Described as a win-win project by some local officials, an affordable housing development set for East Foster Road in Orcutt will cause the surrounding area to lose its “overall character,” in the eyes of one homeowners association.
“We absolutely understand the need for more affordable housing. Our concern isn’t about who will live there,” Edgewood Homeowners Association board member Rosie Rojo recently told the Santa Barbara County Planning Commission.
The “increased activity” tied to the 99-unit Orchard Terrace complex—proposed as 100 percent affordable housing—and new residents it’ll bring to the area “will alter the quiet, liveable character of our neighborhood,” Rojo argued, while citing traffic safety and parking congestion as the homeowner association’s top concerns.
“Cars regularly fly by, and we’ve seen several accidents over recent years. … Adding hundreds of new daily trips will only increase those risks, putting our children, pedestrians, and cyclists in real danger,” Rojo said at the Planning Commission’s Oct. 8 meeting.
“Parking is another serious issue,” Rojo continued. “The proposed development simply doesn’t provide enough space for residents and guests, which means overflow parking will spill into our neighborhood streets.”
Rojo was the sole speaker during public comment, which 4th District Planning Commissioner Roy Reed described as a sign that the project—heavily revised over the past two years—was heading in the right direction compared to previous hearings centered on Orchard Terrace.
Between 2023 and 2024, AMG Land Development took part in discussions with the county Planning Commission and Board of Supervisors to draft a development agreement that aimed to improve the project’s “neighborhood compatibility,” according to the staff report.
The developer originally pitched a three-story building with 61 affordable units for the 4-acre project site.
“Everyone complained that it looked like a hotel,” 3rd District Planning Commissioner John Parke said.
Feedback from Parke and other county officials helped shape an alternative plan for four separate buildings—two two-story buildings, and two three-story buildings—each with increased setbacks from existing residential developments nearby.
The new layout came with a unit increase as well, from 61 to 99, as the redesign allowed the developer to “take advantage of the entire site,” the staff report noted, rather than “clustering it in a single three-story structure on the south half of the property.”
In March 2024, the county Board of Supervisors approved the altered development agreement and deemed the project consistent with the Orcutt Community Plan.
The agreement also entailed constructing a 135-space parking lot as part of the project. The developer pitched a “soft promise” of increasing the lot to 150 spaces ahead of the project’s Oct. 10 Planning Commission review.
“This project is just radically better than what we first saw,” Parke said at the meeting. “We have to look at this as comparing it to what the original project was and how we’ve just mitigated almost all those concerns with this.”
In response to Orcutt resident Rojo’s concerns about daily trips and traffic impacts, Planning Commissioner Reed said that’s “certainly something that the Board of Supervisors can look at in terms of instituting … mechanisms of controlling vehicle speed in the immediate area.”
Parke also addressed Rojo’s comments before seconding Reed’s motion to approve Orchard Terrace’s development plan.
“I think they’re good points, but … our Board of Supervisors has already been very much involved, and that makes me feel that there’s less need for the Planning Commission to dot every i and cross every t on all the different facets of it,” Parke said. “It’s undergone all of that examination already and it’s the best that people could come up with.”
Reed’s motion passed 4-0 (5th District Planning Commissioner Vincent Martinez was absent).
“No change is going to be completely free of opposition from neighboring residents,” said Reed, who described Orchard Terrace as “a significant step toward accommodating the housing requirements—particularly affordable housing requirements—so badly needed in the county as a whole.”
This article appears in Oct 16 – Oct 23, 2025.