Item 18 - Appeal Application Nos. 2023-02 and 2023-03 for Cabrillo Town Center project

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HISTORIC RESOURCES ASSESSMENT JULY 2022 Transportation and Suburban Growth TORN CENTER PLAZA L C A $ANTA ANA, CALIFORNIA J /`�` Automobile purchases were another large part of the increase in consumer spending during the postwar years. Annual domestic production of automobiles rose from 2 million in 1946 to 8 million by 1955, while motor vehicle registrations more than doubled from about 26 million in 1945 to 54 million in 1956. This growth in auto ownership coincided with a decline in the use of buses, streetcars, and trains. Transit ridership within metropolitan areas of the U.S. peaked in 1947 and began a long, steady decline thereafter. The geographical spread and low population densities of the postwar suburbs, combined with the increasing dispersion of employment and shopping centers, made transit impractical for most people living outside the older and denser urban areas. Los Angeles led the nation's major cities in both rates of auto ownership and abandonment of public transportation. By the end of the 1950s, 95 percent of all trips in Los Angeles were by private automobile. As in the rest of the United States, much of the postwar housing boom in California predated the construction of the Interstate. In general, freeway construction was neither a cause nor a means of metropolitan expansion in the late 1940s and 1950s. President Eisenhower signed the Federal Aid Highway Act into law in 1956, but many of California's most important freeways remained under construction more than a decade later. Before the war or shortly thereafter, if a freeway was planned, development would commence along its corridor, even though the actual construction of the freeway was years away. In many other areas, builders anticipated that existing roads and highways would be sufficient or would be improved and expanded to accommodate future growth. At the close of the 1940s, only a couple of freeways had been built, such as the North Sacramento freeway or Los Angeles's Arroyo Seco Parkway. Substantial extension of metropolitan freeways in the late 1960s and 1970s brought about a second phase of suburban growth more extensive than the initial postwar boom. At least initially, the new freeways allowed commuters to live farther from their places of work without a significant increase in commuting time. The benefit of more distant but less expensive land (and therefore more affordable housing) began to compete with the benefit of proximity to employment centers, leading to the explosive physical expansion of metropolitan areas. The migration of jobs from cities to suburbs followed close on the heels of suburban population growth. More than three-quarters of all new manufacturing and retail jobs created between 1950 and 1970 were in suburban areas. By 1973 suburban employment exceeded city employment. This later phase of postwar growth saw the beginning of "edge cities," with midrise and even high-rise office buildings and shopping malls forming new centers of employment, professional services, and retail trade, adjacent to freeway interchanges. Edge cities arose well beyond not only the older central cities and streetcar suburbs, but far beyond much of the earlier phase of postwar suburban growth as well. Pdiy °found (07/21/22) 18 - 782 10/3/2023 11