After nearly 50 years, a controversial California housing project has finally been approved. The effort to build 181 homes in Orange County has been in the works since the 1970s and has battled opposition for decades.
At an Orange County Board of Supervisors meeting on May 5, officials unanimously rejected yet another appeal to defeat Saddleback Meadows, the decades-old housing plan slated for undeveloped land in Trabuco Canyon in the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains east of Rancho Santa Margarita. Conservation groups and local residents have raised concerns about the project for almost as long as it’s been proposed, citing traffic worries, wildfire threats and wildlife protection as chief concerns.
The back-and-forth has been going on so long that the bulk of the objection to the most recent approvals centered on the pace of the project itself. The site’s environmental review is so old, opponents argued, that a new review should be completed to take into account the current population and fire risks. The initial review was finished in 2004.
The current iteration of the project, which would span 222 acres, was first approved in 2002, with a final map approved just last year and a permit issued in January. Today’s plan is a drastic reduction in housing from the earliest proposals, which date back to 1980 and called for 705 mobile homes on the site. Overcoming an early bankruptcy sale and numerous pushbacks against its size, in the mid-1990s, the project scaled back to around 300 units, shrinking several more times into the 181-unit current proposal in 2022.
The concerns about fire safety, largely that evacuation from the neighborhood would be difficult, were rejected. “The fire danger, according to the experts, has just not materialized and is not reason to stop this project,” 3rd District Supervisor Don Wagner said during the meeting.
Despite the approval, there’s still no timeline for construction, which could itself take years to complete.
It’s an incredibly difficult and arduous task to get something built in California, with even simple projects battling long timelines. That drove Gov. Gavin Newsom to approve massive changes to the California Environmental Quality Act last year, creating exemptions and deadline mandates to try to speed up approvals. In San Francisco, it took an average of 627 days to obtain a building permit to construct a multifamily housing project and a whopping 861 days for a single-family home, a San Francisco Chronicle analysis found. (The Chronicle and SFGATE are both owned by Hearst but have separate newsroom.)