Builders May Have Had Their Day in Santa Clarita Valley
In the laissez-faire 1980s, the Santa Clarita Valley was a developer’s paradise, where a real estate boom doubled the population to 158,000 by the decade’s end.
The 1990s, however, will be far from paradise for the valley’s developers.
Los Angeles County’s regional planning commissioners say the previous decade’s unbridled growth has stretched public services in the valley to the limit and must be checked.
The County Board of Supervisors must decide whether to heed the commissioners’ call to reject 25,500 proposed houses, apartments and condominiums--enough dwellings to serve a city the size of Carson. The board is tentatively scheduled to make that decision Thursday.
Dave Vannatta, a planning deputy to Supervisor Mike Antonovich, pledged that the supervisor is “not going to gut or make wholesale changes to what regional planning is doing.” Builders have long considered Antonovich an ally and have contributed heavily to his campaigns.
But even if the supervisors relax the commission’s tough recommendations, it is clear that the rules of the development game have drastically changed in the Santa Clarita Valley, builders, county officials and slow-growth activists say.
With the county declaring that growth has limits, builders in the valley are, for the first time, competing with one another for shrinking slices of the development pie. Developers, as if atoning for earlier excesses, are offering to provide extra roads, parks, fire stations and other public improvements to get their projects approved.
“It’s now a competition,” Vannatta said.
“It sort of pits everybody against each other,” a builder complained.
Supt. J. Michael McGrath of the Newhall School District said: “I think it scares the hell out of developers.”
Developers who once showed no interest in building schools to house spiraling student enrollments are offering to help districts with cash and land for new campuses.
“It is not business as usual,” McGrath said. “We refer to it--I think they do, too--as a beauty contest. They are very carefully trying to be just a little more generous.”
The Dale Poe Development Co., builder of the Stevenson Ranch project, has offered the Newhall district and a neighboring school district land and cash worth more than $50 million. Poe has approvals for 4,300 units and hopes that the county will allow 4,600 more.
Until now, “we’ve been dealing with Dale Poe for many years without getting anywhere,” McGrath said.
The force altering the Santa Clarita Valley development scene is the General Plan growth guide approved by the five-member Regional Planning Commission in May. The General Plan does not confer approval on specific projects but rather lays down a blueprint for growth through 2010.
If the supervisors approve it in its present form, the plan would permit only 12,500 of 38,000 units proposed by developers, leaving 25,500 in limbo. The General Plan is based on estimates of population growth and the services needed to support that population. It is a long-range document not tied to the existing real estate slump.
The seeds of this restrictive new plan were planted, ironically, by developers throughout the 1980s.
General plans are designed to be flexible documents that can be modified to reflect new trends. But during the mid-1980s, the Santa Clarita Valley General Plan no longer guided development because builders flooded the county with requests to amend the plan to allow their projects. Many of their requests were granted.
Unlike simple zoning changes, General Plan amendments typically call for significant changes in land use. Newhall Land & Farming Co., for example, asked for one amendment that would allow 1,215 units built on land zoned for only 32. A decision is pending.
Regional planning commissioners complained that they were unable to focus on the overall planning picture in the valley because they were besieged by so many individual projects requiring plan amendments.
Expressing concern that the General Plan was out of their control, planning commissioners froze all pending amendments on June 21, 1988, and announced that they would overhaul the entire General Plan. “It became very apparent to us that we could not go on,” former Commissioner Betty Fisher said.
Although many developers didn’t realize it at the time, a new era had begun.
“That day, the whole game plan changed,” said developer Dirk Gosda of Korek Land Co.
That game plan took many developers by surprise. Some builders, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they thought that the freeze on plan amendments was an election-year ploy instigated by Antonovich, who that same month was forced into a runoff with former supervisor and slow-growth advocate Baxter Ward.
Some builders guessed that Antonovich was trying to win support in the Santa Clarita Valley, where a strong anti-growth sentiment prevailed. Such sentiments fueled the successful drive to incorporate a portion of the valley into the city of Santa Clarita in 1987.
Although Antonovich trounced Ward in the 1988 general election, 64% to 36%, he trailed Ward in the city of Santa Clarita by 1,600 votes.
After the election, some builders said they thought that business would return to normal.
“I don’t know how anybody could make that assumption,” said Vannatta, Antonovich’s aide. A problem clearly exists in the valley, and developers who thought that growth would continue without restraint were “looking with their heart instead of their eyes,” he said.
