Business View Magazine | September 2019

237 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE SEPTEMBER 2019 it. So, a big part of our housing strategy is trying to diversify our housing offerings so that people who do work here have an opportunity to live here. “Right now, in southern California, we have a pretty severe shortage of affordable and attainable housing. In some ways, that’s an opportunity for us in Rancho Cucamonga because our housing is oftentimes more affordable and more attainable for families that live closer to the coast. We’re not that far from the Pacific coast, but we’re far enough away that there’s a market housing cost differential. On the other hand, we also don’t have a lot of affordable or attainable housing relative to the rest of the region. So, we’re hoping that, through this addition of another 10,000 units, it will reduce the severity of the housing shortage in our City and provide ample opportunities for young professionals and new families to come to Rancho Cucamonga and realize a better quality of life. “In the same vein, we’re trying to further develop key corridors for office and commerce so that we can provide opportunities for the people who live here to work here in a greater range of jobs. So, the rest of our development effort is focused on a couple of these corridors: we’ve got our Foothill Blvd. corridor, which is Route 66, and that’s intersected by our Haven Avenue corridor. A key part of the City’s long-held vision of an economic development strategy is to take Haven Avenue and help facilitate its development as an office corridor where we would concentrate our professional jobs, tech positions, corporate headquarters, etc., and we already realized a lot of success in the development of that corridor over the last several decades. In this current development cycle, we’re seeing renewed interest in office development, but it’s occurring in a more urban, mixed-use fashion. The idea is that our fiber infrastructure will help support the development of those corporate, and professional, and tech uses of that corridor, and it will be occurring in a more walkable fashion that will reduce dependence on automobiles. “That last corridor that I mentioned that traverses the City from east to west – our Foothill Blvd. corridor – is anchored on its east by Victoria Gardens, which is the City’s outdoor mall and regional shopping destination. It opened in 2004 and was intended to be the City’s downtown; there’s nothing else like it in southern California. The City held to its vision and waited until it was able to find the right development partner, and we saw the realization of that vision in Victoria Gardens, which is a 1.2 million-square-foot, open air town center organized around a series of blocks so that it looks and feels and functions like a central business district. It’s one of the most successful retail centers in the country and that idea of a high-quality retail center organized around people in a walkable format is helping to anchor the vision for Foothill Blvd. We’re starting to see some of our first, vertical, mixed- use buildings get built on Foothill and we’ve got several projects in the pipeline to develop three and four-story, mixed-use buildings in that walkable, urban format, helping the City to realize the vision of a mix of uses provided through a series of high-quality suburban neighborhoods, all the way up to urban living organized in these mixed-use buildings in an urban corridor.” RANCHO CUCAMONGA , CAL I FORNI A