Toll Will Lead Yorba Linda Development
Luxury home builder Toll Brothers Inc. was named lead developer Monday of 840 acres in northeast Orange County where 2,100 homes and a golf course are planned on hills that have been dotted with Shell Oil Co. wells for 70 years.
The first 850 homes will go on sale starting in 2000 on property where only a few wells had been located. All those wells have ceased operating, oil officials said.
Toll said it will build 270 of those homes, priced from $400,000 to $600,000. James Boyd, Toll’s vice president for California, said other companies, to be selected later, will build smaller detached homes and townhomes as part of that initial 850-home development.
The rest of the project, on land that had more oil wells, will be developed later, officials said. Oil is still being produced on some of that land.
Robert I. Toll, Toll’s chairman, said the company has been pleased at the results of a previous development it undertook in Yorba Linda. He said the city’s demographics--a third of the households have incomes of more than $100,000 a year--are ideal for his company’s high-end housing.
Pennsylvania-based Toll was chosen by Aera Energy, a joint venture set up recently by Shell and Mobil Oil Corp. to handle the companies’ oil-producing properties in California.
The project, near the Orange and Riverside freeways, was approved by the Yorba Linda City Council two years ago. To help win approval, Shell sold 980 adjacent acres to the state at a bargain price for parkland.
The site includes 200 acres provided by Shell for a city-owned public golf course, an elementary school and two small nature reserves.
Toll, which has built two large residential projects around golf courses in the Philadelphia suburbs and is designing master-planned communities in several other states, had nearly $1 billion in home sales this year. It was selected by Aera after competing with a variety of other developers. Toll will contribute an undisclosed amount of capital to the partnership with Aera, officials said.
Toll and Aera will be selling off development rights at a time when numerous lenders have expressed willingness to finance builders in Orange County.
The problem for the builders, according to consultant Jeffrey Meyers, has been a lack of land to build on--something the oil companies have.
Boyd said he anticipates no problems in dealing with environmental issues posed by the oil drilling over the past decades. None of the 2,100 homes eventually to be built will be located directly over wells, they said.
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Houses in the Works
An 840-acre new home development with 2,100 lots and a 200 acre golf course will be constructed in Yorba Linda
