Signals Turn Green for Rancho California : New Community Measures Growth by Traffic Lights

One measure of progress in Rancho California, the rapidly growing Riverside County community spread over 153 square miles--more than three times the land area of San Francisco--is the number of traffic signals.

Until August, 1984, there wasn’t one to be found in Rancho California and Temecula, the picturesque Old West community within the boundaries of Rancho California. Now there are three traffic signals--at the intersections of Rancho California and Ynez roads, Rancho California and Diaz roads and Rancho California Road and Front Street.

The four-way stop signs at the busy intersection of Front and Main streets in Temecula may soon give way to traffic signals, according to a report in a recent issue of The Californian, a weekly newspaper serving the area.

The mind reels at the thought of grizzled Butterfield Overland Stage drivers reining their horses to a halt at the intersection before the light changed to red. What those stage drivers of the 1860s would think about the antique shops and boutiques dotting the Temecula landscape is even more mind-boggling.

Traffic congestion will never reach the levels of downtown Los Angeles or Century City, but it’s a long way from the leisurely pace of the Temecula Valley of even a dozen years ago, and it represents the downside of growth to many old-timers.

Perhaps an even more important indicator of the growth of greater Rancho California--home to more than 33,000 people--was the establishment of Temecula Valley High School in 1985.

High School Built

According to long-time Murrieta resident Carole Henderson, the establishment of a high school for residents of Rancho California, Temecula, Murrieta, Aguanga and Anza--the primary trade area--was a major step in attracting business, industry and residential developers.

“Before we got our own high school, kids had to ride 18 or more miles to Lake Elsinore to attend a public school,” she said. “This meant that kids had to get up before sunrise and really put a crimp on extracurricular activities.”

Growth in the last two years has been overwhelming, especially in the commercial/retail sector. Rancho Temecula is the increasingly favored name for the community and a likely choice should the unincorporated area achieve city status, according to Henderson.

From the purchase of the 97,500-acre Vail Ranch by Kaiser Development Co. and Aetna Insurance in 1964, to the sale by Kaiser of the remaining 28,000 acres last year to Bedford Properties Inc., Lafayette, Calif., growth was steady but not spectacular. Many people who lived in the community liked it that way, Henderson said.

Exclusive Broker

Development began taking off about three years ago, well before the sale to Bedford, according to Daniel L. Stephenson of Rancon Corp., a Rancho California-based diversified real estate organization.

Since it was organized by Stephenson in 1971 as Rancho Consultants, Rancon has built up a track record as the largest private developer in the community, he said.

This most favored company status came from its initial advantage as the exclusive broker of residential acreage for Kaiser-Aetna, but Rancon has since evolved into a major real estate player throughout the Inland Empire and beyond.

The $30-million Rancon Commerce Center, on the west side of Jefferson Avenue across from Rancon’s four-story corporate headquarters, includes a restoration of the 1879-vintage Gonzalez adobe in the $10-million, 100,000-square-foot Old Adobe Plaza that occupies nine of the commerce center’s 90 acres.

Developed by Rancon Realty Fund 1, Old Adobe Plaza is the third shopping center in the community, supplementing the original built in 1968 by Kaiser on the east side of Interstate 15, and Winchester Square next to Old Adobe Plaza. Winchester Square has a Stater Bros. supermarket, one of two chain food markets in Rancho California.

Movie Theater Added

Rancho California Plaza, the original center, was “reconcepted” in 1979 to serve the growing market of permanent residents as well as the tourist trade that had been the focus of the original center, according to William L. Bopf, vice president of legal and governmental affairs for Rancho California Development Co., a subsidiary of Bedford Properties.

The changes included adding a Mann movie theater, a Ben Franklin variety store and a Safeway supermarket, replacing a smaller independent market.

