Las Lomas Land Co

If anyone has been the public face of the Las Lomas housing project, a controversial plan to build 5,500 homes in north Los Angeles County, it is Hillary Norton Orozco. A seasoned political operative who worked at Los Angeles City Hall a decade ago, Orozco has spent the last year drumming up support for the project by testifying at hearings, chatting up civic groups and meeting privately with members of the Los Angeles City Council.

A Los Angeles County Superior Court judge has declined to order the city to reopen its environmental review of a controversial 5,553-home development proposed for steep hillsides near where the 5 and the 14 freeways intersect. Judge David P. Yaffe ruled Friday that state law doesn't require the City Council to finish preparing environmental studies before considering the proposal by developer Dan Palmer to build a mixed-use community known as Las Lomas.

City Councilman Greig Smith introduced a proposal Wednesday to block the proposed 5,500-home Las Lomas project just north of Sylmar from receiving further review by the city. Smith and six other council members signed a motion that would allow the council to instruct city departments to "cease and desist all work" associated with processing Las Lomas Land Co.'s development application. "I'm very confident that we have the support to finally kill this project," said Smith's chief of staff, Mitch Englander.

A developer who spent years trying to build a 5,553-home development on the jagged ridgelines at the intersection of Interstate 5 and the Antelope Valley Freeway sued the city of Los Angeles on Monday, saying that a decision earlier this year by the City Council to halt its review of the project was illegal. In a 25-page complaint filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Las Lomas Land Co. argues that the council violated state law and the developer's constitutional right to due process when it voted 10 to 5 in March to instruct the Planning Department to stop processing the application to build the project.

Officials in Santa Clarita and Los Angeles are gearing up to fight a developer's plans to build a 5,800-home community in the hills above one of California's biggest freeway bottlenecks, where the Golden State and Antelope Valley freeways merge. The unusual partnership comes amid a major building boom in north Los Angeles County that is expected to add 400,000 residents in the next 15 years, growth that some fear would further clog the region's already congested roads.

A court ruling Tuesday dealt a setback to Santa Clarita's fight against a 5,800-home development near the city's southern border that could become one of the next major battlegrounds over suburban growth in north Los Angeles County. Set in a largely undeveloped swath of mountains between the San Fernando and Santa Clarita valleys, the Las Lomas project is envisioned as a self-contained community of 15,000 people, retail stores and more than 2 million square feet of office space.