L.A. Limits Building on Northeast Valley Slopes

A long-debated proposal to restrict development on rustic hillsides of the northeast San Fernando Valley won final approval Wednesday from the Los Angeles City Council.

By an 11-1 vote, the council enacted changes to the land-use plans covering 3,200 acres of steeply sloping land in Sunland, Tujunga, Lake View Terrace and Shadow Hills.

The amended plan, sought for four years by Councilman Joel Wachs, calls for “minimum” density development of the area--requiring from one to five acres per housing unit--and also places property in it under the city’s strict slope-density construction ordinance.

“This is really an area of unique beauty,” Wachs said. “The real issue comes down to whether . . . this will be destroyed.”

The council action left undecided, however, the fate of several proposed single-family housing developments that have been caught in a legislative battle between Wachs and Mayor Tom Bradley.

In August, Bradley moved to exempt seven projects from the land-use limits, saying it was a matter of “fairness and good public policy” because the developers had already filed to subdivide their land.

Since then, three of the projects have been approved and a fourth scaled back, city officials said. On Wednesday, the council overrode Bradley’s bid to exempt the final three from the minimum-density designation--but also delayed including them in the revised land-use plan.

“The controversial cases will be back before you one by one,” Wachs told fellow council members. “What I don’t want to do is say . . . they’ll automatically get what they want.”

Among the projects still at issue is one by the Dale Poe Development Corp., which hopes to build 119 houses on 41 acres in Tujunga. Another, by the Nansay Corp., envisions a 63-unit horse-keeping community on 65 acres in Shadow Hills.

The approval of the more restrictive guidelines drew praise from homeowner groups and criticism from developers’ representatives.

“Without some protection, those hillsides would be mowed down,” said Tina Eick, a spokeswoman for the Shadow Hills Property Owners Assn.

“We don’t want to look like Glendale,” said another member of the group.

But John Bowman, a lawyer for the Duke Development Co., which is seeking to build 41 houses in the area, said scaling down such projects will make them “economically unfeasible.”

The result, Bowman said, will be “a dramatic impact on housing supply in the region.”

Councilman Mike Hernandez also questioned this effect of the revised land-use plan, which reduces the projected population of the northeast Valley’s foothill area from 150,000 to 129,000.

Hernandez noted that many parts of the city--such as his northeast Los Angeles district--are overcrowded and that schoolchildren have to be bused to areas such as Sunland and Tujunga, where there is empty classroom space.

Suggesting that those areas should accommodate the population overflow, Hernandez asked, “Do I vote for the haves or the have-nots?”

Wachs, however, said developers’ plans for the hillsides would probably not help the people Hernandez was worried about. “The have-nots are not going to be moving into these houses,” Wachs said.

“I’m not going to be able to afford it,” he added.