Builder Drops Foothills Housing Plan

A Newport Beach home builder has suddenly dropped plans to build what would have been the largest single housing development in the sensitive South County foothills below the Cleveland National Forest.

Costain Homes Inc. has dropped plans to build 294 houses in the environmentally sensitive foothills.

Costain Homes held an option to purchase 444 acres in the foothills adjacent to Trabuco Canyon. The project had already been submitted to the county for approval.

“It was strictly a business decision not to renew the option,” said Steve Ford, a vice president in charge of planning and acquisition for Costain. “There were a lot of factors involved in the decision.”

Trabuco resident Bruce Conn said he was happy that Costain was out of the picture because the firm’s other developments in Riverside County were tract-style houses, a type that Conn believes would not fit into the rural setting in Trabuco Canyon.

Sam Couch, who handled the project at Costain Homes, has left the Newport Beach company and still is assisting the Ferber Family Trust that owns the parcel in the canyon.

Couch said he is working with the Irvine firm of Patterson, White and Gross to develop a new building plan with 100 fewer houses that would “balance the intensity (of the development) with the capacity of the local existing traffic circulation.”

He said the plan would call for less grading and fewer homes, and would preserve more than 90% of the area’s oak trees and use existing roads to move traffic from the canyons and foothills to the nearby proposed Foothill Transportation Corridor.

“The Costain proposal was not a good one,” said conservationist Ray Chandos, a Trabuco Canyon homeowner and chairman of an 11-member advisory panel of canyon residents and major landowners. The panel has spent two years reviewing development options for the area. But, Chandos said, the county will “never buy off” on the new proposal because of its failure to deal with the increased traffic that the project would create.

Because of its abundance of oaks and scenic rural roads, the Trabuco Canyon area has been the focus of debate between pro-growth forces and environmentalists who say the area is the last of its kind in Orange County and should be preserved.

County planners are working on a plan to control growth in Trabuco Canyon and nearby foothills.