A plan more than 30 years in the making for thousands of homes in the NorthLake community of Castaic is nearing another public hearing with the Los Angeles County Regional Planning Commission, based on a legal notice published Tuesday.
The public hearing notice involved a development of 3,150 homes on nearly 800 acres east of Interstate 5, west of Castaic Lake and north of Castaic.
Access to the site is provided by Ridge Route Road, which traverses northerly along the western edge of the project, according to the plan.
Phase 1 of the plan calls for 2,295 homes, including: 288 single-family units on approximately 41 acres; 1,341 multifamily units on approximately 107 acres; 345 senior multi-family units on approximately 49 acres; 315 affordable units; and six market-rate live/work units, which is part of about 20 acres of commercial use.
The rest of the land, referred to as Phase 2, would be developed with 855 single-family homes, 386 acres of parks, trails and open space, 23 acres of school uses and 36 acres of associated roadway and infrastructure improvements, according to the notice.
The original plan was conceived in 1992, but eventually stalled during the housing crisis, according to a previous report.
At a Feb. 21, 2018, public hearing, the Regional Planning Commission requested that the applicant include the affordable-housing component. Based on that request, the developer eliminated 108,283 square feet of industrial uses and 13,197 square feet of commercial land uses.
L.A. County officials posted “Recirculated Portions of the Draft Supplemental (Environmental Impact Report)” for the “Northlake Specific Plan” in April, and this week published a hearing notice that revised draft EIR is final and will be discussed at a Jan. 28 public hearing.
While the draft was not re-presented to the Castaic Area Town Council, NorthLake area representative Chris Dittes said he remembered having concerns about the plans during a 2018 hearing and that he had an even harder time trusting the nearly 10-year-old traffic reports presented.
“I have concerns about the validity of an approval that’s more than 30 years old,” he said, referring to the county’s June 1992 approval of the NorthLake Specific Plan.
That approval included 2,337 single-family dwellings on 504.8 acres and 1,286 multi-family units on 95.5 acres, an 18-hole golf course; 169,884 square feet of commercial uses; 545,589 square feet of light industrial uses; a public library; two school/park sites; and 476.4 acres of open space.
The project’s improvements would consist of the construction of Ridge Route Road at the main entrance to the south and a secondary access route to the northwest, construction of NorthLake Parkway adjacent to and west of the Phase 2 portion of the project site, a 4.64-acre connection of Grasshopper Creek Park, a debris basin, 2.39 acres in trail connections, a 5.1-acre pad for a water tank, 29.79 acres of manufactured slopes, and 11.98 acres of natural open space.
The grading for the proposed project would involve approximately 33 million cubic yards of earthwork, a volume big enough to fill the Empire State Building more than 30 times.
The hearing is scheduled to take place Jan. 28. The full plan is available online here: bit.ly/45f0AkO.
