L.A. County’s Growth Spurt Pushes North

It was only a few years ago when it seemed as if the high desert was ready to reclaim the communities of Lancaster and Palmdale, where unemployment and home foreclosures soared in the wake of a crushing recession.

But earlier this month, the area celebrated the opening of a gleaming Dillard’s department store and the Antelope Valley’s first escalator--signs big and small of the region’s revival and maturity.

“You see buildings going up. You see tractors everywhere,” Palmdale City Councilman David Myers said.

After lying dormant for several years, the Antelope Valley and neighboring Santa Clarita are once again pulsing with new housing and commercial construction as Southern California’s economic juggernaut pushes growth north into the last open spaces in Los Angeles County.

As urbanized Los Angeles creeps over the San Gabriel Mountains, north Los Angeles County--already home to about 500,000 people, about the size of the city of Cleveland--can expect its population to jump 169% by 2020, according to forecasts by the Southern California Assn. of Governments. In contrast, Los Angeles County as a whole is expected to grow 33% to 12.2 million.

In the next 20 years, the Santa Clarita Valley--known primarily as the home of the Magic Mountain amusement park--should emerge as a major suburban office center. The population of the high desert city of Palmdale should nearly double to 250,000. And if government agencies approve, the owners of Tejon Ranch at the top of the Grapevine on the Golden State Freeway (Interstate 5) plan to build thousands of homes on rolling hills where cattle has grazed for more than a century.

“Los Angeles is just pushing out in all directions,” said Thomas L. Lee, chairman and chief executive of Newhall Land & Farming Co., which developed the community of Valencia. “As the San Fernando Valley filled up, we were the next ones.”

Planned Developments Spur Impact Concerns

Such rapid change and growth has raised concern about the impact on the area’s fragile environment, underdeveloped transportation system and water and air quality. Landowners are proposing new suburbs as far north as the Kern County line, a prospect that critics say would recreate the Los Angeles-style sprawl that many had hoped to escape.

The local debate over growth has turned into a battle in the Santa Clarita Valley, where residents and environmentalists have clashed with Newhall Land & Farming over its plans to build Newhall Ranch, a 21,000-home development. Newhall Ranch would rank as Los Angeles County’s single largest housing project.

“This spreading out further and further is creating massive transportation and pollution problems,” said Lynne Plambeck of the Santa Clarita Organization for Planning and the Environment. “It’s rampant, out-of-control growth.”

Local officials are searching for ways to deal with growing traffic congestion on I-5 and on California 14, a freeway already clogged with nearly 50,000 Antelope Valley commuters. But the short-term solutions, such as adding carpool lanes and boosting rail services, fall far short.

“That’s going to be a choke point for a few years to come,” said Myers, the Palmdale councilman.

Despite such concerns, north Los Angeles County--along with the Inland Empire to the east--stands to absorb much of Southern California’s future growth as affordable housing and open land grow in short supply and the economy continues to expand. Following the classic pattern of suburban development, the bedroom communities of north Los Angeles County are maturing into a larger, more sophisticated urban area.

* Princess Cruises has announced that it will relocate its headquarters from Century City to a new office and retail district being developed on Santa Clarita’s Town Center Drive.

“That’s a big victory for that area,” business consultant Larry Kosmont said. “Typically what happens is that others follow.”

* Cal State Bakersfield is building a satellite campus in the Antelope Valley to help deal with the area’s severe shortage of upper-division and graduate courses. More than 500 people already study in makeshift classrooms to avoid having to commute to the San Fernando Valley or Kern County to complete their college education, said James Daniels, director of Cal State Bakersfield Antelope Valley Center.

“Our enrollment is so large we’ve already outgrown the building [under construction],” Daniels said.

* Many of the new and larger homes being built are being purchased by locals--a sign of the area’s long-term viability. Kaufman & Broad Home Corp. has found that local residents account for more than 40% of sales in the Antelope Valley, said William Cardon, who heads the firm’s regional operations.

“It’s amazing how mature the community has gotten,” said Cardon, whose firm will soon begin selling houses at City Ranch, a master-planned development of nearly 5,000 homes in Palmdale. “People have established themselves. Their families have grown. Their incomes have grown. There’s a reason to stay.”

Region Expected to Become Jobs Center

As in the boom of the late 1980s, when Palmdale was ranked as the nation’s fastest-growing city, north Los Angeles County will grow in large part because of the availability of affordable housing. During the July-September quarter, the median sales price of an existing home in the Palmdale-Lancaster area stood at $85,000 compared with $197,000 for Los Angeles County as a whole, according to Acxiom/DataQuick, a real estate information firm.

But increasingly, the region will also play a larger role as a place of employment. Once dominated by the defense industry, the area’s economy now is much more diverse, with the Antelope Valley drawing distribution firms and Santa Clarita serving as a low-cost haven for film and television production.

More than 40,000 people already work in the manicured industrial and business parks that line I-5 in the Santa Clarita Valley. That number will only grow as Newhall Land & Farming expands upon the more than 13 million square feet of industrial office space it has built.The area’s booming industry prompted Newport Beach-based Legacy Partners to purchase the 477-acre former Lockheed facility in Santa Clarita’s Rye Canyon for future development.

The open spaces are drawing more white-collar employers from Los Angeles. In June, Explorer Insurance and its 220 employees moved out of Burbank and into new, larger offices in the Valencia Gateway just east of the Magic Mountain amusement park.

“We couldn’t acquire anything [near Burbank] that met our needs,” said Fred Tisovic, executive vice president of Explorer Insurance, a division of Insurance Co. of the West. “Eventually, we see this area as a very promising one where we can draw employees from.”

As a result of its booming economy and escalating land prices, the Santa Clarita Valley is itself pushing development ever outward.

Thirty miles north on I-5, the owners of the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch envision that it will one day serve in part as a bedroom community for the Santa Clarita Valley. Tejon Ranch Co., which controls more than 200,000 acres, has teamed up with home builders to start the process of planning a 4,000-acre master-planned community in northeast Los Angeles County.

Tejon Ranch President Robert A. Stine says that his development will put residents closer to Santa Clarita jobs than will competing projects in the Antelope Valley.

Developers in the Antelope Valley, however, don’t seemed worried. Palmdale and Lancaster are also expected to add tens of thousands of new jobs in the next 20 years, sending development sprawling across the high desert. Space for homes might be in short supply in most mature Southern California cities, but only 20% of Palmdale and Lancaster are built out.

“There are no geographic restrictions,” said Cardon of Kaufman & Broad. “There’s an infinite amount of land that can be developed.”

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Go North

Northern Los Angeles County will experience dramatic growth in the coming decades as urban Los Angeles pushes into the last remaining open spaces in the county.

Population

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Year Santa Clarita Palmdale Lancaster 1994 120,565 94,601 115,486 2000* 136,491 123,515 145,674 2005* 152,067 151,242 179,285 2010* 168,550 180,880 212,830 2015* 186,100 212,433 252,239 2020* 206,760 249,583 293,929

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Employment

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Year Santa Clarita Palmdale Lancaster 1994 40,795 35,414 38,968 2000* 44,808 47,754 48,403 2005* 47,853 57,119 59,325 2010* 51,732 69,046 70,246 2015* 56,612 84,055 86,048 2020* 61,421 98,843 101,857

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*Estimates

Source: Southern California Assn. of Governments

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L.A. Sprawl

Lancaster, Palmdale, Santa Clarita and Tejon Ranch are expected to emerge as centers of growth in north Los Angeles County.

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