May 8, 2008

Tejon Ranch pact would allow 26,000 homes on the range

The developer, the Tejon Ranch Co., has agreed to set aside 178,000 acres and provide an option for public purchase of 62,000 additional acres -- 49,000 to create a state park, 10,000 to realign a 37-mile segment of the Pacific Crest Trail through the heart of the wild lands and the rest to provide docent-led tours of sensitive habitat. It also will pull back development plans along some ridgelines considered crucial to the California condor.

In exchange, a coalition led by the Natural Resources Defense Council, the Sierra Club, Audubon California, the Planning and Conservation League and the Endangered Habitats League will not oppose the company's plans to build three urban centers, including more than 26,000 homes as well as hotels, condominiums and golf courses at the western and southwestern edge of the ranch.

Those groups and others had threatened a campaign against development of the property, saying it would extend Southern California's suburban sprawl to the Central Valley, add to regional traffic and air pollution woes, and harm endangered species such as the condor.

The pact was the second major truce among environmental groups and developers in as many months in Southern California, where such projects can be tied up in court for decades. Last month, conservationists struck a deal with a Houston oil company that would allow for offshore drilling this year in exchange for early retirement of several large-scale oil facilities along an otherwise pristine coastline in Santa Barbara County.

In a prepared statement, California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger said the success in reaching the Tejon agreement underlines how "we can protect California's environment at the same time we pump up our economy."

Some environmentalists expressed reservations about the accord, to be announced today. Ilene Anderson, a biologist and spokeswoman for the Center for Biological Diversity, said her group remains worried about habitat for the condor.

"So while we support significant open space," she said, "it's precedent-setting that critical habitat for a species just brought back from the brink of extinction would be written off for development."

Eight times the size of San Francisco, the unfragmented 270,000-acre property embraces the juncture of four ecosystems: Mojave Desert grasslands, San Joaquin Valley oak woodlands, Tehachapi pine forests and coastal mountain ranges.

Like Louisiana Purchase

The 165-year-old ranch, first cobbled together by Edward Fitzgerald Beale, was owned for decades by an investment group led by former Los Angeles Times owner Harry Chandler and land developer Moses Sherman.

"For Southern California, this is the ecological equivalent of the Louisiana Purchase," said Bill Corcoran, senior regional representative for the Sierra Club. "It is the only place in the region where within a few minutes a visitor can ascend from Joshua tree woodlands to oak-filled canyons on up to vast plains with views across the coastal range."

Permitting for residential and commercial development of the remaining 30,000 acres is expected to be easier with the agreement, although plans still must be approved by state and federal regulatory authorities, as well as Los Angeles and Kern counties, according to Robert A. Stine, president and chief executive of Tejon Ranch Co.

"Our vision has always been to preserve California's legacy and provide for California's future, and this agreement does exactly that," Stine said in an interview. "It's good for conservation, good for California and good for the company and its shareholders."

Finding common ground between the nation's most powerful environmental groups and the Tejon Ranch Co. wasn't easy.

"We've come a long way from where we started," said Joel Reynolds, senior attorney and director of the Southern California Program of the Natural Resources Defense Council. "This was an extremely complicated deal, but also a once-in-a-lifetime conservation opportunity."

The agreement guarantees Tejon Ranch Co. the right to proceed with massive development projects near Interstate 5: Centennial, a planned community of 23,000 homes east of Quail Lake in northern Los Angeles County; and Tejon Mountain Village in southern Kern County, which will include a resort featuring spas and boutique hotels, commercial space, golf courses and 3,400 estate homes. The Tejon Industrial Complex in the Kern County portion of the ranch is already home to IKEA's 2-million-square-foot main distribution warehouse, among others.

In each project, Stine said, "a whole set of design parameters will be reviewed by all parties to ensure that all development activity that takes place will consider all green opportunities into the future; that means transportation, building and landscape materials, water usage. Everything."

