Ahmanson Co. President Is Close to Building a Dream : Growth: Donald H. Brackenbush’s spirit of innovation and willingness to compromise get credit from backers and foes. He says college mentors gave him an environmental and social perspective.

As a young architect and urban planner in the 1960s, Donald H. Brackenbush went to Libya to plan public works projects for the country’s new oil wealth. Then Moammar Kadafi came to power and spent the money on the military.

A few years later, in creating the master plan for downtown Los Angeles, Brackenbush made its piece de resistance a miniature Central Park three blocks wide and six blocks long extending north from the Convention Center. The real South Park turned out more like a postage stamp.

Another heartbreaker was his early 1970s design for the Los Angeles mass transit system. The voters rejected the bonds, killing mass transit for almost two decades.

It’s not as though everything Brackenbush designed ended up on a shelf. But, after 25 years as a high-minded planner, he felt a longing for “the joy and agony of completion.” He also wanted to make some more money.

So, in the mid 1980s, Brackenbush became a developer.

And now, at 55, an age when others may begin to dream of finding a faraway village to retire to, Brackenbush is building his, just west of the San Fernando Valley. As president of Ahmanson Land Co., he is the heart and soul of its massive project, approved by the Ventura County Board of Supervisors last December, to build 3,050 homes and a commercial center in the open spaces of the Simi Hills.

Reflecting an environmental and social perspective that Brackenbush attributes to his college mentors, the Ahmanson Ranch will be no common enclave of cookie-cutter “tract mansions.” Its inspiration is the old village green, with some modern twists. It will have its own schools, library, police station, fire station and town hall--all paid for by development fees.

Also on the company tab will be an environmental institute to see to the protection of 10,000 acres of open space being turned over as part of the development agreement.

The town will have commercial outlets for the daily needs of its 8,600 residents. There will be advanced amenities such as an electric car charging socket in each garage and fiber-optic phone equipment that can link residents to their companies’ computers.

Most unusual, the plans call for dwelling units that can match the income of everyone who works there, from executives who might buy large houses, to the lowliest groundskeeper at the Professional Golfers’ Assn. golf course, who might rent a room in a boardinghouse.

Though Brackenbush hardly claims all those ideas as his own, others who observed the progress of the plan through the Ventura County administration credit his spirit of innovation and willingness to compromise for giving them life.

“In terms of a new, upper-end community, these are not typical things you find coming out of developers these days,” said Joseph T. Edmiston, executive director of the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy.

“I think all new . . . communities are going to have to come up to these kinds of standards,” Edmiston said. “But the first person in town that comes up with those kinds of things at least deserves some kind of credit.”

Inevitably, the Ahmanson Ranch has intractable opponents.

They view its social niceties as poor compensation for an explosion of urban sprawl into the environmentally sensitive corridor between the San Fernando Valley and Thousand Oaks. Soon after the plan’s adoption, nine separate lawsuits were filed by homeowner and environmental groups, neighboring cities and Los Angeles County.

“I think he is slick,” Los Angeles Councilwoman Joy Picus said of Brackenbush. She said her request for gates on Victory Boulevard to prevent traffic from the new town spilling into Los Angeles was ignored.

“He nods his head and says he hears what you say. He’s attentive. He’s reassuring. But none of it was reflected in the final plan.”

Oddly, though the project renders its critics livid with environmental fury, most of them concede that the man behind it evokes a distant, but generally warm, respect.

Imposing in height and resonant voice, conservative in dress, articulate and self-assured, Brackenbush has earned a reputation during the seven years of tortuous negotiations as a master of the artful compromise, giving in with grace to demands that catch his fancy or fit his bottom line, while ever-so-courteously resisting those he won’t accommodate.

“It’s been a pleasure,” said Calabasas City Councilman Marvin Lopata, who nonetheless voted with his colleagues to join the assault of lawsuits against Ahmanson Ranch. “I must admit that I have enjoyed working with him, although I don’t like his project and wish his project would go away.”

