San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
DEVELOPER SCALES BACK LOCAL HOUSING DEVELOPMENT
The Trails at Carmel Mountain Ranch has faced opposition for two years
A plan to remake a shuttered golf course in Carmel Mountain is gearing up to go back before city planners after two years of opposition.
Santa Monica developer New Urban West says it will bring the 1,200-home Trails at Carmel Mountain Ranch to the San Diego Planning Commission in July. The project has been significantly scaled back since it was originally envisioned as a 1,600 home project, but neighbors still say it is too dense.
Despite a regional and statewide push for housing in California, many local developers have elected to scale back the size of projects to get community support. But, it hasn’t made much of a difference to neighbors who say The Trails is too big for the area.
Troy Daum, the founder of CMR United, a 500-person group that opposes the development, said the project
is too dense for the community and reminds him of developments in Los Angeles. He said San Diego has retained a lot of its beauty, unlike our neighbor to the north who he says has paved over open space.
“It’s not the best fit,” he said. “It’s a Los Angeles developer coming into San Diego and using the Los Angeles model.”
Daum argues the project should — at the very least — have a mix of different types of housing, such as singlefamily. The Trails is 60 percent apartments and 40 percent townhouses. He said his group is not opposed to new housing but would like to see it somewhere else. He has proposed turning the golf course into a wine vineyard.
Community opposition to a project is often enough to stop it, but the political winds might be shifting. The San Diego Planning Commission approved a 536-unit senior community in Rancho Peñasquitos in late April despite neighbors calling in to say they preferred the open space of the closed golf course where it would be built. Around the same time, the San Diego City Council approved a plan to remake the California Theatre downtown into a building with 336 condos despite arguments it did not include enough subsidized housing.
Alan Gin, an economist at the University of San Diego who studies housing issues, said it appears more politicians are seeing the link between a lack of housing and rising prices. San Diego home prices were up 19 percent in a year as of March, said the S&P Corelogic Case-shiller Indices. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria
made increasing dense development as a way to lower overall housing costs a central part of his 2020 campaign.
“It is the case that with so much news about affordability and prices being so high, that I think the local government is open to having more housing built,” Gin said.
New Urban West project manager Jonathan Frankel said he has spent countless hours meeting with community members over the last few years and is optimistic The Trails can be approved. Some of the changes the developer made were creating a 50-foot green buffer between the project and existing homes in the community, and a 6.5-mile trail network on the former previous golf cart path.
He also is quick to point out the project will include 120 subsidized rental apartments, something to hopefully appease affordable housing advocates. The rest will be a mix of market-rate apartments and for-sale townhouses. Price estimates are not yet available, but Frankel said townhouses tend to be more “naturally” affordable than single-family homes.
“I like to be an eternal optimist,” he said of getting the project approved. “But there are people who are categorically, and ideologically, opposed to change occurring on the property.”
Daum said he wouldn’t be surprised if the project is approved, but would prefer government officials take into account objections to the project.
The 164-acre Trails project could be a much denser project and is near a significant job center with many of San Diego’s biggest companies a short drive away, including Northrop Grumman, General Atomics and
Petco. It is also close to UC San Diego and public transit.
New Urban West is not the only developer working in San Diego hedging its bets on not pushing the envelope on density. South of The Trails, closer to Sorrento Valley, the 3Roots project — with plans for an eventual 1,800 homes — could likely have fit significantly more housing on the site. However, the developers decided not to change a 25-year-old plan for the site to include more housing because it would have meant going through a new approval process, which likely would have brought out community opposition.
Gin said that while the overall number of homes might be reduced, developers need to find a balance between meeting community demands while also building new houses to get them approved. Another way to look at it, he said, is that it is a positive thing that developers are still pushing ahead with new projects despite roadblocks.
The Trails would be built on the shuttered Carmel Mountain Ranch Country Club golf course that closed in July 2018. The family who operated the course said the cost of watering the property made the business unprofitable. New Urban West says it will keep about 70 percent of the site open space.
Most of the Carmel Mountain Ranch community was built in the 1980s and early 1990s, which would make The Trails the first major development in decades. If the Planning Commission approves the project, it will then need to go to the San Diego City Council for final approval.
phillip.molnar@sduniontribune.com Twitter: @phillipmolnar