OCEANSIDE — The Oceanside City Council has unanimously approved a 35-unit single-family housing development in the Fire Mountain community, adding new conditions aimed at addressing traffic safety concerns raised by nearby residents.
The Kelly Street Lagoon Pacific project will bring 35 detached, four-bedroom homes to a vacant 4.05-acre parcel on the south side of Kelly Street between Hunsaker Street and Andy Lane near Buena Vista Lagoon. The homes will range in size from approximately 1,800 to 2,400 square feet and will include two-car garages and driveways.
The development will provide 146 parking spaces, including 18 designated for guests, exceeding the city’s requirements.
Six of the homes will be deed-restricted as affordable, with three reserved for very low-income households and three for moderate-income households. According to city staff, the very low-income homes will be priced between $90,000 and $120,000, while moderate-income homes will range from $470,000 to $500,000.
The remaining homes are expected to sell at market rates, around $1 million.
Under city zoning, the parcel would normally accommodate up to 18 homes, or 4.35 dwelling units per acre. However, the developer, Oceanside Community Partners LLC, sought and received approval for 35 homes — 8.64 dwelling units per acre — by using provisions under the state’s density bonus law.
The project is the first in the city to apply Assembly Bill 1287, which took effect in 2024, offering a stackable density bonus for including both moderate- and very low-income units.
The project will include a new private street off Kelly Street, as well as a separate pedestrian entrance. The developer is in discussions with a neighboring property owner to create a trail connection to a nearby shopping center.
The internal street will be about 28 feet wide, with a narrower area of at least 21 feet between two lots. Shannon Vitale, a senior planner with the city, said that the private road has been reviewed and approved by both the Oceanside Fire Department and the city’s traffic engineers.
“The site has been designed in consultation with the Oceanside Fire Department and would accommodate fire apparatus trucks and other service vehicles,” Vitale said.
In total, more than 170 conditions of approval were included. The developer also agreed to additional conditions after community feedback, including removing a proposed 36th unit to create open space, reducing pad heights near neighboring homes by eight feet and limiting building heights to two stories, completing a traffic study for Cassidy and Soto streets, adding stop signs at Soto and Kelly streets and at the project exit, installing a radar speed sign on Kelly Street, and repaving Kelly Street from Soto to Andy Lane.
The developer will also install red curbing and no-parking signs along the project frontage to improve visibility for drivers exiting the site, allowing for both left and right turns.
The Planning Commission recommended the project in May on a 6-1 vote.
As part of the council’s final approval, the city will also conduct a city-funded safety study to assess potential impacts and explore further mitigation measures to improve pedestrian and vehicular safety.
Despite changes to the project, some residents expressed concern about traffic safety.
“Let me be clear: none of the staff reports or documents provided on this project, including the local traffic assessment, do not meaningfully address either pedestrian or vehicle safety,” said Bob Ashton, a resident of nearby Andy Lane.
Ashton urged the city to require the developer to install sidewalks on Kelly, Hunsaker, Soto and Cassidy streets.
“This is the number one issue in our community raised during multiple meetings,” Ashton said. “We have school children walking these streets, we have families biking, many older adults – I walk my dog, I walk my grandkids – we all use these streets for access, and they don’t have continuous sidewalks right now.”
City staff said the local government cannot legally require a developer to add sidewalks and that responsibility would instead fall to the city itself.
City Manager Jonathan Borrego noted that not all residents support adding sidewalks and said doing so would require acquiring private property and removing existing mailboxes, planters and walls, making sidewalk installation “a very complicated issue.”
Borrego added that the city has already undertaken “extensive” traffic calming efforts in Fire Mountain compared with other neighborhoods.
“There’s always opportunities to continue to look to do more and we’d be happy to do that,” he said.
