Fire doesn’t care about zoning. A bridge won’t save you when the hills already are burning. Harmony Grove? Try irony grove.
The San Diego County Board of Supervisors did it again. Five officials in a bright, air-conditioned room downtown on Oct. 1, 2025 voted yes—unanimously, naturally—to build a brand-new suburban fairy tale called Harmony Grove Village South.
You’d think, from the name, they were approving a monastery—something with bells and hymns and neighbors tending gardens. Instead, it’s 453 new houses jammed onto 111 acres of kindling, the same parched hillsides that have burned again and again.
They call it progress. We call it madness.
The Fire Next Time
They say it’s safe. That’s the part that kills us. Every consultant, every developer in a clean shirt, swore it’s all under control. “Fire-hardened construction,” “fuel-modification zones,” “Genasys Protect alerts”—as if buzzwords can hold back a Santa Ana wind.
You can’t engineer your way out of arrogance. This is stupidity wrapped in binders and PowerPoint slides.
We’ve seen this show before. In New York, they called it urban renewal—a bulldozer with better stationery. Here it’s fire-mitigated growth. Different words, same winners.
“Gold standard,” the developer called it. Gold for who? For him, sure. The rest get ashes.
One last look back at hell. Witch Creek Fire 2007 along Del Dios Highway, just southeast of Harmony Grove/The Grapevine
A History They Pretend Not to Remember
Anyone who’s lived around Escondido, San Marcos, or Elfin Forest knows the smell of a Santa Ana before sunrise. One spark and the sky turns copper.
Harmony Grove 2014. Witch Creek 2007. Cocos Fire. Each one written in smoke across the hills the supervisors never drive through after dark.
They don’t live there. They won’t sit in the driveway with dogs and kids, waiting for brake lights to move on Country Club Drive while embers fall like snow.
They’ll be on TV later, calling it “a learning experience.”
The Gold Standard in Gall
Developer David Kovach says the project’s fire plan “is the gold standard.” He probably said it without blinking.
Gold for whom? The builders, the planners, the fire district that pocketed an $850,000 “voluntary donation.”
Meanwhile, families will get the bill when insurance renewals triple. They promise 10 percent affordable housing, as if ten percent charity cancels one hundred percent greed.
The Rancho Santa Fe Fire District, still short millions from the last project, smiles for the cameras. And everyone leaves the dais thinking they’ve done the Lord’s work.
The Bridge to Nowhere
Harmony Grove, where the Valiano housing project sewage flows like wine, just northeast of the newly planned Harmony Grove west development./The Grapevine
Their great innovation: a new bridge over Escondido Creek. Three lanes—two for evacuation, one for emergency vehicles.
Try stuffing 453 families, horses, and panic onto three lanes in a wildfire. That’s not a bridge; that’s a bottleneck with signage.
Eight other exits were studied and tossed as “infeasible.” Translation: too expensive. So they built a bridge and a press release.
Supervisor Jim Desmond even said, “We can’t fireproof an area, but we can mitigate it.”
Frame that line in bronze—it’s the county’s new motto.
“Mitigation” is what politicians say when they’re out of ideas but still cashing checks.
The People Who Don’t Get Heard
Residents from Harmony Grove and Elfin Forest pleaded with them. They reminded the board that a court already tossed this plan once for violating the California Environmental Quality Act.
They talked about the fire-station deficit—two million dollars a year—and how this new build was the back-door patch.
They sent letters, begged, testified. The board nodded politely and voted 5-0 anyway. That’s democracy when the lobbyists write the agenda.
The Cost of “Harmony”
Now it’s done. Signs will go up: Village South—Country Living Minutes from the City. Brochures will show golden retrievers on walking trails under Photoshop skies.
And the people who know better will keep their “go-bags” by the door. They’ve seen the sky go red before. They know the bridge will clog, the alarms will fail, the excuses will come fast.
When the wind rises again—and it will—the same officials will stand in front of microphones and say, “We did everything we could.”
Maybe they did.
But it wasn’t enough, and it never will be, not while greed keeps dressing up as growth and calling itself Harmony.
I sent this to the Supervisors:
I understand that many of the projects you are asked to consider remain abstract and you rely heavily on staff to guide your decisions. Speakers droning on about traffic congestion, fire danger, high density, noise, crime, lights, parks, homeless people, etc., ad nauseum, can dull your senses and perhaps cause you to become jaded. It’s fatiguing. I get it.
So I struggle with how to make it real for you. How do I make you feel the weight of your decision on this project? I’m guessing none of you have experienced the loss associated with a wildfire so I’ll tell you what it’s like in hopes that you will feel something, I mean really feel something.
We lost our home and everything we owned in the ’96 Harmony Fire so we know firsthand what it feels like. I rode my horse out with no plan other than to keep ahead of the fire. I stuck out my thumb when I saw a truck and trailer. She stopped and I hastily loaded my horse and got the name of the driver. It took me three days to find him.
We evacuated to the parking lot of a grocery store in San Marcos where we could see the smoke as it grew exponentially over our neighborhood. I went into the store to get some things I thought we would need for ourselves and our pets. I emerged about 30 minutes later with a single tube of chapstick! I couldn’t concentrate. Through the generosity of friends, we had a place to stay that night.
We watched the news and saw the sheer magnitude of the fire (nearly 9000 acres), heard first hand accounts from victims, and saw a man being loaded into an ambulance. The suspense was killing us, so around midnight, we drove cross country to see if our home was still standing. The landscape looked like a war zone. Spot fires flared up all around. We are the second of two houses on our road. Our neighbor’s house was unscathed which gave us hope! As we drove down our driveway, one garage wall remained as did the stone chimney, and the rest was rubble. At the time we were two weeks shy of completing a six-month renovation of our home.
We lost everything, but we never felt sorry for ourselves, especially after we found out that our neighbor, David Hammond, a husband and father of two young children, was the man in the ambulance. He was burned over half his body, remained in an induced coma, and died two weeks after the fire. Another neighbor, just two homes away from David and us, Dr Franz Daniel, died as an indirect result of that fire a few months later. The outpouring of love and community surrounding David’s family was beyond description. Something you may not have ever thought of — his young wife endured that indescribable loss with her two children, in her home, while enduring months and months of noisy reconstruction of the burned homes all around her. Imagine…
We had only the clothes we were wearing that day. Not even a toothbrush. We found a place to rent, no small thing as 120 displaced families were looking for the same.
Then there’s the insurance claim. It’s emotionally and physically exhausting, at best. Then comes the designing, permitting the rebuilding. Our lives were disrupted for nearly two years as we navigated the process.
But we survived. Our animals did too. Our two neighbors did not. All these years later, the pain is less sharp, but always there to some degree.
Our community was forever changed through that experience. This is why we so fiercely oppose a fire plan that leaves the door open to tragedies like those we lived through.
We felt it. We were hurt by it. We mourned our losses and those of our neighbors and their children. We cried. We comforted each other. We endured.
I fervently hope you feel it. Trust me, you don’t want to look back after the next wildfire and know there was something you could have done and you didn’t. The cost is much higher than you think.
To do anything less than your best effort to ensure that best practices are enacted must be construed as negligence.