Watching the Mountains Go Down Hill

Although Los Angeles has a worldwide reputation for urban congestion, we’re blessed by two mountain ranges that are towering reminders of the pre-freeway West.

There’s a painful lesson in those two mountain ranges about preservation of open space.

The San Gabriel Mountains extend eastward between the San Gabriel and San Fernando valleys. The San Gabriels are pretty well protected as part of the 1,000-square-mile Angeles National Forest. No matter how many more subdivisions and malls are built in the two valleys, the mountains will always offer a refuge.

But the other range, the Santa Monica Mountains, separating the San Fernando Valley from the rest of Los Angeles, has been endangered for years. Close to the basin’s urban heart, reaching tantalizingly to the coast, the Santa Monicas are being eaten up by development.

That’s because government got into the act too late, beginning to buy land for the Santa Monica Mountains Recreation Area, on the western half of the mountain range, after real estate prices began to soar. That’s why the park contains only about 16,000 acres, a fraction of the public lands in the San Gabriels.

Despite the staggering cost of land, the federal government is trying to compete for land with real estate developers. Also obtaining land are the nonprofit Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and the Mountains Restoration Trust. But their meager funds make the competition one-sided. With mountain homes selling for well over $1 million, who can afford a park?

There’s little anyone can do now. That was shown this week by what has happened to a small canyon in the Santa Monicas extending from Mulholland Drive down to Fryman Road in Studio City.

The canyon is popular with hikers and is used for nature walks by students from a nearby elementary school. The steep canyon walls, with their chaparral underbrush, are perfect examples of mountain topography. A small stream at the bottom completes the landscape. The canyon, and, on clear days, the entire Valley, is visible from an overlook in a park just off Mulholland Drive.

But not for long. Concluding a long battle over the future of the canyon, City Atty. Jim Hahn ruled Monday that the city had no way of stopping construction of 30 homes there. The property owners will clear away trees and underbrush, build an 18-foot-tall retaining wall, partially fill the canyon and then put up the houses.

I heard about the canyon in a phone call from Judy Marx, one of the homeowners who have been fighting the development. I wasn’t enthusiastic. Members of the save-the-canyons movement tend to be fanatics, their life myopically focused on the canyons to the exclusion of other civic issues. But I drove up to see her, wondering about the wisdom of city officials who allowed homes to be built in such a steep mountain area. The trip was worthwhile, for her story illustrated the dilemma presented by the Santa Monicas.

The canyon’s fate was sealed almost a decade ago when the subdivision was first proposed. The Briarcliff Improvement Assn. of Studio City, a homeowners’ group, opposed it in the city Planning and Building and Safety departments, before the Planning Commission and the Board of Zoning Appeals. The association and others also tried to persuade the state or the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy to buy the land. But neither did. Both the conservancy and the state were under heavy pressure to save other mountain land.

A lot of homeowner groups start too late and give up too early. That was not the case with Briarcliff and other homeowners who joined the fight. They forced the development firm to agree to about 75 modifications of its proposal. The project was reduced to half its original size before the council approved it, with Wachs casting the only no vote. In fact, some of the homeowners hoped the new requirement had made the project so expensive that it would never be built.

But they reckoned without the real estate boom. With prices for mountain homes climbing, the developers are ready to go ahead--as they have every right to do.

My visit to Judy Marx reaffirmed the futility of such efforts to save the mountains in light of today’s real estate prices. As we watch canyons in the Santa Monicas being filled, we can at least be grateful to an earlier generation that had the foresight to save the San Gabriels.