Urban Sprawl

just east of the fifty seven freeway between brain and diamond buyer of tarp funds for a morning meal players lot of it looks at the bird and the heels and the kenyans that's randy says losing incredible area for fox really have appeared in a single beatles still they have a six foot wingspan to have those years so it was just a remarkable thing to a lot of records with fields forever a group working to preserve open space in the chino and twenty pills she says that three thousand acres of open space that border the freeway here are a crucial link in a swath of land that stretches from the cleveland national forest to the whittier hills but a subsidiary of shell exxon mobil which owns the land wants to build thirty five hundred homes here where slaughter beck says that would destroy crucial habitat and block the movement of wildlife if twilight is cut off of fifty seven three way alliance to the west's we're lands unsafe to the tune of millions of dollars will slowly and inevitably collapse as an ecosystem because the supply of new teams won't be refurbished over

time the development company says the project will be environmentally sensitive leaving half of the land as open space including a wildlife corridor golf course and parks it also says the project will help alleviate the region's housing shortage environmentalist say they doubt the project will do much to help the housing crunch because prices in the gray area are high and what's southern california is lacking is low cost housing across southern california developers and community groups are fighting over open space from the coyote hills in orange county to la is newhall ranch and take home ranch which would put seventy thousand homes along the great by dan silver of endangered habitat league a group that studies land use says these conflicts are exacerbated by a lack of regional planning development projects are driven by banks buy land speculation by developers there is no overarching planning that's done to determine what

really should be developed and what shouldn't be it's all have hockey in piecemeal silver says local governments have made such a mess that the state should step in and help direct regional planning la county supervisor zev the heiress mosque he says municipalities would likely fight a state role but he says some kind of regional planning is needed he says in the meantime local governments need to get smarter about the effects of sprawl he points to la county's approval of the new whole ranch it really bothered me that nobody even asked the question is this intelligent business more it was twenty one thousand homes are nineteen thousand nine hundred homes but nobody ever step back and said wait a minute what we doing here planning expert william fulton of sell them our research group says while southern california is running out of raw land to build on there is a lot of land that currently under utilized all truth telling la county for example on the commercial strip filthy you through the property and prime location basically have nothing on them were

happening all four have taught me those buildings are generally obsolete as retail buildings they can be reused or torn down and replaced with with housing developers say they are building an urban areas but such projects which are often called in phil face many barriers richard lambros is executive vice president of the building industry association of southern california there's only heard seven of the population the wand and helen albert who need unity while we look to build until are nodding sheepishly awaiting to prevent chronic lambros says many cities favor retail over housing since they get more tax revenue also a lot of urban land is polluted and developers are reluctant to buy it because they become liable for the contamination and although planners say we need to accommodate more people on less land lambros says developers are shying away from townhomes and condos because it's harder to get insurance for these projects planner william fulton says we are starting to see a lot more high density development in urban areas but not enough to keep pace with

growth he says local redevelopment agencies which currently help developers acquire land for commercial use should consider doing the same for housing i think that the big test will come in maybe twenty fifteen when all of the kids born in the eighties and the early nineties go out and try to find apartment and buy a house that's when the crunch really hurts and so we do have a few more years to figure that out but we better figure it out by then or else will be in big trouble fulton says he doesn't believe he'll gobble up all the remaining open space because there's a lot of interest in and state bond money available to save some of it but he says for much of southern california what gets developed and what has preserved will be decided in the near future in braille else's that feel at nine point three kpcc