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THIS is exactly what the Los Rios Specific Plan was intended to prevent.
The Los Rios District in San Juan Capistrano is California’s oldest residential neighborhood. It was originally intended to be parkland, yet more and more our Council is using it to provide parking for commercial properties.
It already takes several cycles of the traffic light for the residents to get out of the neighborhood.
The City Of San Juan Capistrano has been incrementally taking land in the Los Rios District that was slated for future parkland and turning it into a gravel parking lot. The next configuration will be phase three. This is all to provide parking for the commercial properties on the other side of the tracks that have been given waivers on their business parking requirements. You know, like wedding venues, bars and restaurants.
San Juan Capistrano City Council has placed this burden on the oldest residential neighborhood in California.
The result has been a huge traffic increase in the area; like they didn’t figure the increase in parking would lead to an increase in traffic. Unfortunately they forgot to do one their famous traffic studies.
The oldest residential neighborhood in California is already choked with cars.
Now a group of the developer’s friends will try to turn Los Rios Street into some sort of gated private street, citing “safety concerns” for all the new pedestrians they themselves brought in. (See Capistrano Dispatch)
How do you turn a public thoroughfare into a non-public street? Does the City try to sell it to the neighbors, and how do they compensate the public for the loss of a roadway that their taxes have been paying for all these years? Will the local neighbors be asked to pay for the purchase and upkeep and the gating?
Sounds like business as usual in San Juan Capistrano.
Look! Undeveloped parkland. Better fill it with cars!
(The mall project adds almost 300 more cars trying to get through this traffic light.)
*Yeah, a couple of years ago we chatted with one of the aspiring City Council members that had it in his mind to make the Rio District Upscale Commercial. We mentioned in
passing that some of the parochialism of the history….was going to suffer greatly.
Didn’t seem to both him. He was funded by some heavy hitters…..so it will take the great effort by the citizens to hold anything back at this point.