“I guess they misjudged their influence,” Santa Clarita City Councilwoman Jan Heidt said of developers. During the 1988 election, development interests affected by the proposed General Plan gave $130,038 to Antonovich. Since 1984, those interests have given all five supervisors more than $550,000 combined.
Heidt, one of Antonovich’s harshest critics, said the county would have had to control growth eventually. Between 1985 and 1989, the valley was the fastest-growing region in Los Angeles County.
“I always felt that someday the piper would have to be paid,” she said.
Many developers agreed that a slowdown was inevitable, an assessment bolstered by a county study last year.
The report grimly predicted that the Santa Clarita Valley would need $912 million in public improvements--from parks and libraries to bridges and roads--to serve the region by 2010. And that report does not include estimates from the valley’s five school districts, which predict that they will need $400 million to build 33 new campuses by 2010.
The housing projects most likely to be included in the new General Plan to be considered this week will be those that make up for these deficiencies in the infrastructure.
That certainly has been the case with Northlake, a project north of Castaic that originally called for 5,100 units on land zoned for 605. County planners initially declined to amend the General Plan but later agreed to allow 1,800 units.
Planners said they changed their minds because Northlake would provide, among other things, a fire station, a library site, horse trails, parks and school sites. Northlake, even at a proposed 5,100 units, enjoyed the support of the local school district and Chamber of Commerce. The county even received 550 postcards from Castaic residents endorsing the project.
But Gosda, one of Northlake’s developers, said he hopes that the community support and numerous amenities will persuade the supervisors to allow more than the recommended 1,800 units.
The new General Plan, as approved by the Regional Planning Commission, has been praised by some of the county’s most frequent critics in the Santa Clarita Valley.
Even the Santa Clarita City Council found few faults with the document. And this is the same City Council that is suing the county because it approved the Stevenson Ranch development, which Santa Clarita insists is not well-planned.
But Heidt said she fears that the new plan will not solve the valley’s problems. “Too little too late,” she said. “It will never help us bridge the deficiency of infrastructure that we have.”
Developer Jack Shine, meanwhile, fears that requiring new homeowners to bear the cost of most public improvements will price even more people out of the housing market. He said builders will pass on the costs of roads, schools, libraries and other improvements to the home buyer.
As the hearing on the General Plan approaches, former commissioner Fisher said she is curious to see whether the supervisors make the plan a firm cap on growth. “We’ve yet to see how serious it is,” she said.
And it’s possible that, once the new plan is approved, developers will inundate the county with requests to amend it. “After the plan, the deluge?” Fisher asked.
Gosda, however, said he thinks that the county is serious. “You either get a General Plan amendment now or you’re going to wait years until the next one.”
DEVELOPERS’ CONTRIBUTIONS TO SUPERVISORS
The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors will soon decide on a new General Plan for the Santa Clarita Valley through 2010. Many developers affected have been frequent contributors to the supervisors, a Times survey found. What follows are the top 10 contributors, the number of units proposed by the developers and the number recommended by county planners. The campaign contributions include amounts from developers, their consultants, officers and, in some cases, relatives of company officers.
Developer: Newhall Land & Farming Co. Campaign contributions: $91,425 Units requested: 8,905 Units recommended: 6,023 Developer: Watt Land Campaign contributions: $71,500 Units requested: 1,239 Units recommended: 542 Developer: Dale Poe Development Co. Campaign contributions: $64,975 Units requested: 4,632 Units recommended: 891 Developer: Pardee Construction Campaign contributions: $45,750 Units requested: 172 Units recommended: 30 Developer: Lusk Co. Campaign contributions: $42,500 Units requested: 3,000 Units recommended: 540 Developer: First Financial Corp. Campaign contributions: $37,500 Units requested: 299 Units recommended: 144 Developer: Anden Group Campaign contributions: $33,500 Units requested: 683 Units recommended: 150 Developer: W.H.T. Loh and Engineering Service Corp.* Campaign contributions: $25,405 Units requested: 878 Units recommended: 625 Developer: Northlake Campaign contributions: $24,343 Units requested: 5,100 Units recommended: 1,800 Developer: Larwin Campaign contributions: $20,000 Units requested: 675 Units recommended: 142 * Engineering Service Corp. is a consultant to developer W.H.T. Loh
Source: campaign contribution reports, Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters
