Architect-turned-builder Lara Dutto plans to build 15 homes next to a war memorial of thousands of white wooden crosses in Lafayette.
Dutto, principal of Orinda-based Laraarchitecture, bought the Lafayette Hillside Memorial at 3600 Deer Hill Road two years ago to save the 3.1-acre parcel from development, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Now Dutto, a professor of architecture at Diablo Valley College, has pitched a plan to develop 15 homes on the northern two-thirds of the site.
She wants to split off the southern portion to preserve the memorial conceived in 2006 by contractor Jeff Heaton as a “place to recognize, honor, and commemorate individual national service contribution” of those dying in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
Nonprofit Lafayette Hillside Memorial would continue to maintain the crosses.
“Its scale and rawness and simplicity somehow makes me stop, forces me to take a deep breath, and in that moment I am so grateful for my freedoms,” she told the Chronicle.
Dutto, who has worked since 2010 to support the memorial and once sat on its board, grew concerned when the family that owned it put it up for sale, fearful that whoever bought it would remove the crosses. So she bought it in 2023 for an undisclosed price.
Plans now call for preserving the memorial and half the property as open space, while building a subdivision of 15 single-family homes around a “village green,” with an outdoor cooking and dining area, according to the Chronicle.
Five of the homes would have accessory dwelling units, or granny flats. The development would climb up the slope along Oak Hill Road, below a ridgeline of preserved open space.
Dutto has employed a state density bonus and Senate Bill 330 for streamlined approvals. On Monday, the Lafayette Planning Commission was slated to hold an informational hearing.
The application came as housing advocates sued the East Bay city for creating “misleading and unrealistic housing sites” to satisfy state-mandated housing goals.
The lawsuit by the Housing Action Coalition accused Lafayette of “pretending” to comply with the state housing element, a planning blueprint required of every city and county across the state every eight years.
Mayor Susan Candell took issue with the lawsuit, according to the Chronicle, saying the City Council has approved all housing projects that have come before it. She said the city will have no choice but to approve the Deer Hill Road project.
Lafayette, a wealthy city with $2 million homes, was once a battleground for the region’s housing wars, with two lawsuits, a ballot referendum and more than 100 public hearings that delayed a 315-unit apartment building for almost a dozen years.
Within a 10-year span, 115 homes were built in the city of 25,000 residents, including 10 in 2010, 76 in 2018 and 29 in 2019. The city must rezone to build 2,114 homes, 943 of them affordable, by 2031.
Last year, the state Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal from a neighborhood group, allowing the development to move forward. The project has not broken ground.
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