Getting it right on blight

Finally, Yorba Linda’s beleaguered City Council members are planning to use Redevelopment Agency tax revenues to attack actual blight in the Old Town area.

A recent city agreement with Yorba Linda Housing Partners involves refurbishing the 76-unit Linda Gardens Apartments on Plumosa Avenue, just south of the water district’s headquarters building.

Yorba Linda Housing Partners is a new private entity that shouldn’t be confused with Old Town Yorba Linda Partners, the developers who proposed a controversial overhaul of Town Center with new businesses, underground parking and condominiums.

In 1997, the Housing Partners--under the Southern California Housing Development Corporation name--transformed the old Posada Apartments, across the street from Linda Gardens, into an attractive low-income housing project renamed Arbor Villas.

Strangely, the Linda Gardens land is not located inside the redevelopment zone, while some adjacent acreage, such as the longtime Jack and Jane Adams residence at the northeast corner of Plumosa Avenue and Lemon Drive, was included in the area in 1990.

Both the old Posada and the Linda Gardens units date from the early 1960s, when county planning officials and the Board of Supervisors controlled all local development.

The influx of apartment projects as well as countless gasoline stations along Yorba Linda Boulevard convinced many early residents that municipal incorporation would best preserve the community’s low-density identity and horse-oriented, semi-rural environment.

Linda Gardens “has experienced notable physical deterioration over the years. In addition to an overcrowding problem, long-standing drainage, circulation and law enforcement issues have also plagued the facility and surrounding neighborhood,” according to a memo prepared by Assistant City Manager Dave Gruchow.

Brea police responded to 236 calls for law enforcement at the complex during 2004 and 2005, making the 4672 Plumosa Ave. address one of the city’s “single most responded-to locations,” Gruchow noted. By contrast, police activity decreased 46 per cent the year after Arbor Villas opened.

Gruchow pointed out that the rehabilitation project is not without financial risk. If the Housing Partners group does not secure certain low-income housing tax credits, the city could be on the hook for $16.3 million.

Fortunately, this time, the council got it right. The project won’t reposition historic buildings to make way for high-density condominiums, and tax money will be spent to eliminate genuine blight, not push people out of their homes and businesses to build a better tax base.

Next, council members should maintain the downtown parcels they’ve purchased under the threat of eminent domain the past several years, rather than create their own version of blight.

A FINAL NOTE

If Measure B passes with a majority vote June 6, developers and other individuals and firms associated with the building industry, including developer-funded political action committees, might be less apt to make their usual hefty donations to council members’ campaign treasuries.

While Measure B, the citizen-sponsored Right-to-Vote on Land-Use Amendments initiative, won’t stop future development in Yorba Linda, it would require a public vote if developers want to increase density levels beyond current zoning regulations and General Plan requirements.

Developers would have little incentive to pay for incumbents’ expensive election-year mailings, if council members no longer had the final say on higher densities for major new projects.