The 30-acre plaza, containing 112,000 square feet of retail space, is being renovated at a cost of $2.4 million, Bopf said. Designed by Field-Paoli Architects of San Francisco, the renovation includes replacing the cedar-shake roofs with a warm gray slate-like material. Much of the board-and-batten siding will be changed to a beige-white stucco.

A Nov. 1 completion is targeted for the exterior renovation, which at this time will not include the Rancho California Inn or the office buildings, Bopf said.

“We’ll do the landscaping and begin construction on another office building next spring,” he added.

Bopf said that Bedford Properties will retain about 3,000 to 4,000 acres of the 28,000 that it received when it bought out Kaiser. The other 24,000 or so acres will be sold off. Most of the acreage is in the periphery of the community.

The 3,000 or 4,000 acres that Bedford will retain will be developed--mostly for commercial uses--and marketed, he said.

Although it was planned to be a balanced community--with housing, retail and employment centers--from its start in the late 1960s, Rancho California saw little office and industrial growth until the completion of the Interstate 15 freeway connecting San Diego with Riverside in the early 1980s.

Affordable housing, relatively smog-free air and a weather quirk that results in a cooling afternoon breeze from Oceanside every afternoon made Rancho California popular with retirees and those who didn’t have to commute to work every day. Among the latter is actor Jack Klugman, who is as well known as an owner of race horses here as he is as half of the “Odd Couple.”

The climate and soil is also ideal for wine grapes, making Rancho California one of the Southland’s major wine-producing areas, rivaling the Santa Ynez Valley north of Santa Barbara.

Today, the freeway makes the Temecula Valley an easy commute to employment centers in San Diego’s North County, where affordable housing is an increasingly rare commodity.

Housing Development

The Newport Economics Group predicts that new housing development in southwest Riverside County--from Lake Elsinore south to the San Diego County line--will experience the greatest increase in housing of any part of the state.

The region is scheduled for 35,400 new dwelling units, with 16 approved specific plans covering 15,240 acres, according to the Newport Beach-based research concern. The vast bulk of this land is for housing, but 370 acres have been set aside for retail and office use and 430 acres for industrial use, according to Robert Dunham, president of Newport Economics.

“Housing sales in this area have increased sharply from about 500 a year to 1,500, with an advance to 2,500 expected by 1989,” he said. “The dominant share will continue to be single-family detached houses in the $85,000 to $125,000 price range.”

Dunham pointed out that in recent years, only the Sunnymead area near Riverside--now the city of Moreno Valley--has set a similar pace.

Different Tack

One of the score or so of contributors to this building pace is Mesa Homes, the recently formed residential development arm of Bedford Properties Inc. Mesa’s first product is Village Grove, a 211-unit development of houses priced from the mid-$80,000 range.

As part of its diversified real estate activities, Rancon Corp. is taking a different tack as the developer of Alta Murrieta, located at Interstate 15 and Murrieta Hot Springs Road, just north of the Rancho California boundary but part of the trading area.

To date, six builders have purchased land in the 540-acre master-planned development and are building or planning to build single-family houses there.

They are: The Toman Co., Irvine, 202 houses; Friedman Homes, Rancho Cucamonga, 116 houses, with negotiations under way for 97 more; the Anden Group, Carlsbad, 220 houses; Acacia Construction Co., Fullerton, 104 houses; UDC, San Diego, 214 houses, and Kingsway Construction Corp., San Diego, 179 houses.

Thousands of Homes

When it is built out, Alta Murrieta will have several thousand dwelling units, including single-family houses, condominiums and apartments, according to Rancon’s Stephenson.

The Sunland Housing Group and Radnor Corp. are collaborating on Portofino, featuring 125 single-family houses with 2,000 to 2,590 square feet, priced in the $129,990 to $159,990 range. Houses in the Rancho California project--the second collaboration of Sunland and Radnor--are expected to be on sale in January, with a first phase of 25 units.

The two firms previously collaborated on Vista Mar in Rancho Pensasquitos, San Diego County.