The agreement also creates an "independent Tejon Ranch Conservancy" composed of 12 members appointed by the company and its environmental partners to manage the preserved land in perpetuity. The company will provide about $800,000 a year for seven years to get the conservancy off the ground. Later, it will be funded through transfer fees from the sale of residential properties.

"It's not enough to simply set aside land," Reynolds said. "We also need an entity whose focus is restoration and conservation."

Tejon Ranch remains a vast wildlife stronghold where deer, elk, bobcat and wild turkey flourish. Canyon bottoms are full of oaks. Along old lumber roads edging the brows of hills, flocks of wild pigeons rise. On the uplands, pine and cedar hold their own, and golden eagles ride warm air currents from coastal mountains to the Sierra.

Graham Chisolm, director of conservation for Audubon California said, "There is probably no more important property for the future of the California condor." Only a week ago, he said, roughly half of the 38 California condors in Southern California were foraging on the property.

4 ridgelines spared

A key to unlocking the stalemate was the developer's agreement to pull back from four of five northern-facing ridgelines, including one hemming scenic Bear Trap Canyon, that are prime foraging grounds inside critical California condor habitat.

"By removing the potential obstacles that have plagued similar development efforts in California, we'll be able to move ahead with the entitlement processes on our current development projects in a much more timely fashion," said Michael H. Winer, portfolio manager for Third Avenue Management, Tejon's largest shareholder, and a member of its board of directors.

The company had been seeking an "incidental condor take permit" from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which would have relieved it of liability in the event that its projects were linked to the death of any of the endangered raptors. However, the company recently determined that such a "lethal take permit" was no longer needed given the reconfiguration of development plans under the agreement.

Reynolds, of the Natural Resources Defense Council, said he was satisfied that the condor would be protected under the new plan.

"The condor is a very high-profile species, and there's been significant public investment in its recovery," he said, "and throughout these negotiations an enormous amount of attention was paid to ensuring that this agreement would be consistent with its recovery, and we believe it does so."

By JON GERTNER
Published: March 18, 2007
For much of the past century, the hills and valleys around Los Angeles have been a kind of developers’ paradise, a patchwork of expansive ranches, many dating to the 1840s and 1850s, that supplied builders with a seemingly endless stock of raw acreage. As the region boomed, subdivisions and office parks spread steadily over these former ranch lands, until Los Angeles County encompassed not only Los Angeles but also nearly a hundred other smaller cities. How much bigger the area can get may be a matter of geography. West and south is the Pacific Ocean. East is desert. And the Angeles National Forest and San Gabriel Mountains bound the northeast. It may not be the case that the Southern California dream has run its course here. But the dream may be running out of room.

A Master-Planned Community The city of Centennial, which would include 23,000 homes and sit an hour away from Los Angeles by car, would take at least 20 years to build, according to the developers behind it.
About 60 miles north of the city, though, beyond the San Gabriels, you can still find some open space untouched by the backhoes of big developers. This is the future site of the city of Centennial, population about 70,000, just off Interstate 5, but today it is still fields of rolling grassland that cattle have grazed for more than 100 years. Seen from afar, the Centennial site looks like a swatch of green-and-gold fabric, rumpled here and there in small pleats and gathers, spread over an area six miles long and three miles deep. Behind it rise the Tehachapi Mountains, and if you look closely you can see a glint of silver running through the landscape: the water of the California Aqueduct flowing south. It’s a landscape that’s empty and attractive and remote — but not a place, as one developer confided to me, that’s so attractive or remote as to make it off limits to a builder.

The 11,700 acres allocated for Centennial are part of Tejon Ranch, one of the last great California ranches. Comprising more than 270,000 acres, or 426 square miles, the ranch is roughly one-third the size of Rhode Island. It is so large that many things that need to get from Northern California to Southern California — natural gas, drinking water, electricity, fiber-optic cables, the cars on I-5 — pass through it. The ranch is home to about 14,000 head of cattle, and its agricultural fields yield almonds, pistachios and wine grapes. “All these other huge properties from the 19th century have been broken up long ago,” says Jan de Leeuw, the chairman of the statistics department at U.C.L.A., who lives near the ranch and opposes the plans to develop Centennial. “But Tejon has never been broken up. It exists as a dinosaur.”

