Comments
AROUND LA - There are moments when you look around Los Angeles and cannot help but ask a simple question:
How did this ever get approved?
Not one project. Not one subdivision. Not one zoning variance.
An entire pattern.
Because when you step back and honestly examine portions of the northwest San Fernando Valley, what emerges does not feel like the product of careful long-term planning. It often feels like the cumulative result of decades of disconnected approvals layered on top of one another until incompatible land uses became normalized.
And that is what makes this part of Los Angeles so heartbreaking.
Because this community was once envisioned very differently.
Long before the strip malls, entitlement battles, wildfire evacuation fears, landfill conflicts, and sprawling infrastructure strain, this area was known as Sunshine Ranch — a vast agricultural and ranching landscape stretching across the northern San Fernando Valley.
Historic records describe orchards, ranch homes, rolling hillsides, citrus groves, equestrian land, and carefully planned country estates integrated into the natural geography of the Valley. The original development vision promoted large parcels, open space, agriculture, and a semi-rural lifestyle tied to the land itself.
Granada was even named because the area’s appearance and climate reminded early developers of Granada, Spain.
There was an actual vision here.
Not perfect planning, perhaps — but planning rooted in geography, character, scale, and compatibility with the landscape.
Much of that identity is now hanging by a thread.
Today, the remaining equestrian corridors, ranch-style neighborhoods, hillside buffers, mature tree canopies, and semi-rural character areas that once defined this region survive only in fragments, increasingly squeezed by piecemeal development pressures and planning philosophies that often seem disconnected from the community’s historic form and carrying capacity.
And nowhere is the contradiction more striking than where I live.
My home sits between two of the most glaring examples of planning failure in modern Los Angeles history: the Aliso Canyon gas storage field and Sunshine Canyon Landfill.
Both facilities were operating long before many surrounding residential communities were built.
Yet over time, homes, schools, shopping centers, and entire suburban neighborhoods were gradually permitted to expand outward toward these industrial operations as though long-term compatibility barely mattered.
Today, large residential communities and schools sit in remarkably close proximity to facilities carrying obvious environmental, industrial, wildfire, traffic, and public-health risks.
Looking back, it becomes difficult to understand how any serious planning body could have concluded this represented responsible regional development.
The catastrophic Aliso Canyon gas leak should have forced a broader reckoning about planning in Los Angeles.
The public understandably focused on the failures of Southern California Gas Company, which unquestionably bore responsibility for maintaining aging infrastructure safely.
But the disaster also exposed something much larger.
The Aliso Canyon field itself dates back to the late 1930s, and many of the wells later converted for gas storage were originally drilled in the 1940s and 1950s. The well associated with the catastrophic blowout — Standard Sesnon 25 — was originally drilled in 1953 and later converted into a gas storage well in the 1970s.
That reality raises an uncomfortable but necessary question:
Why were thousands of homes, schools, parks, and dense suburban neighborhoods ever permitted to expand directly beneath a massive industrial gas storage field containing decades-old infrastructure?
The same question applies to Sunshine Canyon Landfill.
Much of the surrounding residential growth occurred long after landfill operations were already established. Yet permit after permit, subdivision after subdivision, and commercial expansion after commercial expansion continued pushing development deeper into areas carrying foreseeable long-term conflicts involving truck traffic, air quality concerns, wildfire vulnerability, evacuation limitations, infrastructure strain, and declining quality of life.
And these are not isolated examples.
Across Los Angeles, communities have repeatedly been allowed to expand around industrial corridors, wildfire-prone hillsides, aging utility systems, flood channels, evacuation-constrained canyons, and environmentally sensitive areas with little evidence of meaningful cumulative carrying-capacity analysis.
Instead of asking whether development was compatible with long-term safety and infrastructure realities, government too often appeared focused on whether approvals could move forward.
That is not planning.
That is reaction.
And eventually, reaction becomes liability.
The consequences are now visible everywhere: mounting infrastructure failures, worsening traffic congestion, recurring utility instability, wildfire evacuation fears, declining public trust, environmental degradation, rising insurance costs, and exploding municipal liability exposure.
These costs do not emerge overnight.
They accumulate slowly through decades of fragmented land-use decisions that fail to account for cumulative impacts until disaster finally exposes what should have been obvious much earlier.
The tragedy is that the northwest San Fernando Valley could have evolved very differently.
With thoughtful planning, preservation-oriented zoning, infrastructure-first growth policies, and respect for the area’s geography and western heritage, these communities could have retained much more of the beauty and character that once made them unique — equestrian corridors, ranch architecture, citrus history, open-space buffers, hillside protections, and thoughtfully scaled commercial development integrated into the surrounding environment.
Instead, too much of the growth now feels disconnected and improvised: aging strip malls scattered without cohesive vision, incompatible developments inserted into already strained infrastructure systems, and dense development pressures increasingly colliding with wildfire danger and evacuation limitations.
Real planning is not anti-growth.
Real planning asks difficult questions before approvals are granted.
Can infrastructure safely support additional density?
Can evacuation systems function during disaster conditions?
Are emergency services already overextended?
Are industrial and residential uses fundamentally incompatible over the long term?
Will today’s approvals become tomorrow’s liabilities?
Those are the questions Los Angeles should have been asking decades ago.
And increasingly, residents throughout the San Fernando Valley are beginning to ask them now.
(Eva Amar is a Granada Hills community organizer focused on infrastructure, wildfire safety, land-use policy, historic preservation, and public accountability in the San Fernando Valley.)
