Mountain Lions Gave Woodland Hills Residents the Voice Sacramento Wouldn’t
OP-ED - We all know the political pendulum swings back and forth. Many wish that it would settle somewhere in the middle, but history has shown this is rarely the case. California housing legislation seems chronically stuck well past reasonable boundaries, and heading toward a dystopian crash and burn. Residents throughout the state are becoming the collateral damage, and it is reasonable to argue that communities and the families who live in them are being harmed and even endangered by Sacramento’s blind faith in applying a simple supply and demand model to a complex issue. The concept of home isn’t just a numbers game, it’s emotional, psychological, and evokes a visceral response for many of us.
Less than a year ago our neighborhood, the Girard Tract, was turned upside-down. The Girard Tract is a middle-class, wooded hamlet at the southwestern end of the San Fernando Valley, in Woodland Hills. It’s nothing fancy, but it’s home. Much like directly adjacent Topanga Canyon, our streets are winding and very narrow; hairpin turns are the norm. We live in a severe fire zone, and as is often the case in fire zones, we cohabitate with beloved wildlife that we also share with our Topanga neighbors.
This wildlife includes the usual suspects: coyotes, deer, raccoons, falcons, hawks, bats, reptiles, rabbits, bobcats, and even many sightings of endangered mountain lions that show up on our Ring cameras. We also now have bears nearby. Our neighborhood has been studied by numerous expert biologists and contains mapped connectivity corridors for wildlife habitat. We know wildlife have been pushed into urban areas due to extreme habitat loss from over development in habitat adjacent areas and destruction of habitat by wildfires.
The Girard Tract also includes the Woodland Hills Country Club (WHCC), a nice but also nothing fancy golf club with a course that was designed over 100 years ago by renowned golf course architect William P. "Billy" Bell, Sr. In 2020 the WHCC was sold to developers, who promptly tried to hit up our councilmember for a zoning change from agricultural open space to commercial zoning. That’s a quantum leap in land use terms. Thankfully, this request was declined. So the developers got creative, as developers often do when there is a lot of money on the table. This is where things get sticky.
In November of 2025, the owners of the WHCC submitted a development proposal to Los Angeles City Planning for a high density housing development with 398 units and parking for over 800 cars on just under 20 acres. This was only phase one of multiple phases planned with an untold number of units and density. High density in a very severe fire zone? It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this is a non-starter, and could very well prove lethal to existing community members. The WHCC project was proposed just months after the Palisades fire. Our community watched the smoke and flames from this fire roaring over the hill towards us, as we waited for evacuation orders. Some left proactively. It was surreal.
We learned the developers were using amendments to AB 2011, a housing bill sponsored by California Assemblymember Buffy Wicks that was intended to facilitate urban renewal and create new housing units in existing commercial corridors, which is a good thing. AB 2011 gives developers who meet certain criteria by-right ministerial approval for building projects. This would not typically be an issue in an existing commercial zone. In an environmentally fragile, extreme fire zone like the Girard Tract, it can have devastating consequences.
By-right means developers get to skip proper Planning and CEQA reviews, and community input entirely. As a community, we were shocked, disheartened and outraged to find out our voices had been silenced by the elected officials of the State that is our home. Officials who are supposed to be representing all of us. Development by right? Who’s right? Solely the right of the developers.
Our rights as families living in the community, many for decades, had been completely annihilated, as had the rights of our Planning department to oversee safe development. This happened through amendments to AB 2011 that our councilmember believes were surgically crafted and lobbied by a big development PAC specifically for the proposed WHCC development, removing any safety protections that would have remained for our community - protections that to a developer are roadblocks. The provisions in the newly amended laws fit the proposed project like a glove.
It is estimated that over 75% of legislation drafted in the nation is written by special interest PACs. As community advocates, we quickly learned that our elected officials don’t always read the full print contained in bills they vote on, and there are no consequences for them if they screw up and pass laws that endanger communities or violate the rights of citizens. We should all be concerned about this.
Before anyone starts in with the NIMBY name calling, let’s clarify a few other things our community has learned over the last few months: NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) is a term that sprung up in the 1970’s when neighborhoods had to defend against hazardous waste and nuclear plants being built in residential areas, and has since evolved into a term that’s used more broadly to describe those who defend their communities against many issues. NIMBY has been weaponized, in part, by big tech and big development, to the point where NIMBY is now perceived with a very negative connotation - one that implies NIMBYS are against building housing. That’s an inaccurate, manipulative distortion.
YIMBY (Yes In My Backyard) is a very powerful big tech and big development special interest group that is extremely well funded, mostly by tech billionaires. YIMBYS tout that they are a pro-housing group, but housing is a mere test lab for them. Their reach goes way beyond this, and they have become a national PAC that is playing the long game in shaping policy and the political landscape of our country. YIMBY is very complex and we won’t try to unpack it here. The Mar Vista Voice published an article back in July about YIMBY’s billionaire political project - this will give you a taste of the real YIMBY.
We’re also not going to get into the weeds politically, but by their own admission in conversations with our WHLA board members, Sacramento legislators like Buffy Wicks admitted they are “fully invested” in YIMBY - or is that vice-versa? Wicks and Governor Newsom have received large amounts of funding from YIMBY and its affiliates. This made sense as continued pleas from us and our community leaders directly to Wicks and her legislative staff, as well as to Governor Newsom went ignored. Even our very own assembly and senate representatives provided no substantive help. We couldn’t understand, particularly right after the devastation of the Palisades and Eaton fires, how legislation that rolled back protections for severe fire zones could possibly have been pushed by Wicks, passed by both houses and signed into law by Newsom.
