Giant housing development in Calif. goes belly-up in the middle of nowhere

[Newsjock]

A very long story from the San Francisco Chronicle

Patterson, Stanislaus County -- In a state where water is growing ever more scarce, gasoline is flirting with $5 a gallon and home prices are in a free fall, the sprawling Diablo Grande land development stands out as a 20th century dream turned to a 21st century nightmare.

... Diablo Grande was to be among the largest land developments in the history of Stanislaus County. Sprawling across some 28,500 acres of ranchland - roughly twice the size of Manhattan - developer Donald Panoz, multimillionaire inventor of the nicotine patch, envisioned 5,000 to 10,000 homes, a resort hotel and spa, six golf courses, an equestrian center, vineyards, a winery and commercial properties, including a high-tech research park.

But today, after Panoz and his partners sank more than $120 million into the project, Diablo Grande is mired in Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings and is expected to go on the auction block within weeks.

... Claudio and Kristina Ross-Ortiz are in a typical financial bind. A home they purchased in September 2006 for $353,000 has been on the market for a year at $149,000, with no offers.

Through the neighborhood e-mail grapevine, Kristina Ross-Ortiz says she's heard that some 70 homes are being or have been foreclosed upon out of about 350 built.

... Each day as he prepares to travel 200 miles round trip to his construction superintendent's job in San Francisco, Gary Rekow loads empty water bottles in his pickup that he later fills from a fire hydrant at the downtown construction site. He brings the jugs back to his 3-year-old home so that he and his wife have drinking water. The exercise saves him a few dollars each day that he would otherwise spend on commercial bottled water at the nearest store in Patterson, 8 miles distant.

"When you fill the bathtub (from the tap), the water is kind of brown; it's stinky looking stuff," Rekow said. He and other residents say the water isn't fit to drink, and barely tolerable to bathe in.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/07/20/RECH11QS8K.DTL

[Subdivisions]

1. The underlying cause of this will continue to

manifest itself in many similar ways.

Without adequate energy amd water, the economic house of cards comes tumbling down.

[Jed Dilligan]

2. If this is what it takes to stop them building that unsustainable crap,

I say good riddance.

[cliffordu]

3. Good. Fuck him and the speculative horse he rode in on.

Build inward. Rehab the cities. Portland Or. That is all.

[onethatcares]

54. cliffordu, we think in the same way.

leave the damned greenspace alone.

[cliffordu]

59. Great minds think alike.....

:headbang:

[Eurobabe]

62. hasn't this movement been going on since time immemorial?

some decades favor the suburbs, some favor the cities. For one reason or another. Who here reads James Howard Kunstler?

Clusterfuck Nation??

http://www.kunstler.com/

:headbang:

[cliffordu]

63. Yep -He's one of my favorites.... I read the oil drum all the time, too.

Actually, I used to live in Portland and watched what happened when they stopped outward growth and demanded, basically that people rehab the city - which was in the shitter at that point.....this has worked beyond all expectation....Portland could be one of the great citys this country has ever produced, and it used to be an industrial wasteland and dying transportation hub.

I also worked at the grants management office at the city of Austin, Tx. and watched what happenend with the
Scattered Cooperative Infill Housing Program - where developers were encouraged to build smaller homes on undersized lots....

Almost everything needed is in place to do what was done in Portland nationwide.......

Except the awareness and the mindset.

[SoCalDem]

4. Bring back the farmland..

these unsustainable "communities" are ridiculous.. I feel for the people who got snookered, but they are not alone..

[cliffordu]

5. That is a GREAT screenshot - where did you get it??

[SoCalDem]

6. I think I found it at b3ta

Here's a larger one where you can read the rest of the crawls..



www.b3ta.com... caution vast quantities of naughty language abound there...but they are fantastic graphic artists

[cliffordu]

9. LOL that's great - Thanks for the link!!

[AlCzervik]

7. those buyers are fucked royally. Where i live in elk grove it once was all farmland

and then the developers bought it all out with an assist from the city council and now as a city w have major problems, granted we aren't a master planned golf community but we are still somewhat fucked for the 10 years or so.

[alfredo]

18. In our downtown, the social life is concentrated in a two block area.

All the big clubs and the farmer's market inhabited that historic block. The Webb Brothers want to build a luxury condo, upscale retail complex on what most of us considered our commons. They started demolition to the old beautiful art deco buildings a week or so ago. There will not be anything for the residents, this monstrosity will be for the rich horse crowd. This will be the third project the Webb brothers have built downtown. Two others, upscale retail spaces, sit empty. Historic buildings were destroyed for that project too. They sold it to the city as essential for the World Equestrian Games in 2010.

