Think Second Street is stop-and-go? It’s going to become a whole lot worse
By Brandon Miller

While citizen activists in the coastal neighborhoods of east Long Beach wait and wait for developer-giant Lennar to tweak its plan to demolish the SeaPort Marina Hotel and construct a high-rise warren of condominiums in its place, there’s a good chance they are waiting in traffic. For that matter, so is Lennar’s proposal.

Nearly every intersection in the vicinity of Second Street and Pacific Coast Highway already exceeds optimal traffic levels. North of Studebaker and Loynes, for example, peak-hour traffic has increased by 35 percent a year since 1975, a cumulative rise of nearly 900 percent. During the same period, the overall increase in the Second Street area is 40 percent.

Lennar’s challenge is to come up with a plan that somehow shows that adding 425 condominiums—and the cars that residents will drive—won’t make traffic worse.

“I will not support any development that cannot mitigate traffic,” says city councilman Gary DeLong, whose Third District includes this area. “And the council will not support any project that does not adequately address the traffic problem it creates.”

The loosely-formed group of environmentalists and neighborhood preservationists who are opposing the Lennar proposal figured they would know its fate by now. After two years of planning, the issue was to be decided at the Long Beach City Council’s May 15 meeting. The activists showed up prepared to appeal the development’s approval by the Planning Commission.

But when it became obvious that Lennar would not be able to present a viable solution to the traffic problem, DeLong persuaded the council to grant the company a 60-day delay. The gesture was consistent with DeLong’s general support of the project. He has been leading an effort to rewrite SEADIP, the document that sets building and density limits for new construction in the coastal zone. The revised SEADIP would raise maximum building heights from 35 feet to 65 feet and shift from low-density requirements to high-density residential zoning.

Lennar’s proposal disregards even the loosened rules. It proposes 425 residential units, a 70-foot height limit and density much thicker than the legal limit. The company hopes to get past the new SEADIP restrictions by embedding one-time-only amendments in its proposal—basically, we-don’t-have-to-obey-the-rules provisions that would allow the project to move forward despite any violations.

The traffic problem is so pervasive, however, that Lennar’s proposal only attempts to mitigate it in eight of the 25 intersections affected. “The Lennar project is inconsistent with the Local Coastal Plan,” summarizes Suzanne Frick, director of the city’s planning department. “The project is going to have significant environmental impacts that can’t be mitigated . . . .”

Then again, mitigating traffic is not the same as eliminating it; Lennar might be able to proceed if it could somehow disperse vehicles along different routes. One such proposal suggests extending Shopkeeper Road—currently a dead-end entrance from Second Street into the Market Place shopping center. But the additional cars drawn into the Market Place area would only bottleneck further down the road. The city transportation plan notes that “any changes to one street will have an impact on nearby streets . . . even streets located miles away.” The dilemma is intensified by certain geographical and structural problems—Park Avenue and the bridges to Naples, for example, which are natural bottlenecks because they are the only paths to certain areas of the city.

At this point, the best Lennar can hope for is something that sounds good to the City Council, which can green light projects like this—those that prove impossible to implement without unsolvable impacts on residents—by adopting a statement of overriding concern, a document which states that the positives outweigh the negatives.

Toward this end, Lennar’s proposal includes a series of “off-site improvements”—developer code for beautification projects designed to entice budget-strapped cities. In exchange for massive traffic, Lennar would install bicycle paths along Marina Drive and landscape medians down Second Street in Naples. Of course, neither have a thing to do with traffic.

Home Depot enticed the City Council with an off-site improvement package last year, winning approval to build a store in the same vicinity after promising to renovate a park on Seventh Street and a small landscaping project near Kettering Elementary School. Like the Lennar project, the Home Depot proposal—already approved—also creates traffic congestion that would not be able to be mitigated. But the Council adopted a statement of overriding concern.

And what is that concern? Money. Long Beach is still in the stranglehold of a budget crisis, and the tax revenue that accompanies development would be welcome in thinly staffed city departments.

For now, however, everybody is on a 60-day hold. If the past is any indication, traffic will only get worse while they’re waiting.