The future of the Saugus Swap Meet is once again up for discussion, with a housing plan slated for the same land hosting the twice-weekly market expected in front of the Santa Clarita Planning Commission once again.
For his part, the current owner of the land, Doug Bonelli, expressed no desire to continue running a swap meet on any other property once his 35-acre lot at 22500 Soledad Canyon Road is sold, a transaction that appears contingent upon pending city entitlements.
The status of that project’s approval is part of the agenda for Tuesday’s commission meeting.
The developer for Riverwalk, a project looking to put 318 homes and a nearly 130,000-square-foot warehouse on the lot, has said its plans do not include a swap meet.
“We’re operational through the end of the month, and then just kind of winging everything by ear from that,” Bonelli said in a message Friday, confirming that he planned on being at Tuesday’s hearing at City Hall.
At the recent discussion of the project in July, the city’s planning staff was asked to address a litany of questions about the project, from its housing density to traffic impacts to its potential school enrollment impacts.
While some recent projects have come with questions about whether too many homes were being put into an area with respect to lot size and parking, these plans brought the opposite concern.
The neighborhood would have four residential planning areas on approximately 28 acres, with 122 detached single-family condos and 196 attached townhomes — 22 identified as affordable for low-income households.
Planners questioned whether the city would be penalized for a reduced number of homes in its plans, with the zoning calling for anywhere from 385 homes to 1,050 with its permitted range of 11 to 30 units per acre. The project is also only proposing 22 of the 318 units to qualify as affordable housing, with the remaining 296 being market-rate.
The agenda notes that both of these figures would impact the city’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment, which is a legal requirement the city must abide by in terms of how much housing needs to be allowable in the plans it approves.
For the fifth area, the industrial component would have 116,790 square feet of light manufacturing or warehouse space and 10,000 square feet of office/mezzanine space with a maximum building height of 39 feet, according to the previous discussion.
Some of the July discussion in front of the Planning Commission appears to have frustrated Peter Vanek, vice president of Integral Communities, who at one point threatened to walk away from the project if wholesale changes were required, despite an extensive planning effort.
In a statement he issued Monday through John Musella, a spokesman for the company, those concerns appear to have been addressed, from the developer’s standpoint.
“After productively working for over three years with city staff, we believe we have proposed a financially viable project for the former speedway site,” wrote Vanek, who also said during the July discussion that he considers himself a housing advocate. “The project respects the heritage of the site with the inclusion of historical elements including a walking history timeline, a speedway-themed park and speedway-themed street names to mention a few. Creating this type of transit-oriented housing development adjacent to the Metrolink station provides a unique housing mix for first-time home buyers as well as 22 affordable homes.”
Formerly the Saugus Speedway, its roots date back to 1926, when a rodeo was hosted there for the first time.
That continued into the 1950s, but in 1939, auto racing on the dirt track also became a local tradition. It was owned by the Bonelli family during this time.
The track was paved in 1956, but after the 1994 earthquake, the bleachers were deemed unsafe and later razed.
