Editor:
Concerning your piece: City Commissions Artist Work/Live Study (News, April 14)
It is troubling that, while your article provides significant space for developer Louis Longi to campaign for his proposed gargantuan Laguna Canyon housing development, you do not include any views of canyon preservationists who are rightly opposed to his high-density project.
And most disturbing is Longi’s scornful and irresponsible attitude toward our canyon’s precious natural resource, Laguna Canyon Creek. In your article, developer Longi dismisses Laguna Canyon Creek as a mere “drainage ditch”. It is true that his section of the creek has been particularly neglected, but areas of the creek upstream and downstream from his section of the eight-mile long riparian waterway (eg. Anneliese School, Dog Park) have been restored and are better maintained, and there are currently plans for a major restoration of the creek through five acres of the DeWitt property.
Mr. Longi says that he is “spending a quarter of a million dollars restoring the creek”. That claim is dubious, at best, and there is no evidence that any improvement has been made to his section of the creek.
Laguna Canyon Creek has been long under siege and much abused by developers such as Longi, who publicly declared to LB City Council that he wants to open the canyon to many more high-density housing projects. They regard this jewel of Laguna Canyon as just an ugly “drainage ditch”, and a nuisance to their development plans and the profitability of their enterprise.
Steve Tollefsrud, John Albritton, Sheila Maquilan and Roberta Kansteiner, Laguna Beach
6 years ago, Longi was touting the addition of 8 cottages similar to his his existing one…..in fact, the LB Indy reported on that first iteration.
What happened, how did an artist’s vision, atotal of 9, single level homes become a huge monstrosity, a 33′ high, football field sized, 30 unit apartment complex come to be? The new partnership with Dornin Investment Group, a Las Vegas-based developer & his money.
Longi championed one thing, but soon the whiff of big bucks sent him running away from modesty and towards this VERY non-rural, non-conforming monolithic project. And funny, but the City’s own analyses going back to the late 1980’s reflect that above the Bark Park, it’s a perennial, high value habitat creek—NOT a drainage ditch.
The OC Superior Court Judge Dunning saw through the ruse 18 months ago, the project’s failure to comply with the Canyon Annexation Plan, the City’s General Plan, CEQA and the Coastal Act.
If he’d have stuck to the original plan, his initial dream, they have already been built. Longi succumbed to the Gordon Gekko School of real estate greed: More is better (for him and his new venture capital financiers). The same corporation wanting to jam another monolithic overkill project, The Coast Inn, down Laguna’s collective throats.
Here’s the link to that LBIndy column some 6 years ago:
http://www.lagunabeachindy.com/artists’-“live-work”-on-hold-2/
BTW:
The apartment complex proposal only carves out 8 studio units as ‘affordable housing.” The other 22 would be 1-bedroom units, rented/leased at whatever the market would bear.
Total occupancy of 47 persons, it would double the population in this funky neighborhood.
Indy readers can find OC Judge Dunning’s scathing rebuke of the City, the Coastal Commission and the applicants online.
This is one of the sad stories about Laguna: Real estate & over-development pressures, with great sums of profit to be made, are driving projects. Revenue models that are only in the best interest of the LLCs, NOT nearby residents who are accustomed to a bucolic, rural way of life.