Los Angeles County is already home to more than 10 million inhabitants, making it by far the most populous in the United States. And yet the population is still growing, thanks largely to the steady influx of immigrants. How to accommodate this growth is an exceedingly difficult question. One popular solution is to build within the city. Robert Lang, the director of the Metropolitan Institute at Virginia Tech, says that “the great challenge of the 21st century will be remaking the postwar landscape” — in other words, transforming the parking lots and dead malls of our sprawling urban spaces into denser “infill” housing and commercial centers. “Los Angeles is really the nation’s largest infill project,” Lang told me, noting that the era of ambitious master-planned communities in Southern California is largely over, except for Centennial, whose plan has just begun to move through the Los Angeles County environmental-review process. Nevada and Arizona may still build one new city after another. Los Angeles will thicken more than it will spread.

To Greg Hise, a professor of urban history and planning at the University of Southern California who has written several books on California’s development, deciding whether to promote infill or to push outward may not be “an either/or question.” The region may need both. Centennial’s developers make that argument. “Infill alone isn’t going to accommodate all of the need for housing in the state of California,” Robert Stine, the C.E.O. of Tejon Ranch, told me when we met there in January. Infill wouldn’t even be enough, he says, to ease the intense regional pressure on home prices. To talk to Stine and his partners in the Centennial project is to encounter a vision for a place that isn’t the last of its kind but rather the first great American community of the 21st century, incorporating the most sophisticated ideas of what makes a city healthy and sustainable. It may not be possible to build another Centennial in Los Angeles County, but the experiment could be repeated elsewhere. “For us on the team,” says Randall Lewis, an executive at the Lewis Group of Companies, one of the three developers in partnership with Tejon Ranch, “it’s not only the largest community we’ve ever done; it’s also the most significant. Centennial will be like a laboratory that others study for the next 100 years. They’ll see the things we got right. And they’ll see if there are things we could have done better.” Building a city of this size will take at least 20 years, the partners agree, perhaps 30. Many of the people working on Centennial, as well as some of its opponents, told me they realize they may not be around, or even alive, by the time it is finished.
Tejon Ranch was created in the mid-1800s by Edward Fitzgerald Beale, the superintendent for Indian Affairs in Nevada and California, who spent about $90,000 to purchase four Mexican ranchos. Beale’s son later sold the ranch to a consortium of wealthy Angelenos, and in 1936 the new owners converted Tejon Ranch into a public company. A large chunk of the company’s stock was controlled, from the beginning, by the Chandler family, which also owned The Los Angeles Homes on This Range? One of the last great California ranches, Tejon, would yield 11,700 of its 270,000 acres for a city with a population of about 70,000 if plans clear an environmental review and other hurdles. 

Compared with most modern public corporations, Tejon has long been a peculiar, cash-poor business. In 2005, half of its $26 million in revenue came from its agricultural business (mostly from the sale of nuts and fruit). Other income came from agreements with ranchers, who graze cattle on the ranch; leases to outside companies, which pay Tejon to mine minerals and mix concrete on its premises and rent space; and payments from the state of California, which runs gas and power lines through the ranch. A few dollars also trickle in from hunting and fishing programs — it costs $20,000 to bag an elk on the property, for example. Mainly, though, Tejon has been a kind of land bank in the truest sense of the word, with its immense value (its market capitalization is about $850 million) a reflection of its development potential. Harry Chandler, the Los Angeles Times publisher and real estate magnate whose family controlled the ranch for the better part of a century, realized this long ago: “Never let the Tejon board sell any of the land in Grapevine Canyon,” he told a colleague in 1916 or so, referring to a specific part of the ranch now near I-5. “That will be valuable property one of these days.”

