L.A.'s Newest City Grew Up in Hurry : Diamond Bar: Where cattle roamed only a few years ago, houses and condos now stand. Town's biggest problem: traffic.

By IRENE CHANG

March 18, 1990 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITER

Sixteen years ago, Diamond Bar wasn’t Joseph Gruner’s idea of the best place to buy a home.

He and his wife, Pamela, wanted to live near the coast, preferably in Orange County. They shopped around for an affordable three-bedroom home, but the prices were too expensive for the one-income family: $45,000 for a 20-year-old house in Westminster or Huntington Beach.

So they settled in a new, 1,400-square-foot tract house in northern Diamond Bar--30 miles away from the nearest beach, 30 miles from the mountains and 30 miles from downtown Los Angeles.

The Gruners bought the house on Red Cloud Drive for $30,000, with a $500 down payment and a monthly mortgage of $330.

At the time, Diamond Bar was a sparsely developed, unincorporated bedroom community on the eastern edge of the San Gabriel Valley. Clusters of wood-shingled tract homes were nestled among 8,000 acres of rolling hills. Oak and walnut trees dotted the landscape, and herds of cattle and buffalo roamed freely.

“My wife used to tell me, ‘You stuck me out here in the weeds,’ ” Gruner, 42, recalled. “But now, Diamond Bar has grabbed hold of us both.”

Incorporated just one year ago in March, 1989, as Los Angeles County’s newest city, Diamond Bar, with a population of 60,000, is one of the fastest growing cities in Los Angeles County, along with neighboring Walnut, and the northern county cities of Lancaster and Palmdale.

Low crime rates and highly rated public schools combine to make the area especially attractive to young families.

In fact, schools were what enticed the Gruners, with three sons, to their second home in the southern part of Diamond Bar in 1987, where they found a $190,000 four-bedroom house in the Walnut Valley Unified School District, a name recognized statewide and displayed prominently in real estate advertisements.

The Gruners’ old neighborhood was part of the lower-ranked Pomona district.

“So I drive 45 minutes every day to get to work,” said Joseph Gruner, who is employed by a Gardena neon sign company. “I don’t feel we compromised. We wanted the new. We wanted the chance to grow with the community.”

Diamond Bar’s quiet, bucolic atmosphere is being replaced as clusters of retail establishments and restaurants sprout up along Grand Avenue, Golden Springs Drive and Diamond Bar Boulevard.

Larger, more expensive homes are being built alongside condominiums and apartment complexes.

Single-family homes in Diamond Bar start at $200,000, but new houses cost at least $400,000, said Gwen Henry, a broker at Richard A. Sowers Realtor Inc. in Diamond Bar. The median price for homes is $325,000. Condominiums start at $100,000 and top out at $300,000, Henry said.

The new development and rise in home prices, is “the evolution of the city,” said John Patrick Newe, president of Century 21 E-N Realty in Diamond Bar and one of the founders of the Chamber of Commerce.

Along with unprecedented growth have come severe growing pains. Ask any resident, old or new, to name the largest single problem facing Diamond Bar, and chances are they’ll give the same answer.

“Traffic,” Granville Wilson, 73, said emphatically.

“You can’t go anywhere anymore,” groaned his wife, Ruby, 75.

The Wilsons moved to Diamond Bar’s first housing tract in 1960, when there were more deer than cars in the area. They paid $18,000 for a three-bedroom wood-shingle and stucco house on La Bonita Road, then only a 20-minute drive to Anaheim, where Granville Wilson worked as a mechanical engineer.

Today, that drive would take twice as long “at least,” Wilson said.

Diamond Bar is serviced by a few major streets that easily clog up during a typical rush-hour period. The 2.5-mile junction of the Orange (57) and Pomona(60) freeways, where 226,000 cars pass daily to and from Orange and San Bernardino counties, is one of the most congested spots in the state, said California Highway Patrol Lt. Donald Pitt.

It is notorious for bottlenecked traffic and fatal automobile accidents. Cars paralyzed in the late-afternoon gridlock take Diamond Bar off-ramps, using city streets as detours.

When the newly installed City Council first met last year, traffic was one of the first items on the agenda. Diamond Bar was being sued by San Bernardino County over a chain-link fence and barricades erected across the east end of Grand Avenue.

Before Diamond Bar’s incorporation, Los Angeles County officials had erected the barriers to block cars from the rapidly growing community of Chino Hills, fearing a recently completed extension of Grand Avenue through Diamond Bar would exacerbate traffic congestion.

The solution was only temporary. Late last year, Diamond Bar officials agreed to remove the barriers by next September, in exchange for $1.2 million in road improvements from San Bernardino. Both sides agreed to cooperate in building more roads to siphon off Grand Avenue traffic.

Still, the Wilsons don’t plan on leaving their quiet, tree-lined street.

“We enjoy the neighbors so much,” Ruby Wilson said, adding that five of their original neighbors still live there. “You get to the point where you’re rooted.”

