Residents near Beckenham Park in Laguna Hills will soon need a $25-a-year permit to park on nearby streets. The city council voted to create a new residential permit-parking zone around the park earlier this month, responding to complaints that overflow from nearby apartment buildings has been clogging the surrounding streets, according to Voice of OC.
The council approved the new permit area on September 8, according to New York Post, which reported that the restrictions are meant to address overcrowding in a part of the city where curbside space is already limited. The affected zone will not blanket every block around the park — instead, it targets designated portions of Costeau Street, Camberwell Street, Avenida Avalon and Hendon Street, along with a separate stretch covering the south side of Wilkes Place, Luton Street, Via Balboa and Calle Carmel, as reported by Voice of OC.
City officials say the spillover is coming from nearby apartment buildings and other high-density housing, whose residents have reportedly been parking on adjacent residential streets rather than in their own developments' lots. Under the Laguna Hills Municipal Code, getting a street added to the permit program isn't automatic — about 67% of homeowners within a proposed area must sign a petition supporting it before the city will move forward, as noted by Voice of OC.
What Residents Will Pay, and What the City Is Spending
Once a street qualifies, residents there will pay $25 annually for a parking permit, the report notes. On the city's side, Laguna Hills expects to spend roughly $10,000 up front on signage and mailed notices to get the new zone up and running.
The debate over how far these restrictions should extend has already surfaced at the council level. At the same Sept. 8 meeting, the body voted 3-1 to continue considering a separate proposal for roughly 46 unrestricted parking spaces along the north side of Laguna Hills Drive, per a report from Voice of OC, according to Voice of OC's reporting as cited by the New York Post.
A Councilman Calls It Whac-A-Mole
During that same discussion, council member Dave Wheeler compared the city's piecemeal approach to permit parking to a game of whac-a-mole, arguing that officials are addressing one neighborhood near the problem at a time rather than tackling the underlying cause. Wheeler said high-density residential developments lack enough parking and are pushing vehicles onto surrounding streets, and he argued that such developments should be responsible for managing their own parking needs rather than shifting the burden onto adjacent homeowners.
Wheeler also asked how many more neighborhoods might be vulnerable in the next round of complaints, and he raised the possibility of moving toward a citywide permit system instead of adding new zones street by street. Assistant city manager Joe Ames offered a possible fix for one of the program's wrinkles, suggesting that streets which clear the 67% support threshold could be grouped together with connecting streets that have lower support, according to the same reporting.
How Other Orange County Cities Handle Permits
Laguna Hills isn't the first Orange County city to wrestle with this issue. Cities including Anaheim, Fullerton, Stanton and Orange have all sought their own solutions to parking shortages, according to a Voice of OC report, which found that limited public street parking has become a daily source of tension between residents across the county.
The rules vary widely from city to city. Anaheim allots up to five parking permits per single-family household and two for multifamily housing, while Santa Ana allows up to three permits for single-family homes and just one per multifamily unit, excluding complexes with more than four units. Orange takes a stricter approach, making permits available only to single-family and duplex properties and excluding apartment residents altogether, per Voice of OC's reporting.
That same 2017 reporting from LAist found Anaheim alone had 43 residential parking districts at the time, and at least 38 cities across Orange and Los Angeles counties had adopted some form of permit parking zone. LAist also noted that demand for these districts was climbing as curb space grew scarcer and, in some cases, multiple families crowded into units built for one as housing costs outpaced wages.
Laguna Hills' program is one of several residential parking permit programs in Orange County, though rules vary from city to city. The evidence available does not spell out how apartment residents near Beckenham Park will be treated under the new program, nor does it establish an exact enforcement start date for signage, ticketing or permit sales.
