The Final Frontier : Space for Large Tracts of Single-Family Homes Draws Developers to Northwest Rim

The northwest rim of the San Fernando Valley has become a sort of last frontier for single-family home-building in the city of Los Angeles, where there is little room left for large housing tracts.

The area from the hills of Northridge to the far northwestern portion of Woodland Hills saw 77% of the net growth in houses built throughout the entire city between April, 1980, and October, 1987, according to the Los Angeles Planning Department.

“It’s really the last frontier for luxury home-building in the city,” Greig Smith, chief deputy to City Councilman Hal Bernson, said of the northwest Valley.

The phenomenon is referred to in urban planning terminology as a “buildout.” Its arrival means that housing development in the city will likely be forced to change from outward sprawl to increased density within the city limits, planners say.

Conflict Escalates

And that could mean bigger, more fierce neighborhood battles as residents react to builders’ attempts to replace single-family homes with apartment and condominiums or develop pockets of land that are surrounded by existing homes.

“You can just see the criticism of apartment buildings in different parts of the Valley,” said Ben Bartolotto, president of the Burbank-based Construction Industry Research Board. “That kind of political opposition is there, not only for moderate or low incomes for apartments, but covering the whole spectrum of incomes.”

Frank Fielding, a senior city planner based in the Valley, said: “Anything we do now, we’re headed into more controversy. Years ago, when we were building single-family homes, that was what was supposed to be happening.”

The reach of urbanization to the city’s outer edge is probably also a precursor to continued sprawl into unincorporated Los Angeles County, said David Hornbeck, a professor of geography at Cal State Northridge.

“Eventually, it’s going to be urbanization all the way to Gorman,” Hornbeck said.

Last Open Space

Within the city of Los Angeles, however, the last vestiges of open space for new housing have been in the northwest Valley, city officials said.

According to the Planning Department, the hillside area from Northridge west to Chatsworth and south to the tip of Woodland Hills gained 1,904 single-family homes from April, 1980, to October, 1987. In the same period, the entire city added 2,479 homes.

And more building is planned for the rim of the Valley. Porter Ranch Development Co. is in the early stages of proposing 3,000 homes and 7.5 million square feet of commercial development in the Chatsworth area. If it is approved, the project would be built over 30 years on one of the largest open pieces of land in the city, a 1,300-acre chunk located roughly between the Simi Valley Freeway and the Los Angeles County line.

In West Hills at the city’s western edge near Valley Circle Boulevard, a Santa Monica developer is in the midst of building three projects totaling 685 homes. Some of the finished homes by Urban West Communities have already sold for $410,000 to $650,000, said Tom Zanic, the firm’s vice president.

Although such developers as Urban West and the Porter Ranch firm are pushing against the hillsides, a large number of small vacant parcels remain scattered across the Valley floor, said Hornbeck, who estimates that the parcels total as much as 22,000 acres.

Future home-building in the city is likely to focus on those parcels, said city Planning Officer Glenn Blossom. Some will be “granny flats,” or detached homes built on lots large enough to accommodate two houses, he said.

“That probably would mean a different kind of a developer, not your developer that builds 100 homes at a time, but rather smaller buildings,” Blossom said.

Other homes probably will be proposed for what were previously considered “problem parcels,” or lots that were never developed because they presented builders with an intractable problem such as an irregular shape, Fielding said.

Increased Density

Moreover, planners expect the overall demand for housing in the city to result in construction of more apartments and condominiums.

The Los Angeles 2000 Committee, a blue-ribbon civic advisory panel, said in its report to Mayor Tom Bradley last month: “Given premium land costs in the city, the decision to encourage affordable housing may lead to increased density, as dwellings take the form of smaller apartment units and new housing prototypes.”

The panel also concluded that, in the future, developers will aim for projects that blend commercial and residential uses.

Planners are about to embark on a 5- to 7-year effort to revise their community plans, which map out what sorts of development are allowed in individual city neighborhoods. They have not yet determined how and where those plans will be changed, but the process will provide for public hearings and will probably be fairly controversial, Blossom said.

Seeking Compromise

“Every plan is some kind of compromise worked out between competing interests,” Blossom said. “There is going to be some tinkering in both directions. In some areas, there will be further scaling down, but, in others, there will be a realization that actually they can have a greater amount of development than currently planned.”

No one can be sure how such a controversy would be resolved. The latest catch phrase used by planners, politicians and developers to describe how to manage future development in the city is “jobs-housing balance.” The idea is for development to create more jobs near residential areas, relieving traffic by shortening workers’ daily trips. It also has its critics.

“It seems like a way to solve the problem until you really try to mix employment and residential,” Hornbeck said. “What kind of businesses are you going to put in the middle of a neighborhood?”

One dispute brewing in the Northridge area could be a hint of controversies that might lie ahead. An Encino developer, ASL Financial, has proposed a 250,000-square-foot office park on vacant land surrounded by homes. A group of residents is opposing the proposal, saying the area already has too much traffic.

For some residents, such as local historian Catherine Mulholland, the talk of change on the horizon merely underscores how far the Valley has come since its early days.

“There was a sense of spaciousness,” Mulholland said of the Valley of the 1930s. “It seems to me now that spaciousness has turned into almost a mockery because you have to travel these great distances, but you never have that sense of elbowroom.”