Rustic Canyon Residents Fight Hillside Development

The residents of beautiful Rustic Canyon, nestled between downtown Pacific Palisades and the Pacific Ocean, would like their neighborhood to remain just that—beautiful and rustic.

Now, after a four-year battle, residents of East Rustic Canyon Road will soon learn the fate of one of the canyon’s last virgin hillsides as the proposed development of the site goes before the California Coastal Commission on Oct. 5.

In 2007, an application was filed with the city of Los Angeles for a permit to build a three-story, 1,966-square-foot home on the vacant lot at the top of the hillside on Vance Street.

“The problem is there is virtually no flat land at the top on Vance Street, making it a vertical hillside lot. It’s a slope of between 60 and 70 degrees, and they want to build a three-story house that will cascade down the hill because there is no place to build it on top,” said Jerry Kagan, a 16-year resident of Rustic Canyon who formed the group Friends of Our Environment to fight the development. “During that process, the whole hill could collapse as it did during the Northridge quake.”

After the 1994 Northridge earthquake, the hillside collapsed, filling the storm channel with soil to street level. With the storm channel blocked, any rain would cause water to overflow into the entire Rustic Canyon neighborhood, Kagan said.

Despite opposition, the city approved the Vance Street application and in response more than 100 residents in the area signed a petition against the development and an appeal was filed with the Coastal Commission, which temporarily stopped the project.

The Coastal Commission will hear both the application and the appeal at its Oct. 5 meeting in Huntington Beach, but Friday the Rustic Canyon residents received another blow when the commission released a staff report recommending approval of the development.

The 107-page report states the “construction of the proposed pile-supported foundation will improve the stability of the upper slope and provide structural support for Vance Street.”

Kagan doesn’t dispute that assessment, but wants to know how the hillside and the residents below will be protected during the construction process.

“They claim that once the house is completed, where the house sits will actually stabilize the hillside and that is probably correct. The problem is, they’ve never shown how they can get to that point,” Kagan said. “There is no construction staging report that adequately shows how this project can be safely developed.”

Although the Coastal Commission staff report recommends that the applicants file an Erosion and Construction Best Management Practices Plan and a Permanent Drainage and Run-Off Control Plan, nothing requires that the executive director review and approve these plans before construction proceeds.

Daniel Pradel, a geotechnical engineer and adjunct professor at UCLA, investigated the stability of the slope at the request of Kagan and other residents in 2009. According to his report, Pradel is of the opinion that the developers have not proven that the project can be safely constructed.

“An adequate engineering report to describe how this project could be safely staged at this site has still not been provided,” Pradel concludes in his report.

“It’s a bad idea because this is an unsafe site,” said Jaimie Korody, who has lived on East Rustic Canyon Road for more than 25 years. “The developers have never proven that it can be developed safely. Moreover, it’s in a seismic fault zone and it’s in a liquefaction zone.”

Pradel’s report also found that, for construction purposes, the site has almost no storage or stockpiling capacity. Rustic Canyon residents like Korody and Kagan, are concerned that with no room on Vance Street, most of the construction equipment and debris will be stored on East Rustic Canyon Road.

“We just want there to be a showing that the project can be safely developed before anything happens, because there really is a risk of damage to people and property if something goes wrong,” Kagan said. “I have fought this with my heart and soul for four years, but whatever the commission decides, that’s what will happen.”

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