Despite such warm sentiment, many who worked with Brackenbush over the years said they knew next to nothing about the person behind his professional veneer.

“He’s a natty dresser, a good planner, ironic sense of humor . . .,” Edmiston said, struggling to come up with a more personal reflection. “Really, it’s not because I don’t like the man or respect him. I just don’t know him personally that well.”

A man who has had the same tennis partner for 20 years, Brackenbush is a model of personal reserve, seeming to lose words to express himself when the subject switches from his project to him. Among the bureaucrats, politicians and homeowners who have dealt with him extensively over the past two years, it was virtually unknown that his marriage of 25 years was breaking up.

“I didn’t even know he was married,” Lopata said. “I don’t know if he’s local or from Timbuktu.”

Figuratively, Brackenbush did come by way of Timbuktu. It was Africa that first polished his diplomatic style, giving him two kings and a military regime as clients.

As a newlywed fresh out of the University of Ohio with degrees in architecture and urban planning, Brackenbush honeymooned in Italy in 1966. In Rome, he found an American planning firm, walked in on a lark to check out the overseas job market and landed a post in Libya.

Then came Malawi, in southeast Africa, where he recommended that a new post-colonial capital be built near the country’s traditional transportation center. The king, however, wanted it farther north, near his ancestral home. The king prevailed.

The capital’s plan provided for concrete housing pads on which people could build their own homes, using native materials: a “kind of Habitat for Humanity before Jimmy Carter knew about it,” Brackenbush said.

Years later, he returned to Africa to work with the military regime of Nigeria on another post-colonial capital, Abuja.

“We were dealing with a bunch of Nigerian generals,” he recalled. “Smart guys. All English-educated, enormously articulate, well-meaning. . . . It wasn’t hard to get a decision. No lawsuits, by the way. They certainly had that going for them.”

He never returned to see how either capital turned out, but doesn’t imagine he would find much of his own inspiration in them.

“It became somewhat doubtful that many of these plans were really going to go forward in your lifetime,” he said wistfully.

In 1970, Brackenbush abandoned “the romantic period of my life” to open a West Coast office for the firm of his former college professors, Ian McHarg and David Wallace, two luminaries of American urban planning. Wallace, a sociologist and economist as well as planner, “understood the social-economic fabric of the city better than anybody I’ve know,” Brackenbush said. McHarg, whose book “Design With Nature” has recently been reprinted, is regarded as the father of the theory of tailoring large-scale development to the ecology of the site.

During 10 years with the firm, Brackenbush worked on a Burbank redevelopment project and numerous regional efforts across the western United States, in addition to the downtown Los Angeles plan and the Los Angeles mass transit plan.

Then, tiring of the world of consulting, he switched to development in 1986, becoming senior vice president of Home Savings of America, assigned to oversee design and construction of the company’s corporate facilities in Irwindale and development of its real estate holdings.

Among those was the 5,433-acre Ahmanson Ranch, which Home Savings’ founder, Howard Ahmanson, bought in the early 1960s. The company had twice drawn up and then abandoned development plans, including one for a densely populated city with its own university.

The property, in the Simi Hills across the county boundary from the huge neo-Tudor and Victorian mansions rising in West Hills, had recently been rezoned as open space, allowing a maximum of one unit per 80 acres. The prospect of spreading 68 multimillion-dollar mansions over the land violated Brackenbush’s McHargian philosophy.

“That’s probably one of the least attractive things we would want to do, socially and environmentally,” he said. “If you can imagine that in the middle of each of these 80-acre ranchettes, you have a house with three teen-age kids with off-road motorcycles, you can see what’s going to happen to the environment.”

It also wouldn’t have produced the kind of high-yield income Ahmanson was expecting.

Ahmanson initially proposed clustering a giant commercial center--about 3 million square feet--with 3,000 housing units in the flattest portion of the ranch. About 3,000 wild acres would be donated to the public.

