Unwelcome Facilities Are Left With No Place to Go

“Nobody wants anything in their back yard; well, where are you going to put it?” asks Barry Walter, chairman of the board of Los Angeles Lutheran High School.

The school has been searching for a permanent home since 1985, when it sold the former Villa Cabrini Academy property in Burbank to Woodbury University. Walter said the 400-student Lutheran school has been forced by homeowner opposition to drop out of escrows on two land purchases, one in Chatsworth and one in Lake View Terrace.

It is operating temporarily out of cramped quarters at a church in Mission Hills.

“Years ago, people wanted to live right across from the school so your kids could go there,” Walter said. “That was the first thing you asked, ‘Where’s the school?’ Now they don’t want to be anywhere near it.”

Meanwhile, he said, vacant land of any size is increasingly hard to find in the San Fernando Valley.

Welcome Mat Pulled

The Lutheran school is not alone. Facilities that arguably serve a community need are seeing the welcome mat pulled all over the Valley.

“We’ve made no progress in terms of finding a location,” said James Astman, headmaster of Oakwood School, which was frustrated last year in an attempt to move from two small parcels in North Hollywood to a 17-acre Calabasas site. “It’s very difficult to find anything that’s sufficiently large and affordable.

“There is an Eisenhower quote,” he added. “I wish these people who seem to be opposing projects like ours, the construction of new schools and other nonprofit institutions, would take it seriously: ‘A people that values its privacy above its principles soon loses both.’ ”

C. David Olsen, pastor of the Lutheran Church of the Resurrection in Canoga Park, said the church has abandoned a plan to build housing for elderly people on its property.

‘Made It Less Tall’

“We have 2 acres in back, and we’re going to have to sell it,” Olsen said. “We had raised the money for condominiums for seniors and we were getting together with contractors, then we ran into neighborhood opposition.

“We scaled it down from 125 units to 75, we made it less tall, we pushed it back from the property lines, we agreed to no access to the street except through our property, but we couldn’t reach a compromise.”

The land will be sold for single-family homes, he said.

A school for emotionally disturbed teen-agers ran into heavy opposition last year when it tried to move to Sunland. One member of the city Board of Zoning Appeals said she voted against the move in part because the vehemence of neighbors would create an “inhospitable therapeutic environment” for the youths.

A drug treatment center to be named for First Lady Nancy Reagan has encountered similar opposition in its effort to move to Lake View Terrace. A zoning appeals official said the board has been flooded with mail, even though the application has yet to come before the board.

“We have a stack of letters from homeowners this high, but no case to attach them to,” he said.