San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
BATTLE BREWS OVER ANOTHER SHUTTERED GOLF COURSE
Developer has proposed 1,200 homes on 164 acres
The next battle over what should happen to a shuttered golf course has begun in Carmel Mountain Ranch, where the fairways, tees and holes of the Carmel Mountain Ranch Country Club golf course have gone to seed since the course’s closure in July 2018.
A local developer has submitted plans to the City of San Diego’s planning department to construct 1,200 townhomes and apartments on the 164 acres of the former course, which is surrounded by homes.
There is, of course, opposition to the plans. As has been true at every golf course that has closed in the county in the past decade, people who bought their houses thinking they would be overlooking beautiful green vistas peppered with golfers now fear what housing development will mean to their property values and their way of life. Traffic, fire evacuation and community character changes highlight concerns.
The golf course was closed nearly two years ago when the Hwang family decided the cost of watering the property made the business unprofitable. The year before its closure, the golf course consumed
45 million gallons of potable water — the cost of which had risen 33 percent in the previous three years.
The entire Carmel Mountain Ranch community, including the course, was constructed in the 1980s and early 1990s and there has been little built in the area since, primarily because there isn’t any land available. The proposed project, proffered by New Urban West, is named “The Trails at Carmel Mountain Ranch” because the new in-fill community will take advantage of the existing golf cart paths to create 6 miles of trails, New Urban West Project Manger Jonathan Frankel said.
Roughly 40 percent of the units will be for-sale townhomes with the remaining 60 percent being apartments, Frankel said. He added that 120 homes will be designated “affordable housing” and priced at 60 percent of the median income for the area.
“That’s 120 affordable homes in a community that doesn’t have any deed-restricted affordable housing. None,” Frankel said.
All of the housing will be built on just 30 percent of the land with the rest remaining open space, he added.
New Urban West was selected over a dozen other companies to pursue the right to build the project, just as it was several years ago in Escondido. For several years, many residents surrounding the abandoned Escondido Country Club had fought tooth-and-nail against housing plans. After New Urban West came in, and after a final lawsuit was settled, the project finally became a reality, with bulldozers now rolling.
Frankel said the opposition to the Carmel Mountain Ranch plans has not reached the same level as it did in Escondido, but it does exist.
“No homeowner that lives on a golf course would expect a golf course would go out of business and become defunct,” Frankel said. “We completely understand the concerns in the neighborhood about critical issues that need to be addressed and will be addressed — things like traffic, school, impacts of parks and libraries.”
One of those homeowners is Tony Daum, a financial planner, who has lived on the golf course for 30 years. He is the founder of CMR United, a group of more than 500 area residents opposed to the proposed project. They realize that golf isn’t coming back, and they say they aren’t opposed to housing in general, but not on the golf course.
“The development they are proposing is very inconsistent with what the community looks like,” Daum said. He said the majority of the units would be rentals as opposed to just 25 percent in the existing neighborhood. “It’s very different from the community plan that’s been in place for 30 years.
“We aren’t against development,” Daum said. “We understand we need affordable places for people to live. But we believe the idea of changing golf course property over to dense urban projects is not really a smart way to develop.”
The land is currently zoned for agricultural use. Daum said he approached the owners quite some time ago with the possibility of turning the course into a winery operation, like what has happened in Fallbrook, where the former Fallbrook Golf Club in the Gird Valley has become the Monserate Winery.
But Daum said the owners aren’t willing to consider anything but housing development.
Frankel said the project planning process is still in the early stages and that New Urban West hopes to go before the San Diego City Council early next year for approval. It would likely be a year after that before construction would begin.