Massive project on Boeing site viewed as 'Economic Engine'.

THE future of Long Beach is 4,200 pages long.

That's the size of the environmental impact report issued by the city for the 261-acre Boeing Co. aerospace plant straddling the Long Beach/Lakewood border. On the line is a 3.3 million-square-foot mixed-use development that would substantially boost the size of the suburban Long Beach commercial market.

"It's the most comprehensive EIR I have ever seen," said Amy Bodek, Long Beach's project development bureau manager. "It was a huge undertaking."

Indeed, the document outlines plans that could radically alter an area that is symbolic of Southern California's post-World War II boom, but which has changed little since it was built more than 50 years ago.

The aerospace

firm's real estate arm, Boeing Realty Corp., paid for the report and plans to sell off component parcels once entitlements are in place and Boeing completes the infrastructure.

The EIR details a plan to replace 5 million square feet of aerospace production space with commercial and light industrial space, 150,000 square feet of retail, 400 hotel rooms and 2,500 residential units. The commercial component would be on the southern portion of what has been dubbed PacifiCenter @ Long Beach--just north of Long Beach Municipal Airport--while the residential would line Carson Street and Lakewood Boulevard on the site's northern and eastern borders.

Though housing for as many as 4,800 people is still contemplated, the EIR is a slightly scaled down version of the plan floated by Boeing three years ago. That called for 8 million square feet of commercial development, 600 hotel rooms and 3,800 residential units.

"It's headed in the right direction," said Phyllis Ortman, president of Lakewood Village Neighborhood Association, which represents about 1,500 Long Beach homes--almost all single-family--bordered by the city of Lakewood to the north, west and east, and Carson Street to the south. Noting that the association was still concerned with a multi-family component earmarked for the site's northeast portion, "'we want to see something that most closely resembles the neighborhoods adjacent to it," she said.

Boom and bust 

The project would be a stunning change for a site that housed as many as 50,000 employees in its heyday during World War II.

If approvals move ahead without serious delay, the project could be built out by 2020, with the completion of its first homes and commercial space in 2006, said Jim Schulte, development manager for Boeing Realty Corp.

Downtown Long Beach was first built in the 1880s, but this corner of the city didn't explode until the 1940s and the post-war years. Bought by the U.S. government in 1941, the site at Lakewood Boulevard and Carson Street was operated during the war by Douglas Aircraft, which gradually acquired the land between 1947 and 1961.

Roughly 30 acres is in Lakewood, near the "world's largest subdivision." Just north and east of the site, Lakewood Park Corp., led by renowned civic benefactor Mark Taper, started building more than 17,000 single-family homes on 3,500 unincorporated acres in 1949. The city was incorporated five years later, after the Lakewood Village tract was annexed by Long Beach.

"Long Beach has identified this as an important economic engine for the city," said Schulte, who declined to estimate the project's cost. As for the city's wish for office development, "we can't create the demand but we can be first in line when the demand is there."

Ortman said residents are not worried with the amount of commercial space planned for the Boeing site, even if much of it is light industrial or research and development. "We have absolutely no concern over that," she said. "We're used to industry being there."

The project would be another in a series of conversions from aerospace to mixed-use--and Boeing's second on Lakewood Boulevard. About six miles north, a mixed-use project that will include 400,000 square feet of retail, 1 million square feet of medical space and 73 acres of sound stages is being developed at the 160-acre Boeing Space Systems site in Downey.

Meanwhile, Playa Vista in West Los Angeles is on an old Hughes Aircraft Co. site while old Northrop Grumman Corp. plants in Hawthorne and Pico Rivera have either recently been or are being redeveloped.

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