A PROPOSED FIVE-STORY mixed-use project at Brookhurst Street and Garden Grove Boulevard has yet to be built after nearly four years (City of Garden Grove).

When the Westminster City Council meets on Wednesday, it will take up a continued public hearing on a citywide zoning and general plan update with key elements focusing on mixed-use land use.

Simply put, ‘mixed-use” is a modern spin on a traditional model: putting housing and commercial and public development – homes, shops, offices, schools, etc.– either in the same area, or even the same building.

Identified are five “special places designed to be pedestrian friendly with higher densities than typical patterns of … use.”

Those areas are the Civic Center, Westminster Boulevard/downtown, “corridors,” Little Saigon and the Northwest District.

I have always been a booster of mixed-use planning and policies. When successful they can be crucial to building community and neighborhood pride and cohesiveness.

In many older cities, the model was pretty good. A small business on the ground floor, with the proprietor above on the second floor, and maybe a tenant above that. Having a food store, a dentist or movie theater a block or so away reduce the necessity to own cars, which in turn – in theory – “calmed” traffic.

But here in SoCal, people want their cars, gosh darn it. They rather enjoy their land-gobbling lawns and – perhaps most importantly – developers want to build the tried-and-true modes of putting sticks in the ground.

My point here – and I do have one – is how does a city move good ideas into good outcomes? It’s been almost a decade since Westminster changed some zoning along Westminster Boulevard west toward Springdale with the hope of spurring mixed-uses. For the most part, it’s been more sputtering than spurring.

Urban planning isn’t the same as human nature, even if it’s for the better. Perhaps as Anne Shirley says in one of those “Anne of Green Gables” books, “People don’t want to be improved.”