[AlCzervik]

19. well that just sucks and i'm sorry to hear that's happening to your town.

fucking developers, after they got done making their bank accounts fat they slunk out of town in the middle of the night leaving "neighborhoods" unfinished with the promise they'll come back when things get better.

[alfredo]

22. This is the third time the city has been suckered in by these guys.

Each time the city forks over a bunch of money and tax credits, each time we get fucked.

[Greyhound]

40. I'd say it's time for a new city council.

We have the unfortunate habit of doing the same thing here, huge corporations are given everything to come in, suck up the resources, tax or exceed the capacity of the infrastructure, and pay no taxes on top of the usual "assistance grants". Meanwhile, small businesses, the ones that actually employ people, are taxed out of existence in order to pay off the debt incurred to bring in the big parasites.

[alfredo]

47. Our city was starting to come alive. Young people were coming

to the town center for entertainment and shopping. Now that block is rubble. The farmer's market was this beautiful, tree shaded area where each saturday we'd shop, listen to music, eat at local restaurants.

Here's what is replacing our social gathering place.

[Greyhound]

48. How generic.

:kick:

[alfredo]

49. It's shooting us the bird

[MonteLukast]

51. They bulldozed a farmer's market?

:wtf:

:grr:

Not done. Simply not done.

Call in the organic food lobby. This means WAR!

[alfredo]

57. It's being moved to a treeless gravel parking lot. No real parking on

the Saturday market day.

[girl gone mad]

55. This is the story..

in cities all across America. Thriving lower/middle class neighborhoods and even slums have been "gentrified", essentially destroying the fabric of formerly cohesive communities and making them empty playgrounds for nouveau rich white yuppies.

So much for a return to city living. The revitalization movement has done more to destroy cities than white flight ever could.

[alfredo]

56. You nailed it. This is for the horse owner crowd, not us Proles

[MonteLukast]

50. From now on, I call BS on Repug "support for small business".

{S}mall businesses, the ones that actually employ people, are taxed out of existence in order to pay off the debt incurred to bring in the big parasites.

Always whining about those evil liberals who will raise you taxes and snuff small businesses out of existence. Always pulling the heartstrings of small business owners, who lap it up and vote for them.

They're counting on people not having the patience to wait a while and see if the consequences of their actions match their rhetoric.

The businesses' death even comes at the hands of raised taxes! I'll bet the Republicans never saw that one coming. :sarcasm:

[Xithras]

32. Diablo Grande was not farmland.

It was built in the dry scrub hills that were only fit for cattle grazing.

[Marrah_G]

34. Was this farmable land?

I was under the impression it was a dry desert type environment. Someday folks will stop trying to build in placed not fit for human living.........

[Xithras]

36. Not a desert exactly.

The terrain is actually steep hilly grasslands that sit in a rain shadow. It does get enough rain to keep it from turning to bare dirt, but that rain is seasonal...it gets wet from December to April and is dry for the rest of the year. Like the Central Valley below, it's temps get into the low 100's during the summer.

Not a desert, but pretty close.

[Marrah_G]

38. Thank you :)

[MonteLukast]

52. Is there such a thing as "xerifarming"?

Sorghum
Amaranth
Quinoa
Kamut

A few drought resistant crops that might work-- non-GMO, too.

[Xithras]

65. Yes, but all of those require some water. Those hills get NO water in the summer.

And relatively small amounts in the winter because it's rain shadow. The land cannot be irrigated (no surface or tappable groundwater), and it's treeless rocky clay so rainwater tends to run away quickly (the creeks draining out of those hills are all flash flood zones). Even if you could get water to it, most of the hills are far too steep to actually farm without massive earthworks like the Asian step farms.

There's a reason that the area is largely uninhabited and undeveloped. For the most part, it's only fit for grazing.

[MonteLukast]

8. They have homes for this price in California?!!

A home they purchased in September 2006 for $353,000 has been on the market for a year at $149,000, with no offers.

:wow:

That actually sounds reasonable!

Too bad it's 100 miles from where you work and has nonpotable water.

God, I would HATE to live in California, blue though it may be. Who has time for anything after the @&#*&%*#& commute?

[slackmaster]

29. You can get a decent-sized house in San Diego for about $200 K now, close to downtown

If you are willing to live in a rough neighborhood.