But the Ventura County Board of Supervisors rejected the plan, and the company scaled back to 1,800 units and a commercial center one-seventh of the original size.

The focus then shifted to a “neo-traditional” town that “takes direct aim at the 1950s tract lots we were so good at in Southern California,” Brackenbush said. “The old village green with the church, the hardware store, the town hall and the social-cultural fabric that went along with it was lost after World War II. Now, we can’t even walk to get a loaf of bread. You get in your car.”

Brackenbush began to think of his town as a place where people wouldn’t have to drive. The design, as it evolved, provided a town center with jobs for 1,800, all within a 10-minute walk or bicycle ride from every house. Apartments sprouted above shops in the town center. Funds were committed for a shuttle bus to nearby Warner Center. Offices were conceived as “electronic satellites” to house platoons of workers from faraway data centers.

Even though they opposed the development as a bad precedent for urbanization, the Ventura County planners liked the idea of the self-sufficient town and gave Brackenbush high marks for his willingness to adapt their suggestions.

One was low-income housing. The county asked for the plan to include housing affordable to everyone working in the development, meaning about 25% of the units would have to be rent-controlled.

Rather than balking, Brackenbush says he grew enthusiastic over the concept that “the librarian can afford a house, the schoolteacher can afford a house and somebody working in the hotel can live there.” The planners say the enthusiasm was a pleasant surprise.

His solution harked back to two old ideas: single-room-occupancy units with communal dining like that of an old-time boardinghouse would be built for 50 residents, and every fifth house would have a back yard unit, or “granny flat,” with rent limits set by a county board. In addition, he promised to give the county six acres for development of subsidized housing.

Brackenbush also won praise from some environmentalists for his quick acceptance of Ventura County Supervisor Maria VanderKolk’s suggestion that the developer create an environmental institute. As a model for what became the Las Virgenes Institute, VanderKolk steered him to the Sonoran Institute in Tucson, Ariz., which is funded by the World Wildlife Fund to research methods to protect natural areas from the negative effects of development.

“He picked up on this idea like a natural,” said Luther Propst, executive director of the Sonoran Institute. “He grasped it and thought it was a plus for the marketing side of his project and the environmental mitigation side. More than any developer I’ve worked with, he tries his best to mesh the needs of banks and employers with the environmental impacts.”

Propst has since recruited Brackenbush to sit on the Sonoran Institute’s board of directors.

Some opponents contemptuously dismiss his environmental rhetoric.

The Las Virgenes Institute, said Mary Wiesbrock, director of Agoura-based Save Open Space, “is simply green window-dressing to make something look good that’s an environmental disaster.”

“It’s touted as a sustainable development, but it can’t be because 37,000 vehicle trips a day will leave the project.

“People aren’t going to go bicycling and hiking. . . . It’s just more urban sprawl and traffic, where thousands and thousands of vehicles will leave every day on streets that are already gridlocked.”

Brackenbush was spared a knock-down political battle before the Ventura County supervisors by acceding to a marriage of his plan with another to build a PGA golf course and 750 homes on Bob Hope’s Jordan Ranch property to the west.

VanderKolk, who was elected in 1990 on a platform of protecting the two properties, proposed joining both developments on the Ahmanson land so that the entire 7,437-acre Hope property could be bought for state and federal parkland.

The large public acquisition won over some park advocates such as Edmiston, but the expansion of the project to more than 3,000 units further outraged opponents. Their only recourse was to go to court, and they did.

The lawsuits will delay the project at least a year, and possibly much longer, Brackenbush predicted.

But he’s not impatient. So far he’s invested seven years in Ahmanson Ranch. The construction, which will begin within six months after the last lawsuit is settled, will continue for 15 years. He expects to be on the job until it’s done.

And, when the time comes, he’ll have no trouble finding a home there fit for a $165,000-a-year executive like himself.

In the future he sees cityhood, and dreamily he says, “Maybe I’ll be mayor.”

He is the kind of guy who could get elected.