A major housing proposal planned for a Southern California country club golf course has hit a roadblock after officials raised concerns about mountain lion habitat.
The project would transform a portion of the Woodland Hills Country Club, a century-old course near the Santa Monica Mountains in the San Fernando Valley, into a residential development with nearly 400 homes.
Arrimus Capital, the Newport Beach-based developer that owns the country club, submitted an application to redevelop part of the property with 398 housing units.
Plans call for 175 three-story detached single-family homes offered for sale, 189 rental apartments in a four-story building, and 34 rent-restricted apartments in a separate four-story building. The proposal also includes more than 55,900 square feet of open space.
Arrimus Capital sought to advance the project under a state housing law that lets developers bypass lengthy city review procedures for certain mixed-income multifamily projects on commercial land, including sites such as golf courses.
But the Los Angeles City Council moved Friday to stop the large-scale development, as Councilmember Bob Blumenfield said the property functions as habitat for mountain lions.
“Due to a plethora of documentation from neighbors and a lot of biological and ecological research provided by the Santa Monica Mountains Conservancy and other biological experts, the Planning Department just determined the Woodland Hills Country Club site is ‘wildlife habitat’ for the endangered Mountain Lion,” Blumenfield wrote in a newsletter to constituents.
Blumenfield has also pointed to the site’s location in a “very high” fire hazard severity zone and argued that the state law Arrimus hoped to use for fast-tracking was not designed for a development of this kind.
Another concern raised by Blumenfield was that the developer was on track to bypass the city’s normal discretionary review process by using Assembly Bill 2011, a state housing law that requires qualifying projects to be approved through a streamlined process.
Blumenfield argued that doing so would prevent the project from undergoing the city’s usual review process, including consideration of community input, environmental impacts and fire safety before receiving approval from the Planning Department.
However, he said, “determining that the project is proposed on endangered species habitat was enough” to force the developer to instead go through the lengthier conventional approval process.
Arrimus Capital representative Aaron Green told the Los Angeles Times that the developer will now need to file a lawsuit in response to the city’s actions. He accused the city of working against Angelenos who are “in desperate need for real housing opportunities” and said “false assertions” had been made that the golf course is mountain lion habitat.
In response to the threat of a lawsuit, Blumenfield told the Times there is “a plethora of information” showing that the property is, in fact, mountain lion habitat and said the city’s decision leaves the Woodland Hills community “in a good position.”
Woodland Hills developer Victor Giraud first built the golf course in the mid-1920s. He offered free club memberships to people who bought lots in his housing tract. In 1945, the course became a private country club.
In 1988, the Los Angeles Times had already reported about concerns over a developer that hoped to buy the then-member-owned club and convert the property into luxury single-family homes.
