The View From Villa Park

by Tony Chavira

I completely understand if you’ve never heard of Villa Park. It is the city with the smallest population in all of the Orange County, about 6,000 people in only 2.1 square miles. 99% of the land has been developed, and the largest percentage of that is housing. Although La Palma, at 1.9 square miles, is the smallest city in Orange County in terms of area, its population is almost three times that of Villa Park. More space? Fewer people? What does that mean to the average-Joe urban planner? It’s simple: Villa Park is all master-planned, suburban housing development sprawl. The “General Plan” (that their building department strictly adheres to) perfectly reflects this, placing such important sprawl issues as “Open Space and Conservation” and “Recycling” at similar levels of importance as “Land Use” and “Growth Management.” But this makes perfect sense: what types of planning issues could a wholly suburban, 2.1 square mile space possibly have?

To do a little comparison, the CRA-LA’s Wilshire Center/Koreatown project area spans about 1.8 square miles of urban density. Although it’s comparable in space to Villa Park, CRA-LA planners need to find a way for a dense population to flow naturally through their city on any mode of transit, while carefully allowing for new-urbanist planning strategies (and avoiding any more of those scary L.A. industrial zones). Conversely, the Pacoima/Panorama City Project Area is about 6.6 square miles. There is a lot of space for suburban housing, and the Pacoima/Panorama city plan is jam-packed with tract developments and concepts. At least two square miles of the Pacoima/Panorama City plan contains only single-family housing, but that’s only about 30% of the scope of the full redevelopment plan. Villa Park has a General Plan that encompasses 2.1 square miles and it’s just for single family housing. Well, and a shopping center with a Ralphs.

Sometimes you need to step away from the tree to really see the forest. The idea of planning an entire suburban-sprawl city in 2.1 square miles is interesting because it points out exactly how redevelopment plan areas are often determined: purely along divisive political lines. Who is to say what the size of any redevelopment area should be? Vermont/Manchester’s Redevelopment Area in South L.A. is only 165 acres, about 0.25 square miles. Compare this the Irvine’s single master plan for the entire city, all 46.5 square miles and 202,000+ residents.

Villa Park’s General Plan is special, though, and in many ways can be seen as a great long-term case study, as the movements of New Urbanism, urban density, and accessibility become more popular. Villa Park is suburbia, and all that planners and politicians can do is optimize the purlieu for their residents. In Villa Park, the game is purely in the hands of the people and their parcels. All politicians can do is react.

Learning to plan for a suburban neighborhood is a strange education for me, maybe because my mind is trapped in the idea that a community needs an “urban” to really be considered “suburban.” But different people want different things; there are more choices than living in a city or on a farm. The General Plan for Villa Park perfectly reflects the living goals of the residents: to have big, well-maintained homes in nice communities, circa 1950. We all want the same thing in that respect (minus the timestamp), and to reflect these things the city needs to have special ordinances for things like noise and zoning.

But the price of wanting a pristine suburban/semi-rural landscape is high, and the rules for development need to be stringent. As previously mentioned, Villa Park has allowed for the development and use of 99% of its property. There are less than 5 vacant parcels left in the entire city. Since the city is completely surrounded, there is literally no way to get new land to develop. The City of Orange (which almost completely surrounds Villa Park) has encouraged the development of the once-untouched adjacent area to the point where Villa Park has become a sort of drive-through neighborhood.

Unsurprisingly, when residents of Orange noticed that there was a lot of open and beautiful space in Villa Park, they decided to hop the fence and start buying property. Without the ability to physically expand, property owners have taken it upon themselves to subdivide their parcels to maximize the amount of space they can use. In some ways, this is entirely the opposite goal of the city, which sought to keep the landscape largely untouched. In some ways, this is the most appropriate response you could expect from residents who have large families and want to use all three acres of their property. In some ways, this is exactly the nature of land use in Orange County, which was all owned by about five guys 150 years ago.

So what does Villa Park want to become over the course of 20 years? Does it want to become more dense and take on the goals of a similar urban plan, like the CRA’s for Koreatown? No way. Does it want to enact incredibly stringent rules for zoning and development, to try and retain its master-planned virginity for as long as possible? The predominant land use in the city is single-family housing, and that works perfectly for city planners wanting to enact strict rules that will keep things the same. They’ve already developed residential design guidelines, requiring any beautification of your property to meet community standards. To some it might seem elitist. To others it might seem appropriate, because wouldn’t you want your neighbors to all have houses as lovely as your own? But both sides agree: if you have the money to buy property in Villa Park, then you probably also have the money to bring whatever you decide to build up to community design standards.

Villa Park planners’ top goal, as outlined in their master plan, is to “retain the rural-like residential character of the City,” with “very high quality single family housing” which promotes a “sense of community.” These are admirable goals. But admirable as they are, encouraging the redevelopment of any property in a desirable community leads to an inevitable increase in its residential population. Unlike the 1800s, when residents trudged farther west when they heard that neighbors had set up a home 50 miles away, Villa Park is trapped within two square miles of land, and Villa Park planners are walking a fine line, forced to keep upping the legislative ante if they want to preserve their city’s rural beauty. The price of each property will grow immensely, but the city will have to find a way to keep residents from selling off or further sub-dividing their parcels for profit.

So, from a planner’s point of view, what is the best approach? Hard power, vehemently restricting residents’ movements? Or soft power, encouraging residents to stay their ground ad infinitum? Whatever the answer may be, Villa Park will be an amazing case study 20 years down the line for any up-and-comer at city planning offices throughout the U.S. of A.

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