Fifty-eight more homes – including 40 being touted as Manteca’s first workforce housing neighborhood – are being presented to the City Council Tuesday for initial approval and annexation by declared Manteca mayoral candidate Ben Cantu.
It marks the first time that an active candidate for mayor has represented a development project before the council. Cantu is a retired City of Manteca senior planner who finished third in a race for two seats in the 2008 city council election. He now has his own land use consulting firm.
The two projects – Winters Colonial Estates and Diego Country Estates – are part of trio of small subdivisions moving forward in the planning process along Woodward Avenue immediately south of the Tesoro neighborhood and east of Pillsbury Road.
Winters Colonial Estates consists of five acres at 9202 E. Woodward Ave. is up for a prezone, annexation, and planned development agreement to turn five acres into 40 homes. It will have eight homes per acre.
Winters Colonial moving forward is prompting the annexation of the Bonds property that consists of five acres on the southeast corner of Pillsbury Road and Woodward Avenue as a Local Agency Formation Commission policy discourages the creation of piecemeal or irregular boundaries and requires logical city limits. The land is prezoned for community commercial. There isn’t a project moving forward at this time on the Bondo property.
A prezone, annexation, and a tentative subdivision map to divide 6.34 acres into 24 single family lots at 9308 E. Woodward Ave. is also before the council for Diego Country Estates. It will have roughly four homes per acre.
A third project – which is already within the city limits – has had a development agreement approved by the Manteca Planning Commission. Lundbom Estates on five acres has 18 homes proposed as well as a park and storm basin site. The project is at 1380 E. Woodward Ave.
The Lundbom Estates property is sandwiched between the two projects proposed for annexation. The reason it has a different sequential address is the fact it is already within the city limits.
The planning commission has recommended approval of the proposed annexations that must be approved by the San Joaquin County LAFCO if the council does support the two projects.
Winters Colonial Estates is the first neighborhood designed in Manteca to try and achieve the elusive goal of creating workforce housing. The homes are being designed to be affordable to households with moderate income for Manteca.
The project includes:
•Five different house plans ranging from 1,151 to 1,466 square feet with a mixture of single and two-story layouts. Some models have one-car garages while others have two-car garages. The typical new home now being built in Manteca is almost twice the size of the largest proposed for Winters Colonial.
•The homes will have stucco walls and tile roofs in contrast to recent attempts at affordable housing in Manteca that included Walnut Place at Walnut and Alameda streets in Central Manteca and the Liberty Collection in Primavera Estates in West Manteca. Both have composition roofs although they do have stucco walls. Tile roofs were eliminated back then to reduce building costs.
•Driveways have a minimum length of 18 feet to allow vehicles to park in the driveway. Driveways are being grouped and staggered to allow maximum on-street parking.
•Streets will be 50 feet wide – the Manteca standard for residential streets.
•Front yards will have more intense landscaping than a typical single family subdivision.
