AGOURA HILLS' CITY OFFICIAL MAKES CONTROVERSIAL REMARKS ABOUT THE ADEQUACY OF THE CITY'S EVACUATION ANALYSIS
Agoura Hills’ new housing projects heighten evacuation worries
Developments south of freeway add to fire risk—opponents plan lawsuit
May 30, 2025
By Eamon Murphy
eamon@theacorn.com
Concerned residents of unincorporated areas in Los Angeles County near Agoura Hills gathered last week to reaffirm their opposition to proposed housing development south of the 101 Freeway, in the vicinity of Agoura and Kanan roads, which they say threatens a vital evacuation route in case of wildfire.
The lively May 21 meeting at Blue Table restaurant in Whizin Market Square was organized by the group PRISMM—Protectors and Residents in the Santa Monica Mountains—and drew scores of attendees from communities including Seminole Springs, Cornell, Malibou Lake and Triunfo/Lobo Canyon.
PRISMM’s Rae Greulich and Steve Hess rallied those present to lobby the Agoura City Council against placing 15 of 20 potential housing sites on the Santa Monicas side of the freeway. These sites were selected by the city to fulfill state mandates to zone for new housing. If fully built out, they have a combined highest unit potential of 1,709 apartments, before the application of density bonuses. State law permits developers who include affordable housing in their projects to build more units than base zoning rules would allow.
POTENTIAL—A map at the citizens’ meeting shows the multitude of housing projects south of the 101 Freeway, with the yellow numbers indicating maximum units allowed. Go HERE for more details on "maximum units allowed"
The property at the intersection of Agoura and Cornell roads, for instance— where the Regency Center Project is currently under construction, in place of a former movie theater—was zoned for a maximum of 185 units. But by designating 20% of the apartments as affordable, the developer claimed a 50% density bonus, upping the unit total to 278.
With nearby Kanan Road already congested at rush hours, and the traumatic memory of the 2018 Woolsey fire still fresh, many residents fear that more people and cars in the area could spell disaster in the event of an emergency.
At the meeting, attendees recalled the last time flames came through the area and the stress of getting out of town en masse, some with horses and trailers. There were references to the chaotic exodus during January’s firestorm in Los Angeles, including the image of a bulldozer pushing hundreds of abandoned cars off of Palisades Drive.
“It’s a nightmare,” one woman declared of the prospective housing map, which was displayed along with photographs of traffic on Kanan and fire in the mountains. “And they want to put apartments on top of all three shopping centers on Kanan Road. We can’t handle that amount of people.”
Hess told the gathering that PRISMM intends to sue to block the housing plans. He was one of the leaders of the successful campaign against the Cornerstone project, which would have been the first part of Agoura Village to be built, had it not been quashed in court in 2018 on environmental grounds.
City officials say they share residents’ concern over public safety, but point to state housing law that requires them to zone for a specified number of units and limits their ability to regulate what gets built. Municipalities that defy the state risk consequences including a loss of permitting control, which takes the process out of local hands completely.
Hess told The Acorn that the purpose of the meeting was “to educate people about what’s happening with Regency . . . and what’s coming down the pike, based on the city’s housing plan.” The safety and evacuation component of that plan “is woefully inadequate, in our opinion,” he said; in particular, “it doesn’t account for any traffic coming north on Kanan. So anybody fleeing any of the beach cities, (such as) Malibu, there wasn’t any accounting for any of that traffic at all.”
According to Agoura’s community development director, Denice Thomas, this is not so. Thomas said the city’s evacuation analysis looked at how people can get to “a safe gateway,” in this case the 101 Freeway: “We did take into account the traffic analysis zones at the southern part of the city limits, and moving people who, historically in other wildfires, have used Kanan (to get) to the safe gateway. . . *We find that the City did NOT. GO HERE AND SEE # 1. So the (traffic) impact does include people from south of the city limits traveling north to the 101, through the Kanan-Agoura Road intersection.” *We found that these people DO NOT travel through the intersection of Kanan and Agoura Roads but are plunked down, out of nowhere, a few hundred feet from the Reyes Adobe and Chesebro onramps. PLEASE GO HERE AND SEE #2.
The state does not require that cities show how they will evacuate everyone within a certain amount of time, Thomas added: “The state just says you have to have a safe way to get people out, so that you can get them away from harm.” This is what traffic modeling exercises are intended to determine. The city and its traffic engineers concluded that Agoura’s roadway network has adequate capacity to move people to safe gateways even at the levels of development envisioned in the housing element. *How can the roadway capacity be adequate if it excludes Kanan Raod south pf the 101 Freeway?? Go HERE AND SEE #1, #3 & #4.
Part of the general plan, the housing element demonstrates to the state how a city intends to build more dwellings. In Jan. 2021, Agoura asked the California Department of Housing and Community Development for “a reasonable reduction” of the city’s most recent Regional Housing Needs Allocation, Thomas said, due to the fact that nearly all of the city is in a very high or high fire hazard severity zone. The appeal board denied the city’s request, 6-0: “No relief was granted.”
*Comments by PRISMM
Highlights, bold and italics by PRISMM