In the late 1990s, once Robert Stine was running Tejon, the board became increasingly restless to move ahead with development. Partly that was due to the growth of Los Angeles and the extraordinary demand for homes during those years. What might have been inconceivable once — living or working a least an hour away from the city by car, at the rustic edge of Los Angeles County — had become entirely acceptable. At the same time, Tejon’s shareholders owned a company with enormous promise locked up in its land and very little to show for it. One shareholder, Third Avenue Management, a New York-based investment group, purchased 3.2 million shares of Tejon from Times Mirror in the late ’90s. When I spoke with Michael Winer, the portfolio manager of the Third Avenue Real Estate Value Fund and a board member at Tejon, he explained that the only other property like Tejon Ranch is perhaps one in Florida owned by the St. Joe Company, a former paper business that recently became a real estate developer. “I wish there were more opportunities like this, but St. Joe and Tejon Ranch are the two,” Winer told me. “To have 270,000 acres that are all essentially contiguous within 70 miles of downtown Los Angeles? I don’t think there’s anything like that near a major metropolitan area with that kind of potential.” The fact that Centennial would take decades to create didn’t bother Winer. “Look, we’ve been in the stock for 10 years already,” he said, noting that Third Avenue now owns a total of 4.4 million Tejon shares, or about 26 percent of the company. “We’re very patient investors.”

No one has ever expected Tejon to develop all of its land. Because of to its size and rugged areas, that would be practically impossible, as well as environmentally unconscionable. But when the board asked Stine to find a few sites for development, he went through the ranch records to see what had been considered before. “About every 10 years or so for the last 40 or 50 years, if you go back into the Tejon archives, there have been some sort of master plans that have been laid out,” Stine told me. “If you synthesize all of those — and actually we’ve put all those plans on top of each other, with new G.P.S. technology — you can see that there are certain areas of the ranch that are more conducive to development and certain very sizable areas that are more conducive to remaining a natural preserve.” Eventually Stine and the board agreed that three parcels were worth developing. One was Centennial, as a master-planned city of 23,000 homes, half of which would be stand-alone houses (the rest condominiums and apartments). Another was a smaller parcel near the Interstate — near Grapevine Canyon — that could become a large industrial park. The third was a big, picturesque tract north of Centennial that seemed well suited for vacation homes. Unlike Centennial, which would be a fairly affordable, dense mixture of housing and businesses, Tejon Mountain Village, as it came to be called, would be a retreat for the affluent. It would comprise about 28,000 acres and include spas and hotels, as well as about 3,500 houses, situated on plots ranging from one-quarter of an acre to 40 acres.

Those plans left well over 200,000 acres of the ranch undeveloped. Recently Tejon declared its willingness to transfer about 100,000 acres into a land conservancy, which would preclude their development. The offer was meant to demonstrate that Tejon is not in the business of turning wilderness into rows of McMansions. It was a kind of gambit, too, the first move in what are likely to be involved negotiations. A natural preserve of 100,000 acres would not be insignificant; Zion National Park in Utah, for instance, is about 147,000 acres. In response to Tejon’s move, though, a coalition of environmental groups began calling for a larger conservation effort. Its suggestion is to preserve 245,000 acres.

One day in January at Tejon Ranch, in a low-slung building that houses the corporation’s offices, I sat with Randy Jackson, the planner whose firm, the Planning Center, created the initial master plan for Centennial, as he showed me slides of the city-to-be. When I asked him what city Centennial would most closely resemble, Jackson told me that he often fields that question. “I say, well, it’s like a piece of this and a piece of that,” he said. Irvine, Calif., has influenced the conception of Centennial’s parkland and open space, for instance. As another example, Jackson cited Stapleton, an ongoing infill project at a defunct Denver airport, whose schools and pedestrian-friendly paths have inspired him. Still, he added, Centennial has its own unique location and possibilities. “This is a blank palette,” he said. “How would you do it if you were going to do it from scratch? There’s nothing there but five or six trees and the flatland.”

