Proposed Construction of 8 Houses on Hill on Mt. Royal Drive Stirs Neighbors’ Concerns

Of all the streets that intersect Hill Drive and run north in the direction of the 134 freeway, Mount Royal Drive is somewhat exceptional. As steep as it’s picturesque, it snakes past an amusing (but illegal) “Dachshund Xing” sign posted under a “No Parking Any Time” warning, and ends in a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill.

Lately, Karen Shanbrom, a resident on this stretch of Mt. Royal Drive, has been circulating a petition in the area aimed at blocking plans by Stan Fargeon, a Studio City-based developer, to build eight single family homes in a 1.59-acre gated community at the top of the street.

“Can you imagine the devastation to our lovely and quiet neighborhood?” Shanbrom asks in her one-page appeal. “All the trees at the top of the hill being cut down! Trucks and bulldozers and earth-movers on ours and the surrounding streets. The congestion related to parked cars—which will only get worse with eight new families living at the top of the street.”

The matter of the proposed construction on 5370 and 5382 North Mt. Royal Dr. is scheduled to come before to the Land Use Committee of the Eagle Rock Neighborhood Council today, Thursday, at 7 p.m. in Eagle Rock City Hall, as part of the developer’s community outreach efforts. (Click here for the meeting’s agenda.)

Although Shanbrom “unfortunately cannot attend” the meeting, according to the petition, several other Mt. Royal Drive residents are expected to be there, including George Keith, an affable man who has been living directly opposite the proposed construction site since he built a home there in 1976.

According to Keith, the hill comprising 5370 and 5382 North Mt. Royal Dr. was once the site of a house that was destroyed in a fire in the late 1960s. The place has been vacant ever since and has changed ownership several times over the years, said Keith. (According to online data from the Los Angeles County Office of the Assessor, the land was sold to its current owner in December 2010 for $129,540.)

Besides sharing all the concerns listed in Shanbrom’s petition, Keith is worried that if city authorities give the green light to eight stand-alone homes on the hill overlooking his property, a neighbor of his who owns a substantial portion of a hill directly below might be encouraged to similarly develop the area.

Above all, it’s the “unrelenting noise of ongoing construction,” to use a phrase from the petition, that is of particular concern to Keith. “For how many years will the construction go on?” he said in a Wednesday interview with Eagle Rock Patch at his house. The answer, he reckoned, was anyone’s guess. “We have got to stop this.”

As Keith spoke, he pulled out a flyer from his mailbox outside his house.

“Save our Wildlife Corridor!” read the flyer, showing an image of a grazing deer near a chain-link fence. Above the image was an intricate map from the Office of the Assessor. It showed a part of the “Watts Subdivision of a part of the Rancho San Rafael”—a 36,400-acre swath of land once owned by José Maria Verdugo, a soldier at the San Gabriel Mission in the late 18th century, from which the whole of Eagle Rock and just about every neighborhood around it is carved.

According to Sean Nguyen, a construction development project coordinator with a Canoga Park-based company called EZ Permits, LLC, the property on 5370 and 5382 North Mt. Royal Dr. will include eight detached houses of 2,500 square feet to 3,200 square feet each. The developer behind the proposed construction is seeking a so-called “Tentative Tract Map” from the Los Angeles Planning Department, which Nguyen described as a “discretionary approval” from the city.

Besides three "zoning adjustments" related to the proposed homes' front yards and side yards as well as a retaining wall, the developer is seeking a “variance for increase in residential floor area,” according to a document made available to the ERNC. “Proposed lots average from 5,000 to 9,100 sq. ft.,” reads one of the five bullet points in the document. “If using the standard rule of 5,000 sq. ft x 25%, we can only build a 1,250 square foot building.”

The property's "slope density" allows for the building of nine houses, "but we're only building eight," David LaFaille, a civil engineer associated with the project, told Eagle Rock Patch. LaFaille said that the developer would probably widen a road leading from the Mt. Royal cul-de-sac to the site of the proposed construction, although, added LaFaille, he isn't sure if there are any city requirements for widening it.

"A lot of bad people go up the street that ends there and drink and indulge in illicit behavior," LaFaille said. "We're trying to clean that up." (Keith confirmed he has seen people over the years smoking marijuana in the area, prompting him to put a traffic cone and flimsy, makeshift barriers in the way.)

Because of the steep terrain, the proposed homes will be dug into the hill, Steven Brabson, an architect with Franklin Studios Inc. who is part of the project, said. Each lot on the property, which is called "Mt. Royal Luxury Gates Residential Development," according to the Fanklin Studio's website, will have two garages submerged into the ground. There will be two levels above the garage area, and the front half of the first floor would also be submerged in the ground, Brabson said.

"The maxmimum number of houses [fit for the property] is nine but the developer has offered to only develop eight out of consideration for the neighborhood," Brabson said. Besides, "if the people who buy these homes have more room, they would find them more valuable," he added.

So far, said Nguyen, he has received no comments from residents disapproving the proposed construction. Asked about the likelihood that eight homes would introduce at least 16 vehicles to an already tightly packed area, Nguyen conceded that there might be that many vehicles during rush hour, although all the vehicles were unlikely to leave at the same time.

Kelly Deco, a Hill Drive resident nearby who has been distributing the flyers Keith found in his mailbox, told Patch that the eight-home project would be “devastating for the area” not least because it’s a wildlife corridor.

"They're not the kind of homes that are in that area," Deco said. "That alone is why they couldn't build there."