NORTH COUNTY COMMUNITY PROFILE : Developers Package the California Life Style : Housing: In Vista’s master-planned Shadowridge, home owners can shop, play golf and attend church without leaving their neighborhood.
They call it Shadowridge, even though the closest resemblance to a ridgeline was created by bulldozers in the late 1970s and the only shadows until the homes came were cast by grazing cattle and farm workers stooping in the one-time tomato fields.
Today, it’s a 1,000-acre planned residential community on Vista’s south side, the quintessence of Southern California master-planned life style.
Some 4,000 homes have been built here: a sprinkling of $500,000 high-end production houses with three-car garages and either glorious views or golf-course frontages; cheek-to-jowl patio homes encased in salmon-colored stucco; and more than 2,000 apartments and condominiums, including some one-bedroom units that can be fetched for less than $90,000.
What’s the biggest problem facing this 10-year-old community birthed by a Canadian development company and anchored by a golf course?
Golf carts. It’s illegal to drive golf carts on the city streets, and until Vista city fathers make the appropriate change in municipal law, there’s always the threat of a roving deputy sheriff citing a golfer whirring down the street on the way to the links.
Ah, life’s problems.
“The only thing I’m unhappy about,” said Morris Mitchell, who bird-dogged the coming development and became the first person to buy a home in Shadowridge when sales opened in 1981, “is that I only bought one house. I should have bought three or four.”
Mitchell, a retired railroad company executive who moved to Vista from Orange County in pursuit of the good life, declared, “We just don’t have any problems here.”
The community, which flows over rolling hills on the south side of California 78 between Sycamore Avenue and Mar Vista Drive, was created by the Daon Corp. a Canadian-based commercial, industrial and residential development company which began operations in the United States in 1976.
Jim Stout, then the president of the American operation, personally was smitten by the 1,000-acre ranchland owned by longtime Vistans Russell and Margie Thibodo, and in a single afternoon--over a kitchen table--negotiated the sale of the property for $7 million.
Today, two of Vista’s five City Council members live in Shadowridge.
The project is the largest of its type in Vista and one of the largest in North County. There are attractive neighborhood shopping centers and doctors’ offices, day-care centers and a small industrial park, a hardware store and a high school and a new Mormon church.
The place is efficient; landscaping is uniformly manicured; utilities are underground. If the place has gotten a bit large, with separate and distinct neighborhoods each with their own ethereal theme names, it’s still homey enough to find scrawled cardboard signs on street corners with arrows pointing the way to “Daniel’s Birthday Party.”
“We’re just a bunch of party animals here,” said 66-year-old Bill Whitthorne, a retired commercial airline pilot who moved here with his wife, Gloria, from Palos Verdes nine years ago.
“I’m happier now than I was then,” he said. “It’s the people. They’re all real nice. I play golf two or three times a week, and we’ll party at the drop of a hat.”
The social life in Shadowridge centers either in the apartments’ spas, or adjacent to the wet bars in the spacious living rooms of the larger homes, or at the private Shadowridge Country Club, which boasts a men’s club with 525 members, a women’s club half that strong, and a famous Sunday brunch.
There are a couple of sights in the community that prompt a second take. One is the seemingly inordinate number of for-sale signs on front lawns.
“For a lot of people, the underlying motive of moving here was profit,” said Guy Morgan, with Shadowridge Realty. “They’re what we call first-phase buyers. They like to buy in the first phase of a new development, sit through the build-out and then turn it over for a profit.”
The other sight is cause for some misgivings, admits Bill Kennedy, who from 1984 until 1988 served as the project’s general manager when Daon was absorbed by BCED Inc., a subsidiary of Bell Canada Enterprises, that country’s phone company.
“If we had to do it over again,” he said, “we should have bought the property along Sycamore Avenue that’s the gateway to Shadowridge. It’s critical to have a good entrance to a community.”
Today, a K mart store is the most significant landmark leading into the community.
SHADOWRIDGE
Population: Total: 11,000-12,000 Total housing units: 4,000 Median age: 32.5
Racial/ethnic mix: White: 73.6% Latino: 19.9% Asian/other: 5.7% Black: less than 1%
Sex: female: 50.0% male: 50.0%
Median household income: $33.285
Income distribution: less than $25,000: 35.7% $25,000-$49,000: 36.3% %50,000+ : 28.0%
Education: No high school diploma: 26.8% High school graduate: 31.6% Some college: 24.2% College graduate: 17.3%