The growth of the industrial sector in Rancho California is particularly startling to one who returns to visit the area after an absence of several years. The rolling valley west of the freeway is rapidly filling up with office, industrial and retail buildings.

F. Ross Grano of the Rancho Bernardo office of Coldwell Banker Commercial Real Estate Services, said that industrial land near Interstate 15 that sold for about $2 to $3 a square foot in the early 1980s is up to $4 and $5 today. This is well under the $12 a square foot that similar land fetches in Rancho Bernardo, about 30 miles south.

After selling out late in 1984 about 30 acres in the first industrial park he marketed in Rancho California, Grano and his staff turned to the 108-acre Rancho California Business Park, which Grano said represents the state of the art in Riverside County: “It’s as good as anything in Irvine at a fraction of the land cost.”

Semiconductor Plant

A major tenant in the park is El Segundo-based International Rectifier which has recently occupied a $90-million, 280,000-square-foot plant for fabrication and assembly of metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transformers or “MOSFETS” for short. The firm will employ 700 when the new plant is in full operation, Grano said.

Across the street from the International Rectifier plant is the newly completed Park Heights multi-use facility developed by a partnership led by John Pfaffl, a Los Angeles developer and businessman, and Cerritos architect Tomislav Gabric. The 86,784-square-foot facility is a two-story tilt-up structure of contemporary design that features an exterior accented by Graylite glass.

Also involved in the development is Fred Lamb, a Rancho California manufacturer. Pfaffl and Gabric have been the most active developers of industrial facilities in the Rancho California area; they’ve built 60 projects, ranging from multitenant offices to industrial warehouses for a single user.

“I have great confidence in Rancho California,” Pfaffl said. “In 1982, when we first came here, nobody knew where Rancho California was. You can talk to anyone today and they know where Rancho California is and what’s happening there.”

Move From Long Beach

Americans aren’t the only ones with confidence in Rancho California: The Japanese, in the form of American Industrial Manufacturing Services--a unit of Japan’s Nippondenso automotive products firm--have opened a manufacturing plant in a 74,350-square-foot building across the street from International Rectifier. The facility replaces one in Long Beach, according to Jim Lewis, executive vice president of AIMS.

“The quality of the labor force in Rancho California is virtually unmatched in other areas,” he said. “Combined with very favorable lease terms for the facility--especially compared with the L. A. area--the labor statistics convinced us to relocate and expand here.”

The firm has hired more than 60 new employees, with an initial goal of 100, he said. He added that within a 30-minute commute of the plant, the labor force numbers about 120,000. Expanding the drive to 40 minutes more than triples the labor force to 400,000, he said.

Much of the commercial development in Rancho California is taking place west of Interstate 15, but Matthew Pollack of Windsor Projects Inc., Rancho California, and veteran Rancho California developer Bill Johnson are two who believe that the largely residential area to the east is worthy of attention.

New Shopping Center

Among Pollack’s developments is Windsor Highlands, a 19,600-square-foot office building at 29373 Rancho California Road in Highlands Office Park.

The two-story structure is across the street from Rancho Towne Center, a 52-acre shopping center that is being developed by Bill Johnson of Johnson + Johnson Development, Rancho California; Ron Hahn, San Diego, son of well-known San Diego-based shopping center developer Ernest Hahn, and developer Sam Marasco of San Diego.

The center will have a 110,000-square-foot Target department store as an anchor, according to Michael Lundin of Johnson’s Rancho California Properties. There will also be a chain supermarket and a Marie Callender restaurant, he said.

Johnson’s firm, formed in the early 1970s, owns 11,000 acres in Rancho California, including 2,500 acres surrounding the new Rancho California Airport about four miles east of Interstate 15 on Winchester Road.

Riverside County will break ground on the airport next month, Johnson said. The facility will have a 4,600-foot runway--expandable to 7,000 feet--and will replace an airport west of the freeway on the site of the expansion of the Rancho California Business Park.