COMMUNITY COMMENTARY:Time to express your views on development

The Crescenta Valley is currently an extremely pleasant place to live. It’s a fairly uncrowded, predominantly single-family community, with great schools and a small-town feel. But increasing pressure from developers looms.

Two hundred and sixty-nine condos are slated to take the place of Verdugo Golf Course; Oakview Convalescent Hospital will be demolished for multi-family homes; Rock Haven Sanitarium will be closing next month, and will most likely be developed for housing.

Now Mountain Oaks, a 40-acre wooded area behind Crescenta Valley Park, is being proposed for condos and a private school.

The entire “rose” of Montrose is zoned for multi-family development, from La Crescenta Avenue east to the La Cañada Flintridge border, and from Honolulu Avenue north to Foothill Boulevard. On nearly every street in this area, one can find an apartment under construction.

The impact of this growth is beginning to be felt. Anyone who has children here knows that currently our schools are maxed out, with no room for expansion. Our water bills contain warnings to conserve, as water supplies dwindle. Few would deny that noise, traffic congestion and visual blight have increased.

The Crescenta Valley now stands at a crossroad. We can go the way of La Cañada, where restrictions on multi-family construction have kept housing prices and quality of life high, or we can go the way of South Glendale, where decades of unfettered development created a nightmarish gridlock of traffic and crowds.

Recently an overbuilt and poorly designed three-story apartment building went up on Florencita Avenue, a quiet street of mostly single-family homes.

The structure, built over the legal height-limit and way out of scale to this quiet street, focused attention on the preservation of the single-family home. The county of Los Angeles agreed to do a study to see if the residents of Crescenta Valley wanted a change in zoning in the unincorporated portion of Crescenta Valley that is zoned for high-density. Crescenta Valley Heritage responded by proposing that six small single-family neighborhoods that are within the high-density zoning be downzoned. Some property owners want no restrictions at all. The county wants your opinion.

During the period of the study, the county is requiring developers to show their plans to the neighborhoods they will be building in. This is the conditional-use permit that has been talked about lately. When it expires, developers will be able to build whatever they want, in whatever style they want, without any input from the community, just like they did before.

Investors and developers have been telling us recently that downzoning will lower property values. Logically, this doesn’t fly. If there’s more housing units available, the prices go down. If there’s less units available, the price will go up. It’s simple economics. What will definitely lower prices are overcrowded schools, traffic congestion and noise.

The county of Los Angeles will hold its last public meeting to gather public comment at 6 p.m. on Sept. 7 at Rosemont Middle School. The direction the county takes will be determined by who shows up at that meeting. This meeting is critical. We know the developers and real-estate investors will be there to oppose any thought of preserving single-family neighborhoods. If you feel differently, you need to be there too.

Whether you live in unincorporated Montrose, Sparr Heights (Glendale), La Crescenta or La Cañada, you will be impacted by development. You are a county resident and have a say as to how the valley will grow, be it through some master plan or a continued conditional-use permit. Let your voice be heard. It is rational, not rampant, growth that will preserve the best of the Crescenta Valley.