-roots group of San Pedro residents, contending that apartment development has run amok, are pushing to have the community rezoned so that only single-family homes and duplexes will be permitted in residential areas.

The group, calling itself the San Pedro Downzoning Committee, is also asking for a moratorium on apartment building along Pacific Avenue, which is in a commercial zone. The group said it would like to see further regulations on apartment development along Pacific Avenue but has yet to formulate a recommendation.

The committee has collected about 2,600 residents’ signatures on petitions delivered this week to Los Angeles Councilwoman Joan Milke Flores, who has said that she, too, is concerned about overdevelopment and will make some announcement about it today during her State of the City address to San Pedro community leaders.

Flores has already written to Los Angeles Planning Director Kenneth Topping asking him to review development along Pacific Avenue and also to review the San Pedro Community Plan.

According to Mario Juravich, Flores’ San Pedro deputy, the letter noted that although San Pedro was downzoned when the community plan was adopted in 1980, “This is 1989. . . . It’s time to take a look, and probably further downzoning is appropriate at this time.”

Flores was tight-lipped Wednesday about what she will say in her breakfast speech today, although she did say her announcement will reflect the work her staff has done in the past six months and will not be a response to the petition.

Shanaz Ardehali-Kordich, who headed the petition effort, said she and several members of her coalition will attend Flores’ speech. She said people in the community are tired of seeing single-family homes torn down to make way for multi-unit apartment buildings. That type of development, she said, is destroying San Pedro as a residential, family-oriented community.

“San Pedro is a nice town,” she said. “But if this overdevelopment isn’t stopped, pretty soon you’re going to run into the same problems” faced by the South Bay’s beach cities.

“There are a lot of people who came here from Redondo and from Hermosa because they thought they could find here what they lost there, but it’s disappearing here too, and it’s disappearing at the hands of developers.”