The tract housing boom that lured first-time home buyers to Diamond Bar in the 1970s and kept them there through the ‘80s has driven up prices considerably, making it harder for middle-income earners to break into the city’s housing market.

In 1988 alone, the median price of a single-family house surged 27%, Newe said. The increase reflects an overall trend that year in the Greater Los Angeles Area, where housing prices grew 30.6%, according to the Los Angeles Board of Realtors.

Prices slowed down in 1989 in Diamond Bar as elsewhere, he said.

Neighborhoods are in transition. A recent influx of immigrants, mostly from Pacific Rim countries, is gradually changing the ethnic makeup of Diamond Bar.

Families from Taiwan and Hong Kong, once concentrated in the western San Gabriel Valley cities of Alhambra, Arcadia and Monterey Park, are drifting eastward to Hacienda Heights, Walnut and Diamond Bar, where schools are considered better, land is cheaper and houses are newer.

In response to the changing demographics, real estate firms in Diamond Bar are scrambling to find multilingual salespersons.

The firms also are adapting their sales tactics to a Chinese method of divination called feng shui, which some Asian clients use to determine if a site and floor plan are in harmony with nature, thus bringing health and happiness to the buyer.

Residential development in Diamond Bar began in 1956, when Transamerica Corp. bought the Diamond Bar Ranch to develop as Southern California’s first planned community.

Transamerica paid $10 million for the ranch, envisioning rows and clusters of spacious suburban dwellings that would eventually become home to 75,000 people. Over the years, the land was sold off to other builders.

Today, tract development covers the hillsides, leaving little vacant land. Newer, more expensive custom homes are located in Diamond Bar Country Estates (“The Country”), the city’s only gated community, with an impressive view of the Walnut and Pomona valleys and access to private equestrian trails.

Prices there range from a low of $600,000 to $8 million, said Gwendolyn Henry, a broker at Richard A. Sowers Realtor Inc., which handles most sales in The Country.

Dr. Hamendra Rana and his wife, Shachi, are building their dream house in The Country: a 13,000-square-foot mansion atop 1.2-acres of prime real estate on Ridgeline Road. Complete with dance floor, billiard and card rooms, and a Hindu shrine, it will be four times bigger than the Ranas’ current home in Diamond Bar.

“I always was fascinated by these big houses as I drove down Diamond Bar Boulevard and looked up,” said Shachi Rana, 31. The Ranas purchased two lots for $350,000 in 1987. Today, the land would be worth $1.3 million, Hamendra Rana said.

The Ranas, originally from Bombay, had another reason for choosing Diamond Bar. Of 700 families in The Country, 80 are Indian, Shachi Rana said.

“Location-wise, it’s perfect,” she said. “The kids have their friends here. I’m close to a group here. And after all this energy and sweat I don’t want to move anymore. I want to pass (the house) on to my kids.”

The Ranas are not the only family with big plans. Houses in The Country have grown to Gargantuan sizes, several more than 12,000 square feet. At first, some residents complained the gated community was losing its equestrian, rural flavor to Hollywood glitz and flash.

“They would say, ‘What the hell are you building a home like that for? Go to Beverly Hills,’ ” said Magdy Seif, 45, whose 15,000-square-foot French Normandy mansion has become something of a tourist attraction for passers-by on Wagontrain Lane.

“They resented us very much in the beginning. But once they realized it increased the value of their home, they didn’t mind,” Seif said.

The upscale reputation of Diamond Bar also is drawing people with more moderate incomes who like the city’s slower-paced atmosphere, said Newe of Century 21.

Developers are meeting an increasing demand for condominiums and apartments, from newly completed $750-a-month rentals on Temple Avenue and Mission Boulevard to the luxury Montefino condominiums, which sell for $190,000 to 250,000. In the last decade, the number of apartments and condominiums tripled to about 3,900 units, 37% of all housing in Diamond Bar.

And that may be increasing: “In January, 60% of our sales were condos,” Newe said.

But while city officials welcome growth, they don’t want an army of bulldozers and construction cranes to invade Diamond Bar and turn it into a city of high-rises and cramped living spaces.

During the 1989 incorporation election, cityhood proponents campaigned largely on a slow-growth platform, blaming the county for allowing development to continue unchecked. Residents voted overwhelmingly in favor of incorporation, by a margin of 3 to 1.

Still, vestiges of the old Diamond Bar Ranch remain.

Joseph Gruner occasionally sees road runners scamper past his window. Cattle graze on golden slopes near the junction of the 57 and 60 freeways, oblivious to the late-afternoon traffic merging dangerously. And deer feed from pools of water near City Hall, across the street from the future site of the South Coast Air Quality Management District’s new headquarters.

But Gruner said he’s ready for the day houses will displace the last of the jack rabbits and coyotes. He’s erected a concrete statue of a deer in his back yard.

AT A GLANCEPopulation

1989 estimate: 49,880

1980-89 change: 77.9%

Median age: 31.5 years

Racial/ethnic mix

White (non-Latino): 67.8%

Latino: 18.1%

Other: 8.7%

Black: 5.4%

Annual income

Per capita: 17,526

Median household: 56,358