In an unincorporated community south of state Route 78 near Escondido, a nearly decade-long dispute over housing development and wildfire safety is gaining more urgency in the wake of the devastating Los Angeles wildfires.
Residents of Harmony Grove Village live in one of the most fire-prone areas of the county, and they worry that a future housing development with inadequately planned evacuation routes could put them all at risk.
The proposed development, Harmony Grove Village South, has been in the planning stages since 2015 and sits in what CalFire has designated as a “Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone.”
The project has one paved road in and out, Country Club Drive, and a contested secondary evacuation route that residents say is a dirt path unusable and impassable by car.
Recent images of clogged traffic, abandoned cars and people fleeing the Palisades Fire on foot sit at the forefront of Harmony Grove residents’ minds.
“We’re talking about entrapment,” said JP Theberge, vice chair of the Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council. “It’s all because the county is letting the developer slide with their definition of what’s safe.”
The plan’s single-exit design would require a waiver of San Diego County’s fire safety codes, and the developer, David Kovach, is seeking approval to bypass these regulations.
In the developer’s Fire Protection Plan, which was prepared by the environmental consulting firm Dudek, officials cite an inability to secure property rights for a secondary road. The proposal instead suggests adding a third travel lane to the bridge as a safety measure on Country Club Drive, which crosses Escondido Creek.
“With only one way out, even though it is three lanes, when a fire bumps this roadway, the road will be unusable,” said Fred W. Cox, former Rancho Santa Fe Fire Chief in a 2018 email about the project.
Long-time community members agree that this extra lane will not be enough.
Some residents who lived through the 2014 Cocos Fire, which burned nearly 2,000 acres and destroyed 40 structures, can recall waiting in traffic for over an hour while evacuating.
“It was probably the most hectic thing I’ve ever been through in my life,” Theberge said.
Since 2014, more than 700 homes have been built in the semi-rural area. If the development plan is approved, more than 450 additional homes will be constructed.
Retired resident Debbie O’Neill, who has lived in her home since 2001, has had to evacuate from wildfires three times.
“If they put in Harmony Grove Village South, we will have to leave whenever there’s a Santa Ana – whether there’s fire or not – because once the fire starts, we probably won’t be able to get out,” O’Neill said.
The Elfin Forest Harmony Grove Town Council sued San Diego County for approving the development in 2018.
In 2020, a San Diego judge ordered the county to rescind approval of the project, citing fire safety among her concerns. A state appellate court also told the county to rescind approval in 2022 but cited greenhouse gases, not the fire plan, as an issue.
Following the state court’s decision, Kovach developed a greenhouse gas mitigation plan to continue with the project and emphasized the need to address the county’s housing crisis. San Diego County Planning and Development Services also said that the project must designate 10% of the units for affordable housing.
Dave Cieslak, a spokesperson for the developer, criticized the pushback by community members and called them “anti-housing activists.”
Theberge takes issue with that characterization.
“This community is not a NIMBY community. This is a whole different issue,” he said.
The Harmony Grove Village South dispute is one of many recent legal battles in which backcountry developments approved by local governments faced challenges due to fire danger.
In 2021, a judge halted the development of more than 1,100 homes in Otay Mesa citing fire risks. Nearly 3,000 promised homes in the Fanita Ranch development in Santee were blocked by a court in 2022.
“At the end of the day, the state has not done a great job of mitigating this desire to build all these homes in the most risky areas because they think, ‘Well, hey, that gives us housing.’ But what good is housing if it burns down?” Theberge said.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors is expected to address the project in the coming months.
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