Unlike most of this country’s largest cities, which were founded because proximity to rivers or trade routes made them ideal places to settle and work, many of our ambitious master-planned cities — Irvine, for instance, or Columbia, Md. — began as social ideas, carefully thought-out solutions to the messy march of postwar suburbia. “These towns were planned specifically as alternatives to sprawl,” says Ann Forsyth, a professor of urban design at the University of Minnesota, who has written extensively about the history and evolution of master-planned cities. Forsyth points out that both Irvine (begun in 1960 and now 30,000 acres in size) and Columbia (1962, 14,000 acres) are larger than Centennial, but that Centennial, at 11,700 acres, is probably big enough to achieve the most crucial aspect of a new-town plan: enough room for housing and jobs so that city residents can live, work and shop there. Whether the blueprint for a self-sustaining town actually becomes reality is another matter, however. Irvine succeeded — indeed, businesses there have done so well that workers now commute into the city rather than out of it. But the question of whether (or when) Centennial will be autonomous is among the most contentious issues surrounding the plan. Opponents see the specter of a bedroom community where residents clog the highways at rush hour in a mad dash to and from Los Angeles. Centennial’s planners dismiss such a prospect; they have built into the city’s design hundreds of thousands of square feet of commercial and industrial space and have begun making overtures to local businesses that might want to move into a Centennial office park.

Centennial’s four development partners — Tejon Ranch, the Lewis Group, Pardee Homes and Standard Pacific Homes — have committed about $35 million to pay for the city’s plan and shepherd it through the Los Angeles County approval process. Representatives of all four parties have also spent a great deal of time sitting around the oak table at Tejon hashing out how Centennial should look, how much it should cost and who should live there; it has mostly fallen to Randy Jackson to harmonize the partners’ visions.

Jackson began the design process six years ago by drawing a boundary. Because Centennial has mountains behind it, highways on two sides and an aqueduct on another side, its geographical shape was almost a given. The question then was where to put the roads and neighborhoods. “The big difference between the way we used to plan and the way we plan now is that we look at the natural systems,” Jackson told me. In years past, a site was plowed flat before builders created greenbelts and ditches to carry the water. The philosophy now, as he put it, is to let the landscape and natural drainage determine where development should occur. “We read the land,” he said, “and out of it comes the plan.”

Jackson acknowledges that no one knows how to plan the perfect community. And his belief that master-planning is still an evolving science is one reason he and the Centennial partners are eager to borrow what they consider the best ideas from cities around the country. When I asked Jackson how they settled on Centennial’s size, he explained that the first goal was a population large enough to achieve the critical mass needed for a self-sustaining community. Planners like Jackson use an array of sophisticated software programs, based on demographic and market research, that enable them to calculate the population and density required to animate new neighborhoods. Such programs also help them figure out how many schools and police stations they may need. To see their work as a real-life version of the computer game SimCity isn’t far off. “To have a grocery store you need 5,000 to 7,000 homes,” Jackson says. The 23,000 housing units planned for Centennial — a number that is likely to go down in the environmental review process — reflects the need to have enough residents for shopping centers, restaurants, movie theaters and business development, without making Centennial too congested. A city of 50,000 might also be large enough for a new branch of a university. Ultimately, Jackson’s plan envisioned Centennial as eight communities, each with a village center and multiple neighborhoods of about 50 homes each. In all, there would be about 1,000 acres of commercial and industrial property. The city would have a network of paseos and greenways to encourage biking and walking, and a variety of designs to conserve water and energy. Fifty percent of the town would be open space.
The much trickier part comes next: engineering a balanced society, mainly through the use of real estate prices. Centennial’s most notable difference compared with existing master-planned communities is that much of its housing, the developers are promising, will be within reach of working- and middle-class Californians. Whether it continues to be over time is a more unsettled matter; if Irvine and Columbia have diverged significantly from their original utopian impulses, it’s because they have skewed toward affluence as their populations and vitality have increased. “If you look at land values, Irvine is a great success,” says Michael H. Ebner, an urban historian at Lake Forest College in Illinois, who is writing a book about suburban America. Yet Irvine, as it has grown, has not been able to preserve the broad level of affordability its planners initially hoped for, Ebner says. In fact, its median household income — $83,000 — is well above the California median of $54,000.

