The long-vacant Whittaker-Bermite property is one step closer to becoming a full-blown neighborhood. On Tuesday, the Santa Clarita City Council voted to move forward with a program-level environmental review of Sunridge, New Urban West's proposal to redevelop the sprawling site into a mixed-use community. The council's action authorizes work on a program environmental impact report that will examine traffic, contamination cleanup, and the project's overall footprint. With that vote, the city has cleared an early but crucial hurdle toward transforming roughly 980 to 990 acres of infill land into housing, parks, and commercial space.
According to The Santa Clarita Valley Signal, the city has agreed to a contract to prepare the PEIR, initially estimated at up to $1.24 million, with City Hall paying the bill up front and the developer reimbursing those costs. The Signal reports that New Urban West is pitching about 5,750 homes, including affordable units, along with roughly 67 acres of commercial development and about 330 acres of parks and recreation space. Adam Browning, president of New Urban West, called the council action "another key milestone" in an email shared by the project's spokesman.
What the plan would build
Project materials from New Urban West describe Sunridge as a roughly 980-acre, transit-oriented community with about 40 percent of the land reserved for open space, trails, and sports fields, and the existing Metrolink station framing its northern edge. The concept is a series of villages and town centers that would mix housing, jobs, and neighborhood-serving retail, with renderings and amenity lists laid out on the project's website and design pages. Those materials lean hard on the high open-space ratio and connections to the Santa Clarita Valley's existing trail networks, and they outline a blend of for-sale and rental housing types.
Cleaned up but still watched
The site's industrial history still hangs over any talk of new homes. The former Whittaker-Bermite facility was used for explosives manufacturing and testing from the 1930s into the 1980s, leaving perchlorate, volatile organic compounds, and other contaminants spread across multiple operable units. Archived Department of Toxic Substances Control documents and fact sheets describe large soil-remediation campaigns that tackled hundreds of thousands of cubic yards of contaminated material, along with long-running groundwater treatment efforts. DTSC reports and cleanup plans remain the official record of what has been done on the site. State oversight has continued even after key remediation milestones were reached, and local reporting notes that DTSC lifted a hold on the property in 2021 after major soil work was completed.
Roads, traffic, and sticking points
Traffic is already emerging as a political flashpoint. The current proposal would tie together Via Princessa and Santa Clarita Parkway but would stop short of extending Magic Mountain Parkway, a change that drew pointed questions at Tuesday's meeting. Councilwoman Marsha McLean pressed for what she called "complete due diligence" before the city signs any memorandum of understanding that would cement the project's scope and infrastructure obligations, a concern she raised on the dais and that was reported by The Santa Clarita Valley Signal. New Urban West has told the city it will roll detailed traffic analyses into the PEIR to back up the circulation network the developer is proposing.
Next steps and process
The city has already put out a call for consultants to tackle the program-level EIR, issuing a request for proposals that seeks qualified teams to prepare the PEIR and all the related technical studies. The RFP listing treats the work as a professional services contract, with Santa Clarita inviting firms that can deliver the full package of program environmental analysis. Once a consultant is on board, the PEIR process will move into public review periods, stacks of technical appendices that include traffic and remediation analyses, and the usual rounds of Planning Commission and City Council hearings before any entitlements can be approved.
Regulatory and legal notes
Any eventual sign-off on Sunridge will have to fold in DTSC oversight and the site's long remedial backstory. The city's planning materials flag the property’s cleanup obligations and the prior entitlements that once governed what could be built there. Because the land sits in the middle of town and carries a complicated ownership and cleanup history, the PEIR is expected to get careful scrutiny from neighborhood groups, city staff and state regulators as the review moves ahead.
