The proposed project involves the City of Signal Hill’s 6th Cycle Housing Element update, identifying four Candidate Housing Sites — Orange Bluff, Walnut Bluff, Town Center Northwest, and Heritage Square — capable of accommodating up to 724 additional housing units to meet the City’s Regional Housing Needs Assessment allocation.
Ganddini Group prepared a transportation impact analysis in support of the Housing Element’s General Plan conformance review and citywide CEQA review, evaluating intersection levels of service, left-turn queuing, and VMT analysis across jurisdictional boundaries with the City of Long Beach and Caltrans.
The study found the Housing Sites’ buildout would result in operational deficiencies at several study intersections without improvements; recommended signal and lane improvements were identified to resolve most of these, except for one intersection where a needed right-turn lane was determined to be infeasible due to right-of-way, cost, and Caltrans jurisdictional constraints. An initial VMT screening assessment found that the commercial component at potential mixed-use sites would satisfy screening criteria for local-serving retail development, and all four Housing Sites would qualify for a less-than-significant impact based on their location within transit priority areas. Notwithstanding the screening analysis, detailed VMT modeling was performed using the travel demand model developed for the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) Regional Transportation Plan, also concluding that impacts would be less than significant as VMT per capita would not exceed the applicable threshold based on comparison to the Countywide average.
The City of Signal Hill’s 6th Cycle Housing Element was adopted by the City Council in September 2022 and certified by the California Department of Housing and Community Development in October 2022.