Get ready for the smallest tract home lots ever in Manteca.

Work now taking place on 157 acres on the southwest corner of Airport Way and Woodward Avenue for the 827-home Lumina at Machado Ranch will include 77 “motor court” lots.

 Most are planned to be as small as 2,746 square feet.

For comparison, in tract home neighborhoods built in the late 1960s and 1970s such as Shasta Park, the average residential lot is 6,000 square feet. That’s more than twice the size of the motor court lots.

They can be that small because four homes share a common area.

The common area is a 20-foot-wide driveway from the street serving four homes that have driveways 18 feet deep that split off the motor court driveway.

Guest parking is allowed on driveway aprons as well as on the street.

All landscaped areas in front of the two homes facing the motor court as well as the two homes facing the street are maintained by a homeowners’ association.

The individual lots have minimum widths of 40 feet and minimum depths of 45 feet.

California Rooms — indoor-outdoor living spaces designed as a seamless extension of a great room — are included in the motor court homes and may encroach up to 3 feet into the backyards.

The new neighborhood will also have “big lots” number 37 and come in at 8,000 square feet.

There are 120 lots of 6,000 square feet — the default standard of tract lots in Manteca in the 1960s and 1970s.

The rest of the lots approach the size of many in older sections of central Manteca where homes were built in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s.

There are 202 lots of 5,000 square, 207 lots of 4,000 square feet, and 109 lots of 3,375 square feet.

Unique mixture of

architectural styles

The unique aspects of Lumina goes beyond the motor court homes to extra fees the developer agreed to pay, and how improvements to adjoining arterials are being made.

There will be a mixture of neighborhoods aimed at first-time buyers, move-up buyers, and downsizing buyers. Instead of being segregated, there will be broken into clustered segments in a patchwork-style approach to have more of a blend of neighborhoods.

They will showcase six distinct styles of architecture — American traditional, California bungalow, farmhouse, Monterey, Spanish and prairie.

The Monterey architecture will be the most unique in Manteca since the French Collection featuring Normandy architecture inspired by the French countryside was incorporated in a neighborhood built just north of Mission Ridge Drive.

Signature Homes will pay $8,000 more per home than other nearby tract homes now under construction.

The $8,000 in extra fees are as follows:

*A fee of $598.54 per home will be paid to purchase a CNG sold waste collection truck powered by compressed liquid gas produced from menthane gas and food waste at the city’s wastewater treatment plant. Once all homes are built, the fees collected will cover the cost of one new truck.

 *Another $2,500 per home will be paid as an infrastructure fee. It is designed to cover shortfalls in the established growth-related fees that have not been updated that the developer pays when they take out a building permit.

 *They will pay a $2,500 fee per home for the Phase V wastewater treatment plant expansion. If the fee, that has yet to be established is less, the developer will pay the lower amount. If the established fee is higher, the developer will pay the higher amount.

*A $2,401.46 per home fee will be allocated for use by the City Council at their discretion. This is similar to the bonus bucks paid two decades ago in exchange for sewer connection certainty. 

More than $30 million was collected back then that went to help pay for the Union Road fire station, traffic signals at Tidewater Bikeway crossings, the skate park, soccer field lights at Woodward Park, and fireworks, among other things as well as plugging in more than $11 million in general fund budget shortfalls over the course of several years.

The Lumina bonus bucks will top $2 million.

Three month or so

Woodward closure

Work connected with the Woodward Avenue between Galleria Drive and Airport Way will require a road closure for roughly the next three months.

That is the bad and good news.

Bad, because its inconvenient for many going to and from rapidly growing southwest Manteca neighborhoods.

Good, because it marks the first time a major residential development is putting in all improvements on major arterials bordering it all at once.

And it will all be completed before the first homes are built.

The current council is now making all developers to do the same.

The reasons are two-fold.

*It means streets are torn up all at once instead of being done in segments as home building occurs. It gets all of the inconvenience to the general public out of the way at one time.

*All improvements along arterials —  full streets and even traffic signals — will go in before home sales starts and are done by the first developer along an arterial in areas immediately adjacent to other projects.

When work is done along Woodward Avenue during the road closure underground utilities will be installed, the street widened, and a new roundabout built at Bella Terra Drive.

The developer will also widen Airport Way along their project, install traffic signals at Woodward Avenue and Airport Way, and build a roundabout at Peach Avenue at Airport Way,

To contact Dennis Wyatt, email dwyatt@mantecabulletin.com