In a battle over green space, Long Beach Council OKs development of vacant lot near LA River

The Long Beach City Council has approved a proposal to develop a 14-acre piece of vacant land near the Los Angeles River into a self-storage, RV parking and car wash facility.

The late 8 to 1 vote Tuesday night authorized an environmental impact report and a zoning change that effectively paves the way for the project to be built. The lot is bounded by the 405 Freeway, the L.A. River and the Metro A-line. To its east, there’s the quiet, upscale Los Cerritos neighborhood, along with another park.

Environmentalists and some local residents have fought the project since it was first proposed in 2020, pushing for the land to instead be turned into a park.

“We will continue to fight,” said Leslie Garretson, board president of the grassroots group Riverpark Coalition and nearby resident, after the vote.

She said she was pleased the councilmember who represents that area of Long Beach, Megan Kerr, voted against the project — the sole nay vote — and that her group isn’t giving up yet.

Supporters of the project were relieved at the decision.

Members of the Riverpark Coalition, from right to left, Renee Lawler, Mike Laquatra, Lynette Ferenczy and Leslie Garretson.

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“ I see it as a win-win for the city of Long Beach, its residents and its taxpayers,” said Sue Nantais, a nearby resident who supports the project. “I don't agree with the argument that we need another park built on this private property.”

The background

The lot sits in what used to be, for thousands of years, a vast floodplain of the L.A. River that would get inundated with water as the river swelled with winter rains.

By the turn of the 20th century, that floodplain was being dredged and bulldozed for industry and development.

The location of the 14-acre vacant lot in Long Beach.

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In the 1920s and 1930s, the land was used for an oil brine treatment facility and oil drilling, which contaminated the soil. By the 1940s, after a series of devastating floods, the federal government stepped in to channelize the river.

The site was partially cleaned up in the 1970s, but soil contamination from that oil activity remains. In the late 1990s, the lot was turned into a golf course that operated until it shut down in 2007.

Since then, the lot has been largely vacant, plagued by illegal activities and an eyesore for many in the community, according to local residents and the city.

“I have three daughters and I must say that twice we've had the homeless from that area try to break into our back door,” said David De Priest, a nearby resident who supports the project and believes developing the land would quell such dangers. “It’s just a bad spot.”

This 14-acre lot near the L.A. River in Long Beach will be turned a self-storage, RV parking and car wash facility after a Tuesday City Council vote.

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In 2019, Redondo Beach-based developer InSite Property Group bought the lot and proposed building a SecureSpace storage facility there to the Long Beach City Council, which has to review and approve developments in accordance with local and state law.

The dream of a park

The lot has long been imagined by residents and officials as a potential location for a large public park as part of the city and county’s efforts to green the L.A. River corridor. It sits adjacent to a county-owned lot. Though nonprofits have inquired, they’ve never been able to purchase the private land due to high cost and an unwillingness to sell.

In 2007, the city of Long Beach’s RiverLink Plan called for turning the site into a park. That idea was later echoed by the state’s Lower LA River Revitalization Plan and L.A. County’s L.A. River Master Plan.

The Dominguez Gap Wetlands along the L.A. River Trail is popular for hiking, biking and birding. It's adjacent to a 14-acre lot that will be converted into a self-storage facility.

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Opponents of developing the lot say the area provides a rare opportunity to add more green space to a heavily urban region, build resilience in the face of worsening heat and floods, and improve quality of life for western Long Beach communities that have far fewer access to parks than the wealthier east side.

“We think these kinds of sites that are currently open space undeveloped sites really should be prioritized for that purpose rather than for development,” said Ben Harris, senior staff attorney at nonprofit Los Angeles Waterkeeper, which, along with Riverpark Coalition, sued to try and block the project in 2022. “If we are talking about expanding park access, green space access, we need to capitalize on every opportunity or else we'll be paving over the last opportunities.”

Areas west of Cherry Avenue in Long Beach have worse air quality and are generally lower income with higher populations of people of color than areas on the eastside, according to the state's environmental hazard office.

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The judge ruled in the group’s favor, saying the project needed an environmental impact report, which the City Council greenlit on Tuesday.

Harris said his group will likely continue to push back on the project.

A sign outside a home in the Los Cerritos neighborhood near the vacant lot that's been proposed to be turned into a storage facility.

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He said that’s because research shows that more trees and green space cools entire communities, whereas areas with more pavement are hotter and harmful to public health. Experts say adding more green space is a key way to reduce the impacts of extreme heat as pollution in the atmosphere makes the world hotter.

“It's a cycle that we've repeated for over a hundred years, and we view this as a death of a thousand cuts,” said Harris at Tuesday night’s meeting. “Every time we do this to the river, we're hurting it more, and we're losing opportunities to heal the river and heal our communities.”

What the Long Beach City Council has said

The original project has gone through changes since it was first proposed back in 2020 after residents fought back.

The company building the storage site, SecureSpace, said it will build a public trail to connect to the L.A. River Trail that runs through the county–owned lot. They also say they’ll plant native plants, use solar panels to offset energy use, and conserve a protected area for endangered tarplants that have been identified on the property.

The county owns an adjacent parcel with the popular L.A. River Trail.

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City officials argue that they can’t block the project because the property is privately owned and the city doesn’t have the funds to purchase the land, even if it were for sale. They say cleaning the soil to a safe enough level for a park and landscaping costs could come to tens of millions of dollars. The current proposal includes cleaning up the site to a lesser degree, since the developers are paving over much of the land.

Opponents, such as Harris with L.A. Waterkeeper, said the city could seek funding for a new park through, for example, the state’s newly voter-passed Proposition 4, which has hundreds of millions of dollars available for climate resilience and green space development.

A rendering of the future development at the 14-acre vacant lot.

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But a city official said Tuesday night that they won’t pursue that path.

“In our resource-constrained environment, using limited staff time and resources to pursue such competitive funding could functionally deprioritize sites in other areas of greater park need,” said Alison Spindler-Ruiz, a planning manager with the city.

Spindler-Ruiz said the city wants to prioritize new green space on the westside of the L.A. River, and that a new park in this location on the east side of the river would not do that because it’s difficult to access from the west side.

Like most cities, access to green space in Long Beach is unequally distributed: Residents on the wealthier east side of the city have an average of 17 acres of green space per 1,000 residents, while west side residents have about 2 acres of park space per 1,000 residents, according to the city, which, in its general plan adopted back in 2002, set a goal of creating 8 acres of green space per 1,000 residents citywide.

Charity Castro spoke in opposition to the development of the 14-acre site. She wants a park there instead.

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City officials argued the area near the proposed storage facility already has enough green space — there’s the Los Cerritos Park just down the street, the recently funded Wrigley Heights River Park Project that will be just south of the vacant lot and the Dominguez Gap Wetlands just north of it.

But some residents disagree, saying a park there wouldn’t just serve the wealthier neighborhood immediately adjacent to it, but also the broader western Long Beach community.

“ I have no green spaces to go to, and the ones that I do have in my neighborhood are few and far between and deeply, deeply under-kept,” said Charity Castro, who lives in the south Wrigley neighborhood, at Tuesday’s meeting. “I deserve, and my community, deserves a park, not a small allotment of natural plants or a walkway that's convenient for your private developers to continue to profit from us.”