[kineneb]

42. i'm staying

love CA, born here. There is far more to the state than just the big cities. I live in a county with 65,000 people; there really is a rural California.

[Art_from_Ark]

10. "Diablo Grande"

"Big Devil"

Who the hell would want to live there?

[MonteLukast]

13. I get a kick out of some of these subdivisions' names.

"Farms" with no farmland, "Lake Shores" with a lake the size of swimming pool, Old West-inspired names with nothing resembling Western anything.

If I open a 100% sustainable housing development, should I call it "Greenhouse Gas Light", "Sludge Lagoon", or "Waterless Cove"?

:silly:

[EnviroBat]

41. How about "Extinction Acres"?

[tismyself]

53. this is good

I'm not making this up. Our community college is fixing to open up the Piedmont Natural Gas Restaurant.

[hatrack]

27. More like "Mierda Grande", as things turned out . .

:eyes:

[marmar]

31. LOL.....

:P

[Xithras]

33. It was named after the mountain that overlooked it.

It sits in the Diablo Mountains, so named because it's tallest peak is Mount Diablo (visible from much of the SF Bay Area).

[proud2BlibKansan]

11. A 200 mile daily commute??

That's just nuts. Even when gas was only $2 a gallon, that is nuts.

[AlCzervik]

12. you'd be surprised how many people in this state have giant commutes everyday.

my husbands job was relocated 130 miles away from were we live, the area his office is in if way too expensive so when he's in the country and in silicon valley he rents a room from a guy he works with during the week.

[proud2BlibKansan]

14. Here in Kansas 40 and 50 mile commutes (one way) are not uncommon

from one small town to another. I live in a metro area and my commute is only 12 miles.

[Newsjock]

15. Not to fault any individuals, but ...

... the circumstances that create such unwieldly commutes -- in exurbia or in the wide-open spaces -- are part of what's made our culture unsustainable. Unfortunately, undoing the damage is going to be very painful on an individual level.

I'd suggest that the government should find some way to mitigate the damage and ease the transition to more sustainable ways of living and working, but that's a whole 'nother can of worms.

[izquierdista]

20. Serfs were bound to the land, free men commute.

In the days of slavery, if a slave was bought by a new master 50 miles away, he was brought to the new plantation and housed in the slave quarters. How much cheaper for corporate management now that they don't have to provide housing! They may have to actually pay a salary, but with the promise of outsourcing, they can get that down to the old slave days and have the best of both worlds!

[Xithras]

37. 4-6 lane freeways all the way at 85MPH.

Most people in the Valley and foothills don't commute all the way to SF though. Their commutes are more in the 120-150 daily range.

Believe it or not, the price differential between the Bay Area and the Central Valley often justifies it. Homes that went for $300k in the Valley would sell for well over double that in the Bay Area. People would blow a thousand bucks a month on gas, but would save $2k a month on a mortgage. It still saved them a grand a month in the end.

And yes, being a Stanislaus County resident, I know many people who do this. Roughly 20% of the county commutes out of the county for work every day.

[EFerrari]

60. A housing crisis in the Bay Area pushed a lot of people way out there.

It is nuts but less nuts than living in your car.

[lastliberalintexas]

16. That's sad all the way around

Sad for the people who were conned into this or who were pushed that far out by the incredibly high real estate prices in California, and sad because much environmental degradation has already occurred, regardless of whether this subdivision fails or not. It would now take a massive effort at great expense to turn the area back into farmland or other natural habitat, and I just can't see the area being bulldozed. Instead, it will become one of many blighted communities in this country with high foreclosure rates and plummeting property values.


Yes, I also know that some people bought into the McMansion wannabe lifestyle. Unfortunatley they are not the only ones being hurt by the housing crash.

[XemaSab]

17. Fuck housing developers

They should all go to jail.

[The_Casual_Observer]

21. If they leave it alone, in 20 or so years you'll never know it was ever there.

[alfredo]

23. Fétidas Grande or Sangrienta Orina proposed names for future developments

[nightrain]

24. very good!!! :))))

[alfredo]

26. Glad someone noticed. I hate the pretentious names for

McMansion neighborhoods, especially the faux British names.

[Blue_Tires]

64. ah...you must be familiar with super-suburban Atlanta, then...

no sympathy for the developers trying to rake in the cash on a huge speculation reach...no one forced them to spend $120 million on some deserted land 100 miles from civilization...

[alfredo]

66. My town has fallen prey to the greedy speculators. No sympathy for them,

but some sympathy to those victimized by them.

