Rule on 2nd units reversed

Property owners in West Newport and on Balboa Peninsula won’t lose the ability to build a second unit on their single-family lots, the Newport Beach City Council decided Tuesday.

The council had considered reducing the amount of housing allowed on as many as 300 properties from two units to one unit per lot. The change would have been part of the city’s general plan update, but residents showed up about 100 strong to object, filling the council chambers and spilling into the lobby.

City officials said the proposed change had several goals. First, the trend in the area has been toward single-family rather than multi-family development, Assistant City Manager Sharon Wood said. The council wanted to mirror that trend while also reducing the expected number of car trips allowed by the general plan.

Because most of the properties likely won’t be built with multi-family units, there’s no sense in projecting that in the numbers, she said.

To Councilman Tod Ridgeway, the long-term goal was to bump up property values by encouraging owner-occupied properties. The council is also better able to regulate drug and alcohol recovery facilities in lower-density areas, and those facilities have been a concern to residents for some time, he said.

“The very thing they’re complaining about, they take away our tool to fight it,” Ridgeway said.

But so many people complained about the proposed housing change that council members preempted them by voting to keep the status quo.

“We knew pretty well before we got to the meeting that it was going to be a fairly large showing,” Councilman Steve Rosansky said.

Wood said calculating possible second units on the 300 properties in question will drive traffic projections back up, and council members have little time to trim other traffic trips from the plan if they want to have it ready for the November ballot.

“We’re trying to stop them from making any more changes so we can finish up the documentation so they can act on it,” Wood said.

But the residents are happy they will keep the right to add second units, and Wood said the change won’t be a fatal flaw in the general plan.

There may be a lesson in this turn of events, as Ridgeway explained it.

“We were well-intentioned on what we were trying to do, and they were well organized, and we had to respond to that organization,” he said.

QUESTION

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