Foes of Mega-Suburb Rethink the American Dream : Development: With an eventual 21,000 homes, Newhall Ranch in Santa Clarita brings a builder’s vision and environmentalists’ fears squarely into opposition.

Tall grass and lush oak trees cover the hills above the Santa Clara River, which snakes through a valley between the Santa Susana and San Gabriel mountains before it empties into the Pacific Ocean 100 miles away.

Cows graze in fields dotted with ancient oil rigs. A bird swoops down and flies off with a mouse clenched in its claws. Only the sound of the wind whistling through the leaves breaks the silence. On a clear day from atop the mesas, hikers looking west can see the dark outlines of the Channel Islands.

Little has changed in this river valley since the Gold Rush, despite the mammoth growth of Los Angeles 30 miles to the south.

Now picture this: Tractor-trailer trucks rumbling down a nearby interstate highway hauling tons of steel and concrete. Streets winding through more than 21,000 homes roofed with orange tiles. An 18-hole golf course, an artificial creek, parks, strip malls, cars and 70,000 people--America’s suburban dream.

This is Newhall Ranch, a master-planned community that pulls together a developer’s vision, a conservationist’s fears and the importance of the power brokers who make it happen. For better or worse, the project symbolizes the expansion--to some, the environmental tragedy--that has marked the evolution of the Los Angeles area.

“We’re going to have to accommodate growth somehow,” said William Fulton, author of the book “The Reluctant Metropolis,” which chronicles the growth of Los Angeles. “The question is how?”

Opponents contend Newhall Ranch would flood the area with pollution and traffic, suck water reserves dry and threaten endangered birds and fish living in the Santa Clara, one of Southern California’s longest and last wild rivers.

“This is it in Los Angeles County,” said Barbara Wampole, co-founder of a local group that has fought to protect the area. “If we don’t preserve this, it’s over.”

Planners say the 19-square-mile development--the second largest in county history--would be an ecologically friendly community that will help house some of California’s exploding population, expected to grow from the current 32 million to 49.3 million by 2025, rivaling the population of Italy, according to one estimate.

But four lawsuits have been filed to stop construction from starting. While they make their way through the courts, players on both sides leaf through voluminous documents and spin their arguments to prove theirs is the just cause.

The developer, Newhall Land and Farming Co., traces its origins to Henry Mayo Newhall, a 24-year-old Massachusetts-born auctioneer who came to California in 1849 during the Gold Rush. Instead of gold, he ended up with ranchland--lots of it.

When Newhall died in 1883, his five sons inherited six ranches totaling 143,000 acres. They formed the Newhall Land and Farming Co. that year.

Other land barons emerged with them at the turn of the century. Henry Huntington turned his railroad empire into a real estate fortune thanks to his widely used Red Car rail system. And, of course, there was William Mulholland, the engineer who envisioned the aqueducts that famously diverted--some say stole--water from the Owens Valley and Colorado River to feed a thirsty Los Angeles.

Mulholland’s dreams assured the metropolis would continue to grow, especially the flatlands of the San Fernando Valley. First came citrus groves, irrigated with the imported water. Over the years other industries followed: movie studios, aircraft factories and a string of bedroom communities that stretched east for some 25 miles from Calabasas to Burbank.

By the 1960s, suburbs were being built for the suburbs. Developments branched outward--east in Riverside and San Bernardino counties, south in Orange County. For some, commuting to work took hours, not minutes.

And, of course, there was the Santa Clarita Valley, where much of Henry Newhall’s land is.

Life Wrapped Up in a Tidy Package

Gary Cusumano, Newhall Land’s president and CEO, sounds like a proud papa as he takes a driving tour through the center of Valencia, the company’s flagship project.

Lawns are immaculate, and neighborhood pools glimmer a crystal blue. The community’s regional mall, the Valencia Town Center, occupies 790,000 square feet in the middle of everything.

Nearby is Town Center Drive, a main street with offices, restaurants and bars. Ample retail space beckons companies to relocate. Six Flags Magic Mountain is just down the highway, the tracks of its roller coasters rising and falling like the hills that surround the Santa Clarita Valley.

“I think the community looks better today than when it was 35 years ago,” he said. “That’s not to say that we’ve never made any mistakes. It’s to say that we’ve learned from some of those and try to always improve.”

Newhall Land began building Valencia in the mid-1960s, the company’s first major foray into master-planned communities that try to wrap every aspect of life--home, work, shopping, schools, recreation and entertainment--into a tidy, Rockwellian package.

No more bumper-to-bumper traffic. Commutes lasted minutes, not hours. Parents felt safe enough to let their children walk to school; Santa Clarita, whose city limits encompass Valencia, is a fixture on the FBI’s list of safest cities. In essence, an American suburban vision.