[elehhhhna]

28. What about Caca Fuego Estates?

[alfredo]

30. Ha!! rectal dolorosa picazón Estates

[entanglement]

25. But planning is anathema! No, we can't have anything get in the way of the almighty free market.

[Xithras]

35. This was my backyard folks. I used to hunt quail out there as a kid.

Diablo Grande was a bad idea from the beginning, but the problem didn't have anything to do with sprawl (or the housing bubble). Diablo Grande was originally proposed in RESPONSE to the environmentalists complaints about sprawl over farmland. Panoz found a large flat area in the otherwise bone-dry and undeveloped foothills and proposed to build a new city there. His original proposal was that his city would have no impact on the surrounding ag lands and would in fact reduce sprawl by redirecting development into "derelict" lands. These hills had little native wildlife and, on paper, it looked like a good idea. It did have one fundamental problem though...water. Those hills don't have a water table that can be easily reached (it sits on old faultlines which allow the water to drain deep and unevenly), so Panoz had to go shopping for water. The article blames "environmentalists" for the 14 years worth of lawsuits, but in reality the fight had more to do with water rights. Panoz wanted to buy, and a few water districts were willing to sell, but farmers and other people in those districts sued to keep their own districts from doing so. They were afraid that Diablo Grande would get preferential treatment in drought years and that the "profitable" sales would eventually lead to reduced water allocations for the people already dependent on those districts. It wasn't a fight over birds and shrimp, it was a fight over WATER. Panoz eventually struck a deal to pull untreated water from the Cal Aqueduct, but the quality was far lower than what he'd originally wanted.

But even that isn't what killed the development. Diablo Grande DIED because Panoz changed his "vision" instead of building a self-sufficient community in the foothills, he decided to expand his vision and turn it into a golf resort. The original plans included everything from senior housing to low income housing to shopping centers, but that was all set aside in favor of building six golf courses and luxury homes along the fairways. Instead of the original plan, which was simply to build a new town for the county, he instead turned it into high end housing and retargeted his sales efforts at the Bay Area. There is a substantial job base in the Central Valley that he could have targeted, but our incomes here tend to be about 20% lower than incomes in the Bay Area and he wanted to chase the money. When asked about the other aspects of Grande, Panoz brushed the questions off and said they'd come at some unspecified later date. It was rapidly becoming clear that he had abandoned any intentions of ever building the town. He just wanted his pretty resort in the hills.

[PVnRT]

39. Very interesting

Sounds like a cluster-fuck from all sides.

[kineneb]

43. family connection, too

My grandfather was a graduate of Patterson High School around 1916.

[Xithras]

44. Interesting, I grew up in Newman, just a few miles down 33.

Neither of the towns resemble the area I grew up in though. Both are simply bedroom communities for Bay Area commuters now. Back then, Patterson was best known for its sprawling peach orchards, and Newman best known for its sprawling dairies. Today, it's just sprawl.

[Kitty Herder]

61. Someday, we in the American west are going to have to come to grips with the

reality of the land we live on and the limited population (and limited number of golf courses and McMansions) it can support with its limited water.

Water has always caused the biggest fights in the west. To this day, my grandmother has to fight to keep her neighbors from diverting her water shares from the mountain homestead she inherited. Her water occasionally just stops flowing. The reason? I had two great uncles who sold off their portions of the homestead to people who built vacation homes on it. What was once a quiet, mountain area with a few cattle and sheep grazing on it is now a noisy, crowded development of summer homes. The problem is that it's an arid place, where sagebrush, pinion, and juniper thrive, but not much else. So there just isn't enough water for all those people to flush their toilets and water their lawns. (I have no idea why they feel the need to have lawns in the mountains.) Often people just don't consider how much water is available when they develop an area.

[KamaAina]

45. Is that a fire area, by any chance?

Normally, places that far back in the California hills (Yahoo! Maps is your friend) have a tendency to burn every now and again.

[Xithras]

46. Not badly.

That part of the range is all grassland, with only some scattered oaks to break it up. There's no chapparal or thick growth to fuel the big fires like you get in other hilly areas of the state, but the area will get the occasional grassfire. Those are pretty easy to extinguish, and firebreaks are easy to cut with a simple tractor pulling a set of discs.

[depakid]

58. Unsustainable development brought to you by corrupt county supervisors

and lack of statewide land use planning.

[galledgoblin]

67. (somewhat graphic image) welcome to the 21st century,

the first half (at least) of which will be spent cleaning up the messes we made in the 20th!

desert suburbs with green lawns...