One of the arguments posited by Hope for the Hills in its Save Carbon Canyon initiative to fight a proposal by CalTrans District 8 to widen the state highway at the S-curves in the Chino Hills portion of Carbon Canyon is that it is better for State Route 142, that is, Carbon Canyon Road, to be considered a scenic route, despite the clutter of signs stuck along this section in a futile effort to improve safety, than a truck route. There, of course, are other reasons offered to fend off the widening project, chiefly safety, as well as preventing even more crowding of traffic.
This last point, however, becomes even more of an issue with the ever-present specter of housing developments in the Canyon and today's Chino Valley Champion includes an article by Marianne Napoles about well north of 300 new housing units in various stages of planning that will add to the amount of vehicles plying SR-142, a two-lane road that cannot be widened with additional lanes without enormous destruction and (almost certainly) unrealistic cost.
The three new projects (a fourth mentioned in the article is already well under way, this being the Serenity Grove tract off Canyon Hills Road next to Oak Tree Downs and Estates and comprising 50 units of around $2 million) include a pair that have long been slated for development.
The one that has had the most public awareness is Cresta Verde, the subdivision formerly known as Stonefield, and which proposes 45 single-family residences, whereas the prior iteration planned for 28. This site is north and west of Carbon Canyon Road and east of Fairway Drive, across from Western Hills Country Club, and there was a great deal of community outcry about this project when first proposed as Stonefield.
Yet, despite an increase of some 60% in the number of units, Cresta Verde (which might more realistically called Cresta Café, given the color of the hills most of the year), seems insignificant in comparison to the other proposed developments.
The Del Vistas subdivision is slated for 95 two and three-story single-family dwellings on just 16.5 acres where there are now stables just southeast of Serenity Grove and across from Hillcrest, another fairly recently built tract. Notably, plans for development of Del Vistas go back more than two decades and Napoles reports that, while the site is not considered a high-density one under California mandates for new housing to meet an obvious shortage of residences, the project is having a Senate bill for that purpose and a "state density bonus law" applied to increase the number of units.
Lastly, and more strikingly, there is Western Hills, where not quite 9 acres of the southern side of the golf course, fronting the state highway, will be crammed with 187 duplexes and "stacked" units. Notably, Napoles wrote that there will be 68 resident and 62 guest parking spots, all uncovered, but where the rest of the cars are supposed to park is an obvious question.
Another one is why it was decided this was an appropriate and necessary site to be rezoned to comply with high-density housing mandates by the State. For example, there is no other location, unless someone can correct this statement, in Chino Hills in which such housing is located where there is only a two-lane major roadway for egress and ingress—and one that will increasingly be utilized as thousands of dwellings are built further inland, especially in south Chino, southern Ontario and elsewhere.
The answer, it seems, would include that the mandates require so many units that some form of reasonable distribution had to be achieved as the City addressed the issue and there likely are other justifications to be cited. There will, of course, be an outcry about this and the other two proposals that will generate explanations about this and myriad other questions.
In days of yore, going back almost 20 years now, this blog routinely discussed the question of large-scale additions of housing in the Canyon and what the issues were. The core concern has consistently been Carbon Canyon Road and the fact that it, as far as we know, cannot be widened beyond two lanes and, if this is so, it will, presumably, wind up like a miniature version of the 60 and 91 freeways and more like Diamond Bar Boulevard. Fire risk was, obviously, another major consideration along with its corollary, ease of evacuation in case of a wildfire.
Stonefield, as Napoles noted, went through five extensions before the project was dropped and another large-scale proposal for south of Carbon Canyon Road at Canyon Hills was heavily contested (this years after a 1990s plan destroyed huge numbers of oak trees, now protected in the City, that were never replaced), so who knows what will be brought forward at that site.
Here we are again, with the prospect of 327 future units, beyond the 50 underway at Serenity Grove, not to mention what may come at the last-discussed location. Almost anyone living in Carbon Canyon can readily understand what this would do to whatever scenic value is left, but the idea of navigating the state highway when (and if) all of these are built, much less the thousands of inland residences that are coming, is one to seriously consider and ponder.
This time, though, with California mandates on housing, it appears far more likely that these latest batch of subdivisions will be approved and built in relatively short order and, as for the consequences (naturally, we'd have to see what the economy and housing market may be,) it doesn't take much imagination to foresee what the future will almost certainly hold for Carbon Canyon.
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