Agoura housing plan turns to Kanan Road

Homes at the shopping centers?



LOCATION, LOCATION—Planning maps show, from left, the Agoura Meadows, City Mall and Twin Oaks shopping centers on Kanan Road that have been marked for new affordable housing. Below, 38 potential sites in the city have been reduced to 20.

LOCATION, LOCATION—Aerial photos above and below show the Agoura Meadows, City Mall and Twin Oaks shopping centers on Kanan Road that have been marked for new and affordable housing.

With visions of the Woolsey fire fresh in their minds, residents of Oak Park are expressing concern that several sites among the two dozen identified as viable for new housing in Agoura Hills could impair a main evacuation route for thousands.

In early September, the Agoura Hills City Council voted to include in its general plan housing update three shopping centers on Kanan Road at Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

The process of identifying sites where market rate and affordable housing can coexist is part of the state-mandated Regional Housing Needs Allocation, an assessment of a community’s housing needs for all income levels, and how to provide for those needs. California law requires each city and county to plan for their “fair share” of the state’s housing growth needs in years to come.

Agoura Hills is required to identify space for 318 new units as part of its 2021-29 RHNA update. Almost 200 of the units must be made affordable to low and very-low income levels.

Renderings courtesy City of Agoura Hills

Renderings courtesy City of Agoura Hills

The city started with 38 sites and whittled the list down to 20. A site’s inclusion on the list does not mean officials have discussed housing with the property owner.

Most of the sites lie along the Agoura Road corridor east and west of Kanan Road and south of the 101 Freeway.

On Kanan itself, the council had already considered two locations that are south of the 101, but one proposed commercial and resident project at the southeast corner of Kanan and Agoura was nixed by the City Council for not abiding by the city’s development standards.

Critics who attended the council’s Oct. 13 Zoom meeting said the maximum number of units developers could potentially eke out of the three Kanan sites north of the freeway—201 at Agoura Meadows shopping center, 220 at Twin Oaks shopping center and 143 at Agoura City Mall shopping center—are too many for such an important escape route in case of fire emergency.

“They should be removed now,” said Mary Wiesbrock, chair of the Agoura Save Open Space organization. “It would be next to impossible to remove them later.”

Traffic is ‘already at a bottleneck,’ said one resident who travels Kanan Road regularly

Traffic is ‘already at a bottleneck,’ said one resident who travels Kanan Road regularly.

Marla Axelrode, who’s been evacuated twice from Oak Park including during the Woolsey fire three years ago, said that on normal days the line of cars on Kanan is “amazingly long.” She hates to think of even more cars tied to new residences near the heavily traversed intersection with Thousand Oaks Boulevard.

Michelle Santucci, an Oak Park resident for 22 years, also recalled how frightening it was to evacuate down Kanan during the Woolsey fire. She said that even without the new residences near Thousand Oaks Boulevard, “we’re already at a bottleneck.”

Santucci also said the city should consider the potential for light and noise pollution associated with added residents in that area.

“Look at other alternatives,” she urged the council.

Jann Orkney, an Oak Park resident who relies on Kanan Road regularly to reach the freeway, told the City Council that the Kanan shopping center sites could generate “another thousand cars.”

“The Woolsey fire’s just all too fresh in my mind to think that that makes any sense at all,” Orkney said.

After the meeting she told The Acorn, “If this goes through, it will endanger all who live on the Kanan corridor. It would slow down evacuation tremendously during wildfires or other emergencies.”

Wiesbrock suggested the city “think outside the box” and allow the conversion of under-utilized office buildings into apartments.

Another message from the critics was that the decision to add the three sites to the list that’s sent on to state officials came as a surprise to the public— a premise disputed by Agoura Hills Councilmember Deborah Klein Lopez.

“The process was not a surprise,” she told The Acorn via email. “In fact, the city went above and beyond our legal duty to educate and include the public on this.”

Lopez said that when the council held its first meeting on the Agoura Hills housing element, the members were not comfortable voting on the updated plan “without having a public workshop.”

“So we held a meeting with the goal of educating the public about the state mandates and explaining what we can and can’t control. We had a panel of four experts. We also wanted to gather the public’s input, which we did.”

In July, The Acorn ran a guest column by Lopez in which she explained what’s at stake.

“To meet our goals for lower income housing, we must, by law, provide incentives that could result in over 1,400 new units, just in Agoura Hills,” she wrote. “You read that right. And if we fail to do this, we risk losing the limited local control that we still have.”

The city also used social media and email, and Lopez used her own newsletter to spread the word.

“We then held a third meeting where we had robust public comment on the housing element update,” she said.

During the Oct. 13 meeting, according to Lopez, some of the critics misstated facts. Among them: The city did not approve 500-plus units on those three sites.

“We did not change the zoning in those areas,” Lopez added. “The owners could have submitted applications for residential units for well over a decade. We did add the properties to the housing element update to show the state the areas where residential could be built.”

HOUSING ELEMENT–Thirty-eight potential new housing sites along the Agoura Road-Kanan Road corridors in the city have been reduced to 20.

Follow Scott Steepleton on Twitter @scottsteepleton.