A non-climate caring  developer is planning to bulldoze almost 2,000 trees

to build 21 Homes on the border of Woodland Hills and Tarzana.

As chronicled in the Wall Street Journal. (See below)

  Am I the only one who thinks destroying 1,830 trees to build

21 homes is unconscionable and make no sense in today's world of global warming.

This summer is forecasted to be the hottest summer on record.

  If you think this is outrageous as part of the problem not the solution.

Beyond that there is the historical need to keep the absolute last one of a kind windows into the past for future generations for decades and maybe  centuries to come.

Please sign this petition,

Jeff Bornstein, President-West Valley Alliance for Optimal Living

 ( No relation to the Developer Alan S. Borstein of Borstein Enterprises)

 

W
OODLAND HILLS, Calif.— Part of what sold Setmir and Aida Qose on the World War II-era home they bought last April was something even older: a century-old orange grove across the street.

“Summertime, you can smell the oranges,” said Aida Qose, 49 years old. “It feels like you are living in the middle of the country.”

Yet her home and the Bothwell Ranch in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Woodland Hills sit only blocks from the busy Ventura Freeway, and the surrounding San Fernando Valley is carpeted with suburban development. A developer plans to build homes and in the process remove most of the trees from the 14-acre farm, which contains the remnants of the valley’s last working citrus grove. The plans have prompted sadness, and an outcry from some.

“We would prefer it stay the way it is,” Qose said on a sunny day in early December, gazing at trees brimming with fruit.

The Last Working Orange Grove in the San Fernando Valley to Give Way to Homes© Provided by The Wall Street Journal
The trees’ removal would mark a quiet end to an era for Los Angeles. The San Fernando Valley was home as early as the 1920s to a more-than-70,000-acre sea of citrus. Suburban sprawl began encroaching, and some growers opted to sell because it was more lucrative than continuing to run a grove. Profits diminished over time as agriculture’s regional footprint shrank—including packing houses and the availability of field workers—and as tougher global competition emerged from places like Brazil.

The developer, Los Angeles-based Borstein Enterprises, filed for permission earlier this year from the city of Los Angeles to replace 1,100 of the 1,400 mostly citrus trees with a 21-home subdivision. Representatives for the company said they plan to set aside 4 acres as a preserve for the old ranch including an old structure used as a garage and workshop, and leave two rows of orange trees as a buffer along the front entrance that will be maintained.

Los Angeles City Councilman Bob Blumenfield said he helped broker the deal in 2022 after his previous efforts fell through to turn the whole orange grove over to a nonprofit preservation group. “At the end of the day, we found a way to get a third protected,” he said. “It is a huge win. This is private property and they could have sold it off.”

 

 

The Last Working Orange Grove in the San Fernando Valley to Give Way to Homes© Provided by The Wall Street Journal
The deal doesn’t mollify critics who say the Bothwell Ranch should be preserved in its entirety as precious remaining open space—and homage to when agriculture was king in the valley.

“It is the last of its kind, never to be duplicated,” said Jeff Bornstein, a local resident and president of the West Valley Alliance for Optimal Living conservation group. “They want to take away this beautiful monument to the past.”

Bornstein said his group would try to block the project once it gets final approval as expected next year, on grounds including the need to keep more trees to combat rising heat.

Of broader concern is the impact of losing one more significant group of trees on an urban environment like Los Angeles, which like many large cities is vulnerable to rising temperatures from climate change, said Jeanne McConnell, co-founder of the environmental group Angelenos for Trees.

The Last Working Orange Grove in the San Fernando Valley to Give Way to Homes© Provided by The Wall Street Journal
 
”There is no urgency in addressing the loss of green space all while people are dying of heat in this city,” McConnell said.

Brad Rosenheim, a spokesman for the developer, said at least 278 new trees would be planted and there would be green setbacks on the property.

Other opponents cite the colorful history of the ranch, where owner Lindley Bothwell kept a collection of more than 100 classic cars as well as a train track with a steam engine. Celebrities from Walt Disney to Jay Leno have walked its grounds.

The land for the orange farm was acquired in 1926 by Bothwell, who originally had about 40 acres but along with his family sold off chunks to development as the valley’s population soared, said a great-nephew, John Bothwell, who now owns many of the old cars including a 1923 Model T. “Imagine what this car has seen,” Bothwell said while out for a spin in the Model T on a Southern California boulevard.

After her husband died in 1986, Helen “Ann” Bothwell took over and kept the ranch going—often telling him she never wanted it broken up, said Alan Clendenen, a fellow car enthusiast and decadeslong visitor to the ranch. “She really kept up the place,” said Clendenen, 82, who recently bought a 1913 Rolls-Royce at the ranch.

Her death in 2016 prompted the heirs to put the property up for sale, citing concerns that keeping it in agriculture was unprofitable. The ranch had less than $25,000 in revenue that year with water costs alone as high as $50,000 a year, and it hadn’t made money in decades, said Andrew Fogg, a lawyer for the family trust.

“They were Lindley’s trees and she wanted to keep them going in memory of her husband,” Fogg said.

The news of a possible sale triggered alarms that the orange grove would be plowed under. Robert Gohstand, a geography professor emeritus who decades earlier helped save a much smaller, nonworking orange grove at California State University, Northridge, called it irreplaceable. “It serves as a marvelous green ‘lung’ for our suburban environment,” Gohstand said.

Nearly 4,000 people signed a petition to save the grove, and in 2019 Blumenfield proposed the city of Los Angeles designate the ranch a historic-cultural monument, which would make it harder to develop. “What used to be a farming community is now largely gone,” the councilman wrote in a statement at the time. “Who will remember it if we don’t stand up to preserve this historic agricultural orchard?”

Fogg said the ranch didn’t meet the criteria for a monument because all of its original orange trees—which last about 50 years—had to be replanted in the 1970s and 1980s. But the family agreed to consider a sale for about $14 million to the Bothwell Ranch Foundation, which was formed in 2020 to help put the property in conservation. However, the family sold to Borstein in 2022 after the foundation failed to secure the financing, Fogg said.

Having seen little ranch upkeep since Ann Bothwell died, some neighbors said they are happy to see the new plan of homes and a small preserve on what could have been many more homes.

“This particular developer is a very kind person because he is not building as many as he could,” said Goldie Schon, 60, whose home abuts the ranch. The boards of the local Tarzana and Woodland Hills neighborhood councils have both unanimously supported the new plan.

However, neighbor Judy Braun said she would hate to see most of the trees go. “This is a beautiful thing to have in the neighborhood,” said Braun, 77, as she walked past the locked front gate one day in early December.
 
 
Bothwell Ranch 5300 Oakdale Ave. ZA-2023-2170-ZAD, VTT-83927-HCA, ENV-2023-2172-EAF, 21011