Planning Commission approves height limit increases in Newport Center

The Newport Beach Planning Commission on Thursday unanimously recommended an increase to height limits on buildings in Newport Center to accommodate a higher density of housing.

The amendments to Newport Beach’s municipal code will be considered by the City Council for final approval as soon as March 11. They feature updates to height limits affecting a handful of specific sites including raising the allowable height at the current site of Armstrong Garden Centers/portions of the Newport Beach Country Club from 32 and 50 feet, respectively, to 70 feet; the current site of the Country Club’s golf course from 50 feet to 110 feet; the northern portion of Corporate Plaza from 32 feet to 70 feet; the 100 block of Newport Center from 50 feet to 85 feet, and the 300 block of Newport Center and the current site of the Regal Edwards Newport from 32 feet to 270 feet.

The updates are needed to achieve a mandate issued by lawmakers in Sacramento to zone for a dramatic increase in housing across the state by 2029, according to reports by city staff. Allowing for taller housing developments with a higher density of units reduces the overall number of projects that need to be built.

The amendments would lay the rough blueprint for a “walkable mixed use urban core in Newport Center,” Newport Beach Principal Planner Ben Zdeba said during the meeting Thursday. He added that focusing the development of taller structures in a portion of the city near Fashion Island was consistent with planning officials’ original vision for the city.

“The Newport Center was really supposed to be the downtown for the south coast,” Zdeba said.

A slide from a Newport Beach Planning Commission Thursday compares a cardboard model of the city’s projected development made in the 1960s with modern aerial renderings.

(Courtesy of the city of Newport Beach via YouTube)

The handful of people who offered public comment on the matter during the meeting were generally supportive of the updates. However, resident Jim Mosher suggested that developers allowed to build taller structures in Newport Beach would more likely build a small number of luxury apartments rather than a higher volume of affordable units that would have a deeper impact on California’s housing crisis. He pointed to recent projects offering only market-rate units as examples.

State officials called on the city to plan for an additional 4,485 homes in the most recent Regional Housing Needs Assessment. But identifying suitable sites and developers willing to take on more units of affordable housing in Newport Beach’s lucrative coastal real estate market poses a challenge, according to city officials. In order to compensate for that, the housing element plans for 8,175 new homes, far exceeding the RHNA requirement and allowing for significantly more market-rate units.