Jackson and his colleagues created a model of what the ideal Centennial city population would be. They wanted diversity: old people and young families and singles; rich folks and working-class people, too. The Centennial partners envisioned a community that would include rental apartments and housing prices that would start at around $250,000. This is in large part a matter of practicality. Police officers, teachers and other essential building blocks of a community need to be able to afford to live where they work, especially if it’s in a remote city; new residents may also need financial incentives to be pioneers in a place where the concrete is barely dry. Moreover, in the Los Angeles region, where three-bedroom houses often start at $500,000, low prices could be a big draw. (The planners calculate that the lower-cost housing in Centennial would be affordable to more than 70 percent of California’s households.) So the initial phases of construction would focus on less-expensive housing and rentals, because those buyers and renters are the people Centennial needs to give it life. In a few years, after things have “snowballed,” as Jackson put it, those who arrived early would find opportunities to move up. In other words, by the time initial buyers and renters became higher earners, more-expensive neighborhoods would be going up in Centennial, some with million-dollar homes. Meanwhile, as older residents aged, there would be options for downsizing — into those original rental apartments, for instance, as well as small upscale homes or senior housing.

“It’s a very complex model between your needs of who you want to bring into the community and how that community matures over time,” Jackson said. “We’ll go back and revisit this every year for the next 25 years, and we’ll tweak it, because you never quite get it right.” Jackson mentioned that many things about the plan have already been tweaked, including the name. At first the proposed city was called Rolling Meadows, because that suited the site’s geography. Then the planners wanted a name that suggested a community that was both old and new. One day Robert Stine, a fan of the writer James A. Michener, suggested the title of Michener’s book “Centennial,” and everyone agreed. That sounded just about right.

To Stine, developing Centennial is not just a matter of flipping a chunk of Tejon for a quick profit. “We’ve been here for 150 years, and the ranch is going to be here 150 years from now,” he says, “so I think anything we want to put our thumbprints on we want to be of a quality that’s going to enhance the value of the surrounding land and in no way detract from it.” Of course, none of these intentions preclude the future possibility, when Centennial is not just grasslands but a real city, that Tejon will in turn slice off and develop other pieces of land from its immense holdings. Then Centennial won’t be just a stand-alone city. It may be the hub of a new region. Stine does not necessarily rule this out.

Opponents of Centennial and Tejon Mountain Village have demanded that the ranch forswear just such a future, however. “Instead of piecemeal development, we’re looking for a ranch-wide plan, so that everyone acknowledges the larger picture,” says Ileene Anderson, a Los Angeles-based staff biologist for the Center for Biological Diversity, one of a dozen environmental groups that have formed a coalition to oppose the Tejon developments. “In the future,” Anderson told me, “are we going to be fighting multiple development issues in sensitive areas, well past my lifetime? The notion would be that since the developments are starting to roll out, let’s figure out where the best places for development are, as well as the best places for conservation. We’d like to see a comprehensive plan so that all of the cards are on the table.”

