CommentsPROTECTING CALIFORNIA’S RICHES--If you’ve driven between Northern and Southern California on the I-5 freeway, you’ve passed through one of California’s most biodiverse ecosystems, which sits on the Tejon Ranch.
Here you will find a unique biogeographic meeting point: California’s Great Central Valley, the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, and the South Coast Ranges meet high in the Tehachapi mountains, near the Angeles and Los Padres National Forests.
Tejon is home to the California Condor, the San Joaquin Kit Fox, the California Spotted Owl, the Tehachapi Slender Salamander, the Pronghorn Antelope, and dozens of other rare and beautiful species.
It also sits on one of California’s last remaining wild grasslands. Each spring it blooms with masses of wildflowers.
Tragically, a sizable part of this beautiful place is about to be devastated by the one of the largest housing developments in LA County’s history. The Tejon Ranch Company’s Centennial development would convert 6,700 beautiful acres into 19,000 homes (mostly single-family) and 8.4 million square feet of commercial space.
On May 28, the California Native Plant Society and the Center for Biological Diversity filed a lawsuit against the LA County Board of Supervisors for approving the Centennial development.
I strongly support that lawsuit: Enough is enough.
We would have to be a city of naïve Angelenos to believe that the the specific plan for Centennial at Tejon Ranch is an innovative and ecologically sound option to remedy the affordable housing crisis.
Globally and locally, our wilderness is shrinking because of logging, mining, corporate agriculture, oil extraction, and urban sprawl. Why would the LA County Board of Supervisors vote in favor of a housing plan that would be built over an irreplaceable ecosystem, in a high fire hazard zone?
Centennial would increase car commutes, traffic, carbon emissions, and air pollution. We already suffer terrible air quality. Just this last month, the Los Angeles-Long Beach metropolitan area ranked the worst in the nation for ozone pollution.
In January 2018, Harvard atmospheric chemistry professor James Anderson warned us we have only five years to mobilize a “World War II-style” transformation of our society to respond to the climate crisis.
On May 6, 2019, the U.N. released an alarming report finding that about 1 million species are on the brink of extinction and may be forever lost within the next couple of decades -- an unprecedented loss in human history.
Extinctions have already begun in our treasured Golden State, where we have 300 endangered species. One-third of the 135 bird species of the Mojave Desert have significantly declined.
Extreme weather events are destabilizing urban centers and rural communities throughout the world, and Los Angeles is no exception. Wildfires reached as close as Calabasas in fall 2018 and blackened areas around Sylmar and the 405 Freeway in fall 2017.
Why would we destroy irreplaceable wildlife under such ecologically delicate circumstances when luxury apartments have been built faster than trees have been planted throughout Los Angeles’ historic neighborhoods?
The housing infrastructure Angelenos need already exists. Vacant buildings are not being utilized, while others are being rapidly built to make housing immediately accessible to wealthy transplants. There are no excuses for the 12% increase in homelessness across L.A. County and 16% increase in the city of L.A. when our historic neighborhoods, independent businesses, and buildings are being priced out, demolished, and sterilized with massive housing developments and commercial businesses.
If L.A. County can approve massive urban housing developments for rich, predominantly white transplants, why can’t it approve affordable housing projects for ethnically diverse, working class Angelenos, without displacing them from their communities or destroying biodiverse ecosystems that are the epicenter to our collective survival?
Our supervisors and other leaders can do much better. It’s time for smart, sustainable development to replace the slash-and-burn approach exemplified by Centennial.
(Paula Kahn is a Guatemayan, Jewish-German millennial, a daughter of refugees, who works in environmental and social justice in Los Angeles.)
-cw