Newhall Ranch, built just minutes north of Valencia, would be divided into five villages. Each would feature a social-commercial center surrounded by a variety of housing--houses, condominiums, apartments and low-income housing. A 50-mile network of pedestrian and bicycle trails would link the villages, and a trail would be carved next to the Santa Clara. Newhall Land has also promised to fund construction of six schools.

The development will attract 19,000 jobs to the local economy, planners say.

More than half of the development--about nine square miles planners have dubbed the High Country--will remain untouched, and Newhall Land has set aside about 10% of the homes as low-income housing. Marlee Lauffer, spokeswoman for Newhall Land, says developers are looking for “that small-town feel.”

The project’s critics, however, have scoffed at every concession made by the developer. Construction and traffic will spew pollution into the air, much of the rugged High Country is useless for building anyway and the construction on the low-income homes won’t even begin until the rest of the project is half done, they say.

And perhaps most poignantly in this auto-dependent region, those short commutes everyone was enjoying will lengthen because existing roads and highways won’t be able to accommodate the traffic, critics say.

The only reason Newhall Ranch is being built, activists say, is because of money. They say Newhall Land has long contributed thousands of dollars to the campaign coffers of virtually every notable politician in the area to help grease the bureaucratic machinery that approves county developments.

“It’s very difficult to have any good public process with Newhall because they are so powerful,” said Lynne Plambeck, one of the leaders of the Santa Clarita Organization of Planning and Environment, a group fighting area developments. “It’s like Tammany Hall.”

Newhall Land acknowledges that it makes contributions to “local, elected officials that are pro-business.” But it flatly denies that it tries to buy favor.

“We’re probably held to a higher standard than most developers because of our public prominence,” Lauffer said.

Everything Depends on Water

Much of the development area was submerged thousands of years ago. It seems almost funny that an apparent lack of water would be the biggest issue now. It’s enough to make Mulholland crack a smile from beyond the grave.

Newhall Land’s effort to secure enough water for the project is a replay of countless other battles for water over the years in Southern California.

“We’re going to have to add a large number of people and a considerable amount of economic activity without adding more water,” said Fulton, the growth expert and editor of the California Planning and Development Report. “We’re going to have to learn to do more with less.”

Newhall Ranch would lie completely in Los Angeles County along five miles of the Santa Clara River valley, which extends into Ventura County. More than 19,000 acre-feet of water is needed to supply all the homes once the final home is built, by about 2025, officials estimate.

Ventura County fears the development would eventually tap the region’s ground-water supply, sucking away water needed to sustain a large field of citrus groves nearby.

Ventura County has taken the unusual step of suing Los Angeles County to stop Newhall Ranch. Ventura says the Los Angeles Board of Supervisors gave the project the green light without addressing possible impacts to towns across the county line and specifying where Newhall Ranch will get its water.

Activists Desperate to Preserve Open Space

Newhall Land says there will be three major sources, each accounting for roughly a third of the supply--overflow from Castaic Creek, which the company is entitled to; water bought from the State Water Project; and waste water that will be recycled at a yet-to-be-built $7-million treatment plant.

No ground water will be used for the build-up, contingencies have been made in case of droughts and other water shortages, and construction on subdivisions is prohibited until a water source is identified for that tract, Newhall Land’s Cusumano said.

“I think we’re in pretty good shape for a long time to come,” he said.

Critics call the water plan “a shell game”; developers would be forced to use ground water after they find out there is not enough in the future, they say.

The fight will go to the courts in the coming year, pitting developers against their historical foes, environmentalists. No trial date has been set for the four lawsuits filed to stop Newhall Ranch, although it’s expected to begin before the end of the year at a state court in Kern County.

“We’ve gone through a seven- or eight-year process that involved three community meetings, eight planning commission hearings, three or four Board of Supervisor meetings trying to respond to all the concerns to the community and our neighbors,” Cusumano said. “I think we’ve done a fairly decent job with that and yet we find ourselves in litigation. It’s a little disappointing.”

Activists are desperate to stop the project not just to keep the site “pristine,” but to change the way America thinks about developing as well. The projects being built in open spaces should be moved to urban areas in need of revitalization, they say.

Kathy Long, the Ventura County supervisor who represents the area neighboring the Newhall Ranch site, moved to Ventura from Los Angeles about two decades ago. She said she wanted to escape the ugliness of the growing metropolis.

“These [developments] are accommodating folks with a higher income bracket who wish to flee,” she said. “We as citizens have to rethink how we’re going to get to this wonderful quality of life . . . when we also want to have a half acre of property. Those two don’t mix.”

Rethink the American dream, they say, because not everyone can have a Mayberry.