Ground Broken for Long Canyon Homes
With a belch of black diesel smoke and the scrape of a bulldozer’s blade, Mayor Greg Stratton broke ground Wednesday on the Long Canyon housing development, ending years of waiting by neighbors.
The planned 652-house neighborhood will cover 300 acres of now-lush pastures in Simi Valley’s west end and fill in the final blank in the 15-year-old Wood Ranch subdivision. Most of the project’s remaining 1,500 acres will be preserved as parks and open space.
But Long Canyon also offers a promise that many Wood Ranch dwellers hold more dear than a new neighborhood next door.
It will allow construction of Wood Ranch Elementary School, which should ease crowding in the city’s west end classrooms. Groundbreaking for the $6.7-million, 600-student school is scheduled next week.
“This is a day we’ve all waited for, and some wondered if it would ever arrive,” said Norm Walker, president of the Simi Valley Unified School District, which sold Long Canyon to developers New Urban West for about $7 million.
“We’re excited about seeing a school built and, of course, the two [projects] are inextricably linked together,” Walker told city officials, developers and Wood Ranch neighbors in a crowd of 100 gathered before the groundbreaking. “We’ll be building more than new houses here. We’ll be building lives.”
Before the ceremony, Stratton recalled the kink that the recession put in Wood Ranch’s progress. Previous developer Olympia / Roberts stopped building and filed for bankruptcy in 1993, leaving the land vacant and plans for a school in limbo.
Stratton told the crowd that the city and the residents of Wood Ranch worried about who the new developer would be--right up until New Urban West stepped into the picture in March.
The Santa Monica developer--largely in the person of Vice President Tom Zanic--lobbied residents for support in a carefully orchestrated public relations program of neighborhood meetings and letter-writing campaigns.
Before long, the project had passed through the Planning Commission and City Council, and Stratton was at the controls of a 12-foot-high, 70-ton bulldozer, breaking ground for the new neighborhood.
“A lot of times, a developer comes in and doesn’t talk to anyone; no one knows what the plans are and rumors start, and all of a sudden there’s a lot of opposition,” Zanic said Wednesday in an interview.
“We’ve learned through the years that the best way to have a successful project with a community is to communicate with [it] as much as we can,” he said. “That just allays, we think, so many fears that people have.”
The Long Canyon homes are to range from 2,000 to 4,000 square feet on lots as large as a quarter of an acre and will sell for about $225,000 to $475,000, Zanic said.
