REAL ESTATE : Residential Sales at Core of Rancho Santa Margarita Are Nearing
For months now, Rancho Santa Margarita has been trumpeting developments in its Town Center. The real excitement, though, starts June 12. That’s when the first residential project in the central core of the 5,000-acre planned community opens its sales office.
Until now, development in the 250-acre Town Center has centered on the retail and service components--things such as the start of construction on a library and the signing of a lease for a 132,722-square-foot Target department store. And those are important elements in the life of a community--the more offered within the boundaries of Rancho Santa Margarita, the easier for the marketing pros to sell prospective homeowners, and other businesses, on the joys of being there.
But the Town Center was designed to be the central core--the downtown--of the community. In keeping with Rancho Santa Margarita’s status as a new town, plans always called for residential development to be incorporated into the downtown area.
That is something most Southern California cities have shied away from. But planners learned a lesson from cities that kept new homes out of their commercial and retail cores, then watched those cores die as business was siphoned off by outlying shopping malls and entertainment complexes.
The key to a viable downtown, they decided, is to have people of all economic stripes living in close proximity to the retailers and service providers.
It is a symbiotic relationship in which each party helps sustain the other. And now, about a year after the first retailers opened their doors in the Town Center, Rancho Santa Margarita begins adding the residences.
First will be Corte Melina, a 26-units-to-the-acre condominium development by San Juan Group. The company had one of Southern California’s best-selling condo projects last year with Tijeras Creek Villas, also in Rancho Santa Margarita.
The 190-unit development is in south Orange County’s ubiquitous Spanish Colonial architectural style--though moderated, marketeers say, to have more of an “early California Metropolitan” appearance. A mix of two- and three-story buildings plus lots of exterior ornamentation, including front porches, is intended to dispel that high-density feeling.
Prices, which haven’t been set yet, are expected to range from just under $110,000 for a 712-square-foot, one-bedroom, one-bath flat to somewhere below $145,000 for a 1,363-square-foot, two-bedroom, two-bath, two-story unit.
In all, plans call for the Town Center area to contain as many as 3,000 units.
