Azusa Approves Massive Housing Development on Site of Nursery

The Azusa City Council has cut the city’s last major tie to its agricultural roots, agreeing to allow one of the largest housing developments in the county to be built on the site of a 520-acre nursery.

City Council members late Thursday approved the 1,602-home Rosedale planned development on what now is home to one of the world’s largest commercial nurseries.

The project, developed by Upland-based Lewis Homes and the Monrovia Nursery Co., has been a decade in the planning and is intended to house 5,500 people, more than 10% of Azusa’s current population.

The Monrovia Nursery, which includes land in Azusa and an unincorporated area of Los Angeles County, will gradually be swallowed up as single-family homes are constructed over a 15-year period.

Rosedale would include a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school, shops, 14 acres of parks and 225 acres of open space in the foothills.

Azusa is known for a quarry that is its major landmark, and its own mayor has called it the caboose of the foothills.

“It’s a last chance for Azusa to move into its rightful place in the San Gabriel Valley,” Councilman Dick Stanford said.

“These homes are going to sell for at least $175,000. That’s a lot more than most in Azusa, and those kind of homeowners bring a lot of dollars to the local market,” Stanford said.

After numerous studies and dozens of meetings, the council narrowly approved the development on a 3-2 vote, with Mayor Cristina Madrid and Joseph Rocha dissenting.

Both complained that there would be too many homes in too small a space, that the developer can change plans without city approval, and that despite millions of dollars the city will receive, the benefits to Azusa will be minor.

“The project is valued at half a billion dollars. The money we’re getting is a pittance,” Madrid said. “This is Round 1. The fight is not over.”

The city will get a $1.5-million development fee, $1 million for traffic mitigation and $6.5 million from assessments on the new homes, as well as the school, which is expected to cost about $15 million.

But Stanford said, “This is pretty much one of the last remaining spaces anyone can really build on in the San Gabriel Valley. It’s a great opportunity.”

City officials and the developers say that considerable effort has been put into reducing the project’s impacts. There are 162 conditions for approval, including a requirement that experts be on site to evaluate potential Indian burial grounds.

The project has been scaled back from 2,100 homes, townhouses and apartments to 1,602 single-family homes. In addition, the developers will invest about $50 million in improvements to such things as roads and sewers.

Still, to some lifelong residents of the city, the nursery--the world’s biggest commercial grower of potted plants--is a place where customers know many of the more than 600 employees by name. The nursery has been there since 1952, when it relocated from Monrovia.

“These workers have families. They’ve lived here a lifetime. Now they are being told they can work in Visalia or Oregon,” said resident Art Morales.

The Monrovia Nursery Co. owns larger sites in those locations and plans to pay workers to relocate.

“Azusa is not the Azusa we moved to,” said David Linden of Monrovia Nursery. “So we’re moving out to more agricultural areas.”

The nursery is the last remnant of the vast Foothill Ranch, where until the 1950s lush orange orchards grew. Today, there are few reminders other than street names of the agricultural industry.

And as a commemoration of that past, the project is named for the Rosedale family, which owns the nursery.