The altruistic facade of YIMBY is starting to crack, however. Residents of communities are starting to see the reality of aggressive housing legislation being pushed on all of us. NIMBY is seeing a resurgence. Through our research, we saw a trend in that most of the special interests opposed to Sacramento’s heavy handed housing legislation were those that are concerned with public health and safety - this included physicians, nurses, and fire fighters. Those in support of the YIMBY agenda were typically groups promoting big development and real estate interests. The NIMBY vs YIMBY arguments are just another example of deliberate, forced polarization. Maybe we all need to look behind the curtain more. Dare we hypothesize there are merits to the arguments of both camps?
The Girard Tract is about a mile away from Warner Center, where we have seen the massive build out of residential, high density, multi-family units for several years now. Once completed, Warner Center will have about twenty-six thousand new residential units, including several thousand aimed at senior housing. The LA Rams are now headquartered there, and the new development will also feature a 10,000-seat entertainment and sports center, two hotels, 10 acres of green space, and office space. We can’t speak for everyone in the Girard Tract, but overall no one here seems to be complaining about where Warner Center is heading, despite some concerns about traffic, and having enough police, fire protection and hospital beds to serve an exponentially expanding community. There is no NIMBYism here, we just want a voice in what happens to our neighborhood, and to keep our families and wildlife safe.
As a community, we had no choice but to organize and push back. The developers made it clear they had no intention or interest in community input - something that would have been required through regular review processes, had the suspect new legislative amendments not been signed into law. Buffy Wicks’s legislative staff admitted that AB 2011 “wasn’t intended for neighborhoods like [the Girard Tract].” It wasn’t intended for single family neighborhoods of any kind. They argued that the golf course didn’t qualify for AB 2011. They were right, it didn’t. But they seemed to have zero understanding of the amendments to AB 2011, one of which Wicks supposedly authored, that changed the game and have so negatively impacted and endangered our community. It was clear they didn’t want to know. Neither did Governor Newsom. We begged for help for months and were stonewalled or completely ignored. Community residents are not stakeholders in Sacramento’s game.
Thankfully, after a hard fought, exhausting eight months, LA City Planning denied by-right ministerial review for the proposed WHCC project. Our community, along with experts from the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy, National Park Service, and many others, were able to prove that WHCC more than meets the criteria for a mountain lion habitat. That is an actual, real fact. We have mountain lions here in the neighborhood, including on the golf course. The lions saved us, since we had no voice to save ourselves. We are grateful that Planning stood up to protect our community, both human and wild.
Recently, Jon Rawlings, a chapter leader with LA YIMBY wrote a piece that appeared in the LA Daily News. We can’t express how disappointed we are in the abject inaccuracies, mistruths and one-sidedness of this article. It’s a prime example of what YIMBYism promotes, and the article reads as if the developers themselves commissioned it. Rawlings provides no balance or objectivity, but there is a healthy side order of flippant snark. He talks about a “good faith conversation”, but we were never afforded that by the developers…or Mr. Rawlings. If he really cares about housing and the community he lives in, Rawlings could have easily reached out and spoken with WHLA or another community group. We would have gladly explained our position to him. There is so much he has left out, and likely isn’t even aware of.
Mr. Rawlings repeatedly comments that our community outright rejected compromises with the developers. This is a misinformed fabrication. No compromises were ever discussed. When the developers were advised by community leadership to seek community input, they flatly declined.
Later in the game, the developers did approach our councilmember with the offer of a tolling agreement. We think they did this because they realized they were losing the battle, presenting silly arguments like mountain lions couldn’t jump a six foot chain link fence to access the golf course. Mountain lions can typically jump 18’ vertically. However, any agreements or compromises that might have been reached were contingent on our community agreeing to a rezoning the entire 94+ acre golf course as a commercial zone. This wasn’t a compromise, it was attempted exploitation. To grant commercial zoning would have opened our community up to untold destruction by developers.
To our Girard Tract neighbors and other supporters: What you have seen over the last eight to nine months is the big development industrial complex in full swing, right down to the faux journalism that is being strategically placed by various authors and outlets to undermine the arguments we have steadfastly made in defense of our community and wildlife. The trial in the court of public opinion is underway. As a community we must continue to clap back.
What would it look like if developers were required to put community input and environmental needs ahead of pro formas and profit margins? What if they acknowledged that our wildlife is stressed and compromised, and as developers they must practice stewardship? What if our leadership finally stepped back and listened to the long standing cry that one size doesn’t fit all - neighborhoods need to offer different things for different people. Not everyone could survive Manhattan, not everyone wants to live in a forest. Well folks, we had that to a great degree with CEQA and local planning departments, but those institutions have been eroded by the current leadership model in Sacramento. We understand that planning processes frustrate developers, but there must be a meet in the middle pipeline that can be implemented. To get there, developers have to be willing to consider communities they are impacting first. People before profits, and the creation of housing for people that is sensible and lends to quality of life.
We believe it’s possible to build healthy, sustainable, affordable communities that are good for all living beings. Non-profit builders like Homes 4 Families are doing it. Maybe Sacramento should look at that.
Following the money doesn’t lead to the very middle class Girard Tract. But it’s home and we will fight for that. We’re fine if you want to call us NIMBYS.
Editorial by: THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS, WOODLAND HILLS LANDWISE ALLIANCE (WHLA)
(The Woodland Hills Landwise Alliance is a community group advocating for the Girard Tract. WHLA’s goal is to work constructively with all stakeholders. www.woodlandhillsla.org)
