Try telling Donna Steinmetz that landfills don't affect property values and she scoffs.
The Puente Hills landfill looms behind her home in Hacienda Heights, where Los Angeles County trash is reconfiguring the landscape as it fills the canyons of the grassy hillside.
"The house is like a dust bowl every day," she says. "And then there's the smell."
Neighbors complain they can't sell their houses, she says. But even though common sense says no one is eager to move next door to a garbage dump, proving it is a difficult matter.
As Riverside County supervisors prepare to vote on a massive expansion of the El Sobrante landfill Tuesday, a pair of studies commissioned by county officials say similar projects in Southern California have had little or no impact on the value of surrounding properties.
Puente Hills is cited as the best example -- a dump that will be roughly the same size, taking roughly the same amount of trash, with the same kind of residential and commercial development that someday is expected to surround El Sobrante.
And El Sobrante's neighbors have something else in common with those living around Puente Hills. They don't believe what the experts say, either.
"I can't imagine, if people have a choice, that they're going to want to live in an area that has an excessive amount of truck traffic and smells," says Cindy Janke, who lives in Wild Rose Ranch, the housing tract nearest El Sobrante. "Once people get here and find out about the dump, they'll just keep going."
Path of development
The expansion would add 100 million tons of capacity to the county's only privately owned dump, the 9 million-ton El Sobrante Landfill. Owner USA Waste Services hopes to make it a destination point for trash generated by customers of its trash-hauling operations in Los Angeles County, and it proposes to give Riverside County plenty in return: a home for its own trash, for example -- 40 percent of the expansion would be reserved for garbage generated within county borders, at a low fixed rate.
The county stands to collect hundreds of millions of dollars, meanwhile, by marking up the cost to local garbage haulers, and by collecting royalties on trash imports. The revenue has been enough to sway key environmental groups. The Endangered Habitats League, for example, has endorsed the project as the only way to pay for endangered-species preserves.
But plenty has changed since the dump opened in 1986 in the dusty hills to the east of Temescal Canyon. A decade ago, the area was dotted with farms, orchards and isolated rural homes, and only later came Wild Rose and California Meadows, the first major housing tracts in the area. Now Corona is the focus of Riverside County's real estate revival, a destination for Orange County workers looking for less-expensive housing. Subdivisions are sprawling south, business parks are in the blueprint stage, and the rural roads are decorated with signs pointing the way to new tracts, promising "Homes starting at $140,000."
A garbage dump is precisely the wrong kind of development for the area, says county Supervisor John Tavaglione, who represents the Corona area. The area is simply too valuable for garbage, he says -- a dump may discourage more beneficial development.
"When you have a major landfill in that vicinity, it creates impacts that could be placed better elsewhere," he says.
Experts say no impact
Two studies commissioned by Riverside County deny the dump will prevent the area from developing to its highest potential.
County zoning decisions already have surrounded the dump with a patchwork of open-pit mines and other low-tech industrial development, according to an economic and political analysis developed by Inland Empire economist John Husing. Residential development has been steered to the other side of Interstate 15. The dump site is hidden, over the lip of the canyon and barely visible to the nearest housing developments.
If Wild Rose residents can smell anything, Husing says it is more likely the stench from the Recyc sewage-sludge processing facility alongside the dump -- and from what that company likes to call "bio-solids."
"Talk about something that ought to be eliminated," Husing says. "It's not El Sobrante, it's the thing next door."
Husing's report, delivered to county supervisors in April, analyzed not just property values but also the case for the project and the economic terms of the deal. Traffic congestion problems seem manageable, he said. At most,freeway traffic would increase by 1.25 percent, an insignificant increase because transfer trucks would be barred during rush hours. Overall, the deal makes sense, he says.
"I really think that the most important issue is that Riverside County's population growth is about to be enormous," he says. "If you look at the population forecasts for Riverside County, you're looking at an increase of 50 percent over the next 12 years, and that implies that you have to build the infrastructure for it."
One of the most important things people will need, he says, is a place to put their garbage.
A second county study, commissioned by the county Waste Management Department, was more narrowly focused.
Riverside-based real estate appraiser Morris Reynolds looked at the effect of the dump on surrounding properties. His report found that home prices in Wild Rose and California Meadows have followed the ups and downs of the real estate market, and comparisons with similar neighborhoods show the dump has had no negative impact.
Effect hard to prove
Both reports cite the experience of two other landfill projects -- Puente Hills and the Milliken Landfill in Ontario. Reynolds made his own comparison of property values in Ontario, while the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts commissioned similar studies in the area surrounding Puente Hills. None found a discernible impact on property values.
Puente Hills might be a closer match for El Sobrante than the Ontario dump, which is surrounded by booming airport-area industrial development. The Los Angeles County landfill comes within 2,000 feet of residential properties.
No one ever has been able to show that dumps affect property values, says Don Nellor, solid-waste section head for the Sanitation Districts. Over the past decade, prices of nearby homes climbed and fell as did those in the surrounding area. Perhaps more significantly, since 1994 the district has offered to reimburse homeowners within 1,000 feet of the landfill property line if they sell their homes and can demonstrate that the dump hurt the price. So far, no one has filed a claim.
Nearby property owners say the general slump in the real estate market has masked the effect of the dump -- the entire area has been selling for rock-bottom prices, says Steinmetz, a property manager as well as a dump neighbor. But now that prices are beginning to rise, the properties nearest the dump won't see the full increase.
"(LA County) has just been lucky so far," she says.
The smell, the view, the decrease in wildlife -- all have had an effect, but the criteria for reimbursement are too strict for anyone to take advantage of, complains Jeff Yann, a board member of the Hacienda Heights Improvement Association.
The impact on real estate is subtle, confined mainly to properties within one mile of the dump, says Laurie Fabian of Century 21 Hacienda Estates.
"When you disclose that there's a landfill there, (potential buyers) usually back away. We usually tell them up front," she says. "There's no sense in wasting people's time."
Same fears in Corona
Though the residential lots nearest El Sobrante are at least 1.2 miles away, homeowners and real estate agents fear that potential buyers will back away when they learn of the dump. The Corona-Norco Association of Realtors has declared its opposition. The dump is bound to have an effect on property values, says President Frank Nelson, even if it can't be measured. It's not a risk worth taking for Los Angeles County's trash, he says.
"Let's take care of western Riverside County's trash first," he says.
Others go further. No matter whose trash is buried at the site, it's going to be bad for development, says Woody Harpole of Calvert Properties. "I just have to feel it's going to have a profound effect on uses in that area," he says.
Meanwhile, the county's developers are remaining quiet as construction proceeds apace. The county Building Industry Association takes no position.
It's an age-old argument about landfills, says Bill Hutton, regional counsel for USA Waste. Everyone thinks they're going to impact development and property values, but if people can't see them or smell them, there's no impact, he says. What opponents often forget is that the dump has been in operation nearly a decade, and the fact that it hasn't discouraged development ought to say something.
"If (El Sobrante) had a negative impact, it wouldn't be happening," he says.
Published 7/13/1998