Development Battle Escalates on Baja Beach

Livio Santini is blessed: He owns 26 acres atop an ocean bluff ripe for houses and condominiums, just when this beach town’s cachet has never been higher.

And he is cursed: A dozen rustic bungalows, long occupied mostly by Southern Californians, block what would be a multimillion-dollar ocean view from his property.

He wants them out. The residents, whose homes sit on seaside land owned by the Mexican government, have dug in. The result has been a nasty war of wills and finger-pointing--and the most extreme display of tensions cracking lately over development along the northern Baja California coast.

Residents say that the Santini family has been ruthless in trying to uproot them, including cutting them off from gas and water supplies by plowing a 15-foot-wide trench along several hundred feet of the property line. There have been angry set-tos, vandalism and reports--impossible to confirm--of threatening gunshots. When one couple’s empty home burned flat in the middle of the night in November, neighbors accused the Santinis of a terror campaign.

Santini, a Tijuana architect, and his brother Aldo dismiss some of their adversaries as “high-class squatters” with no claim to the federal coastal strip. They say that they would like to settle with the others before applying to the government for control of the strip. The Santinis suggest the burned house was torched by troublemakers trying to frame them. They defend the huge trench as a way to keep out interlopers.

“It’s worked to get a couple of them to leave,” said Aldo Santini.

The showdown reflects the unease over potential development on the Rosarito coast, where thousands of U.S. retirees and weekenders paid cheap rents to settle rustic lots long before glitzy hotels and vacation homes filled much of the shoreline and a new major movie studio bestowed extra marquee appeal.

Even more hotels are opening or planned, and a cruise ship dock is taking shape downtown, about 20 miles south of the U.S. border. The rental market has taken off, too. “There’s a lot of activity right now,” said Silvia Marcor, a leading real estate agent in town.

Some worry that Rosarito’s rising promise and shrinking stock of vacant land next to the sea will spell cutthroat competition for a beachfront once populated mainly by camper trailers and little cabins.

Ex-Mayor Hugo Torres Chabert, owner of the Rosarito Beach Hotel, where the pier is being built, said the current “period of conflict” is a normal part of growth. Rosarito received cityhood in 1995 and needs more upscale projects to raise revenues, he said.

“They have to do better building. That’s for the improvement of Rosarito,” Torres said. “But we should not step on anyone’s rights.”

Some see a generational shift underway.

“Sons or daughters of people who rented out the property got educated. They saw that business was no longer in renting a small portion to a couple from the States. They want to develop the area,” said a former Mexican coastal official.

The jousting has taken various forms. Some of the residents under fire are vying for government permission to remain on coastal land sought by developers. Others have hired lawyers to fend off building schemes that they think threaten their slice of paradise. One clandestine pamphleteer cranks out broadsides hitting a proposal by Torres and others for a marina and hotel where a mostly American community lives near the Rosarito Beach Hotel. (Torres said the project is years off.)

Some residents have officially registered their neighborhood associations in order to lobby officials and seek legal protections.

“We’re here--for how long we don’t know,” said John Lewis, who lives on a contested seaside parcel north of town and heads the legal affairs committee for a grouping of 10 neighborhood associations. “When it comes time, it’s going to be a hell of a fight.”

Rosarito, with a new 20th Century Fox studio and a Sharp Electronics Corp. plant, wants to be more than a tourism town. But the coastline has been its bread and butter and, sometimes, a battleground.

Various property disputes--from rival claims by peasant groups to fraudulent sales--have ensnared scores of unwary newcomers to Baja California over the years. Settling on seaside land can be tricky in Mexico, where the law bars foreigners from outright ownership. Foreigners typically have rented land from owners or bought through a Mexican bank trust.

Much of the newest concern stems from confusion over who gets to live on land within 60 feet of the water--called the federal maritime zone--belonging to the Mexican government. Hundreds of people built on this public land over the years, some through formal government concessions, others through under-the-table payments to federal regulators. Still others paid rent to the nearest landowner. The hodgepodge of coastal land holding has left the federal agency in charge without an up-to-date count of who is living there.

“It’s a bomb ready to explode because of the investment coming to the area and the urgency of the owners to get people off the land,” said Silvia Perez-Thompson, a consultant who advises several neighborhood associations.

The Mexican government’s new environmental overseer in Baja California has vowed to address the chaotic situation by joining with local and state officials to survey who is living on beach property and assess each person’s legal claims. About 70% of those people are foreigners but many have established some legal rights over the years, such as by paying federal fees.

“We’re going to follow the law. We’re not going to commit injustices, but we’re not going to ignore the problem,” said Hugo Abel Castro Bojorquez, Baja delegate of the Mexican environmental agency. “We have to find a way they can live there without violating the law.”

The coastal zone muddle has fueled the animus eight miles south of Rosarito at Rancho Santini, once a remote surfers’ outpost and now neighbor to some of the swankiest condominiums in the region. Next door, construction crews are at work on an eight-story tower said to be a future health spa.

Aldo Santini said his family’s plans to develop a 380-unit retirement community “aren’t worth a penny” without clearing that ocean vista.

Livio Santini and partner Roberto Curiel, who owns a construction company and the Marina Coral and Hotel in Ensenada, have begun trucking earth for broad terraces for the proposed subdivision. The estimated $70-million project was first envisioned two decades ago by the Santinis’ father.

That proposal led to squabbling in the 1980s between the Santinis and residents, an omen of the current battle with some of the same dwellers. But after buying out some residents and knocking down 12 homes a decade ago, the family sat on its plans.

The Santinis say that about half of the residents in their way lack legal rights to remain. The residents say that it is the Santinis who have acted illegally. Allowed by law at least a footpath across the Santini property to their homes, the beach residents use wheelbarrows to cart bottles of water and groceries over creaky planks spanning the 4-foot-deep trench.

Both sides have called for a truce, but have yet to reach one.

The thought of surrendering brings tears to the eyes of Jade Caplan, whose family has had a home here since 1970. That’s understandable: Her cost for a perch that accommodates a small but airy stucco house and boasts a 25-mile coastal panorama is $52 in monthly fees to the Mexican government.

But months of siege have softened Caplan’s once-steely resolve. “I’m willing to hear what they have to say,” she sighed.

At Rancho del Mar, north of Rosarito, Lewis and two dozen neighbors are seeking rights to the federal coastal strip on which their houses sit. But a development company that recently acquired the surrounding land has a rival bid for the coastal concession.

The development company is creating a subdivision on higher ground just across the tollway from the beach.

Lewis and his neighbors worry the developers would use the government concession to boot them from the beach. “We’re living here in fear of being kicked out and losing all our investment,” said Lewis, a former Glendale businessman who spent $155,000 to buy and fix up the house.

The developer said the company plans to redo the neighborhood on the ocean side, but not yet. He said the company is, for now, too busy selling its hillside lots, which offer utilities and ocean views, for from $29,000 to $46,000.

“It’s something we have to do slowly and carefully. We don’t want to negatively affect a single person,” said administrator Luis Gutierrez Saavedra. “We don’t want fights with anyone.”

The same refrain is heard at Rancho Santini, but months of the bitter standoff have snapped the serenity of surfside life. “It was our little bit of heaven,” said Burt Sveine, a San Diego real estate broker who retreated north of the border because of the conflict. “Now it’s our little bit of hell.”