Developer Wants to Keep His Place in Sun Pristine
Keeping the desert in its natural state may be hard to do these days with the proliferation of the second-home market.
The popularity of the Southern California desert already has taken its toll of some once-pristine areas, fouling them with traffic congestion, noise and smog.
The Di Giorgio Development Division of Di Giorgio Corp., a San Francisco-based conglomerate, is attempting to attract second-home buyers and retirees to its 3,200-acre Rams Hill community--without destroying the reason why people come to the desert in the first place. As the biggest developer in this town of fewer than 2,000 full-time residents about 85 miles east of San Diego, Di Giorgio has been promoting Rams Hill with a Palm Springs-bashing advertising campaign for several years.
But recent ads have escalated the warfare by portraying Palm Springs as a traffic-clogged, smoggy place, crowded with tourists bringing all the problems of the big cities with them.
Sid Karsh, development division president for Di Giorgio, defends this style of promotion, saying that the ads tell the truth.
“Rams Hill is surrounded by a 560,000-acre state park, so there is no way we can end up with 50 or more golf courses, like the Palm Springs area,” Karsh said.
During 15 years at Dart Resorts, where he was president of the second-home development arm of Dart & Kraft, Karsh learned about the realities of development the hard way--in the courts--when residents of Tahoe Donner, a Dart development, brought suit against the developer.
Dart Resorts won the final battle in April, 1984, when a Sacramento County Superior Court jury ruled in favor of Dart in a $100-million class-action lawsuit filed in 1976.
“One thing I can say without equivocation is that developments like this (Tahoe Donner) are history,” Karsh told a reporter in December, 1984--referring to the massive, 6,000-acre development at Truckee in the High Sierra.
Last August, less than two years later, he took over as president of the Di Giorgio Development Division. The major thrust is marketing Rams Hill, although Di Giorgio also sells eight-to-12-acre lots in its Indian Head Ranch development in another part of Borrego Springs.
“When I made the comment on large developments being history, I was referring to projects with large numbers of lots--6,000 in the case of Tahoe Donner,” Karsh said. “Frankly, I’ve been fortunate to work for two of the finest companies in the land development business.”
Limit Golf Courses
An earlier Di Giorgio project, De Anza Desert Country Club, and the Roadrunner Golf & Country Club, also in Borrego Springs, are virtually the only competitors to the 18-hole, Ted Robinson-designed Rams Hill golf course.
“We’ve developed golf courses, but we don’t want Borrego Springs to be overrun with them,” Karsh said. “People come to Borrego Springs to get away from it all, so we try to preserve the desert as much as possible in our development.”
Don Davis, vice president/project development at Di Giorgio Development, pointed out the absence of street lights, the minimal amount of grassy landscaping and the absence of other non-desert elements in a tour of Rams Hill in particular and the Borrego Springs area in general.
As his station wagon pulled up to one house, Davis wrinkled his nose in disgust at the sight of a manicured lawn. “We’ve tried to discourage people from putting in lawns, but Midwestern habits die hard,” he said. “A lot of people come to the desert and immediately begin to transform it, rather than adapt to it. That’s how the Coachella Valley and Phoenix were ruined.”
Choice of Homes
Asked why Robinson didn’t model the golf course on the Scottish links natural course at Bajamar near Ensenada, Mexico, Davis said that asking average recreational golfers--the kind most likely to use the Rams Hill course--to use a natural course is too big a step for a developer.
Housing at Rams Hill includes one- and two-bedroom Casitas condominiums with 800 to 1,100 square feet, priced from $94,500 to $122,000; Santa Rosa patio homes with 1,500 to 2,086 square feet, priced from $155,000 to $340,000, and Santa Fe Homes, single-family detached houses with 1,120 to 1,370 square feet, priced from $155,000 to $193,000.
Karsh said the master plan for Rams Hill includes 1,570 dwelling units; since sales began in 1984, about 150 houses have been sold in the development.
A buyer can also purchase a lot and build a custom home, Davis said. During a tour, he pointed out several custom houses with architecture that is relatively daring for a mass development, adding that all custom house designs must be approved by the company.
Di Giorgio is not a newcomer to Borrego Springs. The firm has owned land here since the 1940s, when it raised table grapes on the fertile soil.