In my conversations with Anderson and some of her allies in the environmental coalition, several issues stood out. One is that Tejon Mountain Village — the low-density vacation development planned for a more rustic and perhaps more biodiverse area of the ranch — is far more problematic than Centennial, at least environmentally. Among other things, the village would be situated in what appears to be a crucial habitat for the endangered California condor, which was only recently brought back from the brink of extinction and reintroduced to the wild. “I think the location is a big problem,” Joel Reynolds, an attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told me. “I just can’t imagine why they think that putting a development in that habitat of the condor can work.”
It is, in fact, entirely possible that Tejon Mountain Village will be blocked in the environmental-review process, even as Centennial moves ahead. The two projects are independent — indeed, they would be located in different counties: Centennial in Los Angeles County and Tejon Mountain Village in Kern County. Still, Reynolds and Anderson point out that Centennial also raises significant issues: above all, a worry about the strain 23,000 new homes, as well as a large number of new businesses, will put on the region’s public services. The new city may be a beacon of progressive planning, but that can’t mitigate the fact that it will be among the largest housing tracts in California history. “We generally agree that Centennial should not happen in this form, and it should not be as big as it is,” says Jan de Leeuw, the U.C.L.A. professor and local resident, who characterizes its location as “the middle of nowhere.” Paul Novak, a planning deputy for Los Angeles County, told me that Centennial’s location, in a sparsely populated area, presents a number of infrastructure questions. “I think roads come to mind for most people,” he says. “But roads are less complicated than water or sewage disposal. Or police and fire service. You’re trying to provide law-enforcement protection to a community of 70,000 people.” Novak adds that for a community to have a hospital, it generally has to have more than 50,000 people. The residents of Centennial could conceivably put pressure on the existing medical services for at least a decade, until it achieves the right size and density.

Novak notes that his boss, Michael D. Antonovich — a county supervisor who has one of five votes on the county board that will determine the city’s fate — will not take a position on Centennial until its application has wended its way through the county’s environmental-review process, which will take at least a year. The Centennial partners, who believe they have taken great care to figure out the new city’s water sources, hope to begin construction in 2009. But the plan could easily be tied up in litigation. Novak says that a comparable development nearby known as Newhall Ranch, which is supposed to consist of nearly 21,000 housing units, will have taken about 15 years to advance from proposal to groundbreaking, if that occurs as expected in 2009. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing — Greg Hise at U.S.C. believes that the input from state officials, neighbors and environmental actors over a period of years ultimately benefits many planned communities. “Some people bemoan the process,” Hise says. “I see it as a positive.” Still, what may especially complicate things in Centennial’s case is that any transfer from Tejon Ranch to a land conservancy, in order to move things forward — whether it’s 100,000 acres or the 245,000 acres sought by the environmental coalition, or more likely, something in between — would probably involve some kind of compensation to Tejon. Whether the state and private organizations could raise the money to pay for such a large tract makes the conservation process far less simple than it might appear. A promise by Tejon to set aside a large tract in perpetuity would ultimately require more than just a verbal commitment. It would require serious political, legal and financial resources too.

Tejon Ranch’s grand size and location have already transformed the prospect for its development into a passionate, once-in-a-lifetime battle for housing or conservation. After this ranch is carved up, there will not be any others like it again. Perhaps that’s why both parties repeatedly asked me which side’s argument I found most persuasive. But if anything seemed clear, it was that Tejon’s projects have brought about a collision of reasonable people. Each side cares deeply about the value of the land. The irreconcilable problem is that they value it for entirely different reasons. Robert Stine of Tejon put it to me this way: “You’re never going to please all the people all the time. We know that. So we’ve got to do what we think is the right thing for the land, for the communities that we want to build and for our shareholders.” Meanwhile, the environmental coalition isn’t naïve; its members know that there’s a fortune at stake — one Tejon investor, the money manager James Roumell, told me the value of Centennial’s development to the ranch corporation is $500 million.

“We recognize the fact that it is private land; it is a publicly owned company with shareholders,” Ileene Anderson says. “They need to make a return on their investments. Certainly California is not losing population, and people have to live somewhere.” But in Anderson’s view, it comes down to the benefits of the ranch and its stockholders or the benefits of all Californians. You could simplify that further and say it comes down to money or to nature. For better and for worse, the land holds both.