On a clear day, the trails winding through West Coyote Hills near Fullerton, California, offer a sweeping view of the mountains rising over Orange County’s suburban sprawl. Over 500 acres of open space are covered in low-growing, feathery coastal sage scrub, a native plant community that urban development is replacing. Dozens of coastal California gnatcatchers, a threatened native bird species, flit around the shrubs.
When it rains, vernal pools, or seasonal wetlands, form between the hills, supporting wildflowers and amphibians. Today, these wetlands are a rare habitat: More than 90% of California’s vernal pools have been lost to development. “I love the fact that even in this urban area, there’s an open space that is just a jewel,” said Angela Lindstrom, who lives nearby.
Until the 1990s, that jewel was actually an oil field, owned by the oil giant Chevron. Though Chevron sold thousands of acres of land in Orange County to investment firms in the ’90s, it kept some parcels for its own development projects, including West Coyote Hills. In the early 2000s, the company’s real estate subsidiary finalized a plan to turn the area into a subdivision — squeezing the last bit of commercial value from the land.
Once Lindstrom realized what was at stake, she jumped into local environmental activism. Three decades later, as the president of a group called Friends of Coyote Hills, she’s still leading the campaign to establish a nature preserve in Fullerton. “(We have to) think about the green infrastructure that we can save for future generations,” she said.
In 2012, Friends of Coyote Hills spearheaded a city-wide referendum on Chevron’s plans that proved how unpopular they were with voters. Almost a decade later, under local pressure and with philanthropic, state and federal grants, the city of Fullerton purchased 24 acres of the area next to an existing nature preserve for $18 million.
“(We have to) think about the green infrastructure that we can save for future generations.”
But now, the fate of the remaining 483 acres, valued at $140 million, is on shakier ground, thanks to federal turmoil and lack of support for conservation projects and protecting wildlife habitat. Conservationists were hoping that millions of dollars in grants from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service could have supplemented other funding sources. Now, that money might not materialize. Still, state conservation agencies have already secured about $70 million in state grants to acquire the rest of the land — and Chevron has signaled its willingness to wrap up the sale sooner rather than later, even dropping the price to $95 million, though negotiations are ongoing.
In the meantime, however, the company can still pursue the housing development, as its permit with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is still pending — a hedge against conservation organizers coming up short on funds. Chevron did not respond to requests for comment.
ACROSS CALIFORNIA, land prices are at a premium, and affordable housing is hard to find; a typical home in California costs twice as much as a typical home in the U.S. overall. California mandates that local governments create plans for housing needs across income levels as the population grows. In recent years, the Legislature has added incentives for developers and streamlined the approval process.
Increasingly, housing developments are encroaching on environmentally sensitive spaces like West Coyote Hills — and riskier, more fire- and flood-prone regions. Relatively easy-to-build-on landscapes have already been developed, said Melanie Schlotterbeck, a stewardship consultant with the nonprofit Coastal Corridor Alliance. “Now, we’re stuck with properties that are a challenge.”
Schlotterbeck also serves on her city’s planning commission, approving new developments to meet the state’s housing goals. “You can have housing, and you can conserve land,” she said. “You might need to think creatively, but it can be done.” Policies like zoning overlays that allow for more mixed-use developments, infill building and higher density would help preserve open spaces, Schlotterbeck said. Strip malls, abandoned warehouses and underused hotels could be converted to townhomes or apartments, too.
“You can have housing, and you can conserve land. You might need to think creatively, but it can be done.”
But redeveloping former industrial sites can be complicated. Twenty miles south of West Coyote Hills, an old oil storage facility, the Magnolia Tank Farm in Huntington Beach, will become a mixed-used development with 20% of the rental units priced below market rate. The CEO of the real estate company behind the development has said it will “(brighten) this historically blighted stretch of the coast.” Left out of that narrative: The site floods often and borders a toxic waste dump. On top of that, climate change could cause the sea level along the coast to rise by as much as a foot by 2050. (While there are risks associated with building homes over capped oil wells, West Coyote Hills does not face the same flooding or sea-level rise risks.)
“You couldn’t give me one of those houses,” said Ray Hiemstra, the associate policy director at Orange County Coastkeeper, a nonprofit focused on water policy. Ideally, the tank farm would have been restored as a wetland, he said. But it proved difficult to build political support opposing the housing proposal, despite the risks, and the area had no obvious ecological value.
“There’s nothing but dirt,” Hiemstra said. “If we had found something like a burrowing owl, it would have been a problem for the developer.”
The owl, a species of concern in California, was crucial in stopping another luxury development nearby. More than a dozen state or federally threatened or endangered species, including the San Diego fairy shrimp, the Ridgway’s rail and the California least tern, had carved out a habitat near Banning Ranch, a swath of coastal land that had been an active oil field since the 1940s. Their presence was one of many tools that conservation advocates used to create a 387-acre preserve, said Schlotterbeck, who worked on the campaign.
BUT USING FEDERAL LAW to win conservation battles could be harder in the future. The Endangered Species Act prevents harming, killing and hunting endangered species. For decades, that has included destroying the habitat those species rely on for food and nesting or reproducing.
Now, however, the Trump administration has proposed a federal rule that would limit the scope of the law, outlawing only the direct killing or injuring of a protected species, but not the harming of its habitat. Environmental advocates say that this could lead to more development, drilling, logging and other industrial activity on crucial habitats.
“You would be prohibited from shooting a spotted owl out of a nest, but you would not be prohibited from chopping down the tree containing the nest,” said Tim Preso, an attorney with Earthjustice.
And if the Endangered Species Act is watered down, it could remove incentives for developers to set aside land to make up for habitat destruction elsewhere, Preso said. The 33,000-acre Balcones Canyonlands Preserve outside of Austin, Texas, for example, was established to offset the region’s rapid growth in the 1980s. As housing developments boomed, eight species were listed as federally endangered in just four years due to habitat loss. Developers still pay fees towards managing and expanding the preserve, which supports golden-cheeked warblers and other wildlife.
In West Coyote Hills, the presence of federally threatened and endangered species, including gnatcatchers and the least Bell’s vireo, a migratory songbird, gave conservation groups “breathing room” to formulate a plan, said Blair Crossman, a project development specialist at a state agency called the San Gabriel and Lower Los Angeles Rivers and Mountains Conservancy, which has facilitated the land acquisition. Without that leverage, future conservation projects might become more difficult.
The Trump administration has proposed a federal rule that would limit the scope of the law, outlawing only the direct killing or injuring of a protected species, but not the harming of its habitat.
And conservation can make the housing around it safer, too. Ecologists plan to remove invasive plants and replant native fire-resistant species in West Coyote Hills, allowing the ecosystem to act as a buffer between neighborhoods, slowing the spread of wildfires and giving first responders time to act. “This isn’t just, ‘Oh, we’re taking a big chunk of property that might have been housing, and it’s going to be birds and bunnies living there,’” Crossman said.
Lindstrom remains optimistic that, with the help of donors and state funds, the hills will remain open. “I think this cause has such deep roots and wide support, it would be extremely unpopular to develop the land,” she said. “If we continue to pave over every green space left in California, our problems will only get worse.”
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This article appeared in the August 2025 print edition of the magazine with the headline “From oil field to oasis.”
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