Sales Effect of Metrolink’s Proximity to Homes Uncertain

Valencia resident John Harrison plans to give his car a rest. Instead of driving more than an hour to work, he expects to take advantage of the new Metrolink rail line connecting Santa Clarita and downtown Los Angeles. “I hope it will reduce some of the anxiety of peak-time traffic,” said the tax manager and CPA at Coopers & Lybrand. Besides, he added: “I believe in the benefit of reducing car travel for the environment.”

Jerry Gladbach is another Valencia resident who plans to try the new commuter rail line to his job as a manager of civil engineering at the Department of Water and Power in downtown Los Angeles. He currently leaves his home at 6 a.m. and gets back at 6 p.m. Gladbach is already car-pooling but, he said, “I love trains, so I’m going to try it and see how it works.”

Harrison and Gladbach are just the kind of commuters that public transportation planners are hoping to draw out of their cars and into a train or bus. One of the first steps in that effort is Metrolink, which debuted Monday with stations in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County communities of Santa Clarita, Burbank, Glendale, Moorpark, Simi Valley, Chatsworth and Van Nuys.

Just how successful the new Metrolink system will be is still uncertain. Another uncertainty is what affect Metrolink and several other proposed rail lines will have on property values in the San Fernando Valley and Ventura County.

But living near a rail station is considered a plus in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia and suburban San Francisco.

In the Bay Area, where the BART public rail system has been in use about 20 years, for many homeowners being near a BART station is perceived as a real plus. “There are buyers who come in and say, ‘I want to be close to BART,’ ” said Avram Goldman, senior vice president and regional manager at Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate Services in San Ramon, in the East Bay near Oakland. “For about 25% it’s an important consideration in buying a home. These buyers will often pay more to live close to BART,” he said.

“How much value it adds is hard to quantify,” Goldman said. “The only time it could possibly be negative is if the house is right next to the tracks or right next to a station.”

However, life is different in Los Angeles, where the automobile is at the center of our culture and public transportation hasn’t been a viable option for most commuters since the days of the venerable Red Car.

“You can take a look at other commuter rail services around the country and you’ll find that for the most part not only do they not hurt property values but indeed they help to raise them,” said Michael Bustamante, a spokesman with the Los Angeles County Transportation Commission.

Residents and developers in the areas adjacent to new rail lines hope that the prediction of higher home values proves to be true in Los Angeles too. Newhall Land & Farming Co., which developed Valencia with meandering walking trails, is hoping that train service will make their community more attractive to home buyers. Other Santa Clarita developers would like to see the same result.

Metrolink will initially feature 11 stations along 114 miles of already existing railroad tracks. Three lines will connect Santa Clarita, Ventura County and San Bernardino to Los Angeles Union Station. By 1995, the plan is to have more than 400 miles of track with 60 stations. Travel time between Santa Clarita and downtown Los Angeles will be about 67 minutes. Between Chatsworth and Union Station, expect about 56 minutes of travel time.

“There’s a huge difference between sitting in a train and sitting in traffic,” Bustamante said. “There’s an opportunity to get people out of their cars and clean up the air.”

Not everyone is thrilled, however, with Metrolink and other public transport proposals, including a rail line connecting LAX and Palmdale along the San Diego and Antelope Valley freeways, and an east-west Metro line through the San Fernando Valley.

“It will have some positive and many negative aspects,” charged Gerald A. Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino Inc. “I see a real severe problem for the homes near the rail lines.” Most of the efforts to get Angelenos out of their cars are doomed to failure, Silver said, so why waste the money? He also believes that neighborhoods adjacent to rail lines and stations “will change in character and the homes will decrease in value.”

Only a few commercial developers with office and retail properties adjacent to rail stations stand to benefit, Silver said. “I believe that in the long run there will be an economic benefit for merchants adjacent to the stations,” he said. “What’s driving this is the greed of a handful of developers.”

In fact, commercial property owners along Metro Rail sites--as distinguished from Metrolink--are not only suffering as a result of construction activity, but they’re being obligated to pay for the interim mess through benefit assessment districts.

JoAnn Kollars, president of the Crown Point Homeowners Assn. in north Long Beach, agrees with Silver that the rail lines may hurt home prices more than help. Kollars lives about 200 feet away from the Metro Blue Line and she’s convinced that the train line has been detrimental to property values.

“We can hear it up to five or six blocks away,” Kollars said. “Prospective buyers walk in, hear the train and walk out before they see the whole house. You can’t even get them to make an offer.”

Besides the noise, Kollars said, there’s added pollution. Commuters who park their cars adjacent to the rail stations contribute to what’s known as “hot soak.” That’s the phenomenon that occurs when people turn their cars on and off, spewing pollution into the air.

“In Los Angeles, rail lines are still viewed as a negative. As long as people think that, it’s going to be true,” said William Fulton, editor of California Planning and Development Report in Ventura. “It’s going to take a really long time for proximity to any kind of transit to be perceived as a plus by a residential buyer.”

Jobs in Los Angeles are all over the place and most suburban residents aren’t within walking distance of new and proposed rail stations, Fulton said. For example, “the number of Chatsworth residents that can easily and conveniently use Metrolink to get to work is pretty small,” Fulton said, and the station is basically in the middle of an industrial park.

It will take time for public transportation to become really popular in Los Angeles, Fulton predicted, but eventually living near a subway or rail line will be a plus--as it is in many other cities. Besides, Fulton said, “I’d rather have a train in my back yard than a freeway.”