Builder Envisions City on Joshua Tree’s Border
Here, on the southern fringes of Joshua Tree National Park, the old California desert still reigns--the one of scattered houses on dusty lots, an RV park or two for the snowbirds and the sound of wind scouring the washes.
But the new desert, the one of dazzling green golf courses, gated subdivisions of multimillion-dollar homes and tanned business executives, may be on its way.
Plans are afoot for a 7,000-home city and high-tech center--believed to be the largest single project ever proposed for the Coachella Valley region--on a large, empty tract running along the park’s southwestern border. And a Palm Desert company wants to turn 1,600 acres next to the site into two golf courses and about 300 residential lots, some of which would sell for as much as $2 million for the land alone.
The prospect of pampered green reaching into these austere brown hills is stirring concerns about the impact of creeping urbanization on a popular national park, as well as highlighting growth issues in the fast-developing Coachella Valley, 100 miles east of Los Angeles.
“I’m sitting here on my deck and looking at wide open spaces. I don’t want to see that changed,” said Mel Ballen, a retiree from the San Gabriel Valley who bought his Sky Valley property for $10 an acre in the early 1950s and lives about a quarter of a mile from the sprawling park.
Not only would the proposals dramatically alter the flavor of this 900-resident unincorporated community and the similar, nearby Indio Hills, but they would push more development to the edge of Joshua Tree. And they would cut the national park off from a large nature preserve established more than a decade ago for the endangered Coachella Valley fringe-toed lizard.
Created as a national monument in the 1930s and declared a national park in 1994, Joshua Tree covers nearly 800,000 acres of rugged desert dotted with huge pale boulders and its namesake plant. More than a million visitors a year hike the park’s winding, sandy trails, camp or otherwise get away from it all.
But the “all” is inching closer. Along with encroaching development, an enormous landfill has been approved for the site of an old mine surrounded on three sides by the park.
And voters’ approval last month of expanded Indian gambling in the state could turn the Palm Springs region into Southern California’s slot machine capital.
There are projections that the population of the Coachella Valley will double over the next decade to more than half a million.
“This area out here is just taking off like gangbusters,” said Joshua Tree park Supt. Ernest Quintana. “It’s a beautiful area--the clean air, the night skies, the open space--but if we’re not careful, we’ll lose that.”
At the Washington-based nonprofit National Parks Conservation Assn., Senior Director Brian Huse worries that “we could look over time at creating an island out of Joshua Tree, cutting it off from the surrounding desert.”
New towns should not pop up on national park boundaries, he argues. “If we are concerned enough about protecting those areas in parks, we need to incorporate that into land use and zoning policies,” he said. “Put the subdivision somewhere else.”
That kind of talk drives builders and developers crazy.
“If they feel they need a buffer . . . then buy it,” said Ed Kibbey, executive director of the Building Industry Assn.’s desert chapter. “No physical harm is going to occur to the park by building [next] to the park. The park is huge.”
Developers of both the proposed Habitat, the 1,600-acre residential and golf course project, and Joshua Hills, the small city, point out that there is already growth near the park. And they insist that their developments would be among the best in the region.
“We have an opportunity to do a master-planned community,” said Marvin Roos, who works for a Palm Springs firm that is drawing up Joshua Hills’ blueprints.
Plans for the $1-billion project have yet to be submitted to Riverside County officials, but that has not stopped opposition forces from gathering.
“It’s absolutely inappropriate to put that kind of development there,” said Joan Taylor, conservation chairwoman of the Sierra Club’s Tahquitz Group. “There exist zoned industrial [tracts] and plenty of land for housing” elsewhere in the valley, she said.
As for locals, “the majority of Sky Valley is against this thing,” said Ballen, president of the Sky Valley homeowners association, although “there are people who believe they will benefit from it in the long run.”
When he and his wife, Vera, bought a few acres from the federal government in 1954, they could see only one house on the horizon--a big one belonging to Harry Bennett, the Ford Motor Co. security chief who moved to the desert after years of battling labor for Henry Ford.
Bennett roared up in a tank of a Cadillac to introduce himself and a year later brought in a bulldozer to scrape a road to the concrete block cabin that the Ballens were building as a rustic retreat.
A Rural Place
While manicured resort cities and dozens of thirsty golf courses sprouted next to Palm Springs, Sky Valley remained a simple, rural place of modest houses with horse corrals and grand views. To the east the land stayed empty--thousands of acres of old railroad and federal plots bought by a Canadian firm with extensive real estate holdings. Beyond that was the community of Indio Hills, much like Sky Valley.
Just to the south, the 17,000-acre Coachella Valley Preserve was created in the mid-1980s to protect a series of natural palm oases and a 7-inch lizard that can be found only on what’s left of the valley’s sand dunes.
Curtis Pickering, an Oregon developer who has a fondness for grand plans but sometimes has trouble executing them, had vacationed in the Coachella Valley for years. On one visit a broker took him out to the Canadian company’s property. Pickering fell in love. He obtained an option on 9,000 acres in 1996.
He hatched an ambitious proposal to turn the spare, rolling scrubland into Joshua Hills, a small, self-contained city that would appeal to Silicon Valley executives, some of whom have second homes in the nearby resort cities.
There would be an office complex for software and high-tech firms employing 6,000, as many as 10 golf courses and 7,000 homes, a school and shops.
“It’s a special piece of property and will attract high-end users,” said Pickering, who now lives in Palm Desert with his family.
Although some of Pickering’s business dealings have been successful, a scheme to operate a shipping container company and two ports, one in Washington and one in Rhode Island, fell through in the early 1990s.
Other Pickering projects that didn’t work out include a housing development in his Oregon hometown and efforts to turn around a troubled fishing tackle company and to develop an athletic club outside Portland.
He has been sued more than two dozen times since the late 1980s in connection with his business deals.
Most of the suits have been settled, said Pickering, 42.”I’ve had some good successes. I’ve had some problems.”
A Change in Management
Last week, Richard Oliphant, a former mayor of Indian Wells and a Coachella Valley developer, stepped in as manager and a stakeholder in the Joshua Hills project. Pickering will no longer take a lead on the proposal, but he remains a principal investor, Oliphant said.
Whoever pursues the Joshua Hills development has considerable challenges ahead. It would cost millions of dollars to install water and sewer lines, and require zoning changes and ways of offsetting the ecological effects of plopping a city between Southern California’s only mainland national park and the nature preserve.
Riverside County Supervisor Roy Wilson, in whose district the projects lie, said that he has not taken a position but that the Joshua Hills proposal faces “what I think are serious environmental issues.”
“Why spend all that money for roads and water and sewer out there if you have developable land near . . . existing cities?”
The Habitat proposal--submitted to the county by Winchester Development Co., which builds golf courses and accompanying housing developments--faces some of the same issues. But because it would be smaller and less dense, it has not raised as many hackles as Joshua Hills.
“If Sky Valley is going to be developed, you couldn’t ask for a more upscale development than what they’re proposing” for Habitat, said Brad Ballen, Mel’s 44-year-old son and a member of the community board that advises Supervisor Wilson’s office. “You’ve got multimillion-dollar homes coming in.”
Still, he worries that Habitat’s 80 “villas” on smaller lots will be a bad precedent for Sky Valley, which is zoned for lots of at least 1 1/4 acres.
Cameron Barrows, who manages the multi-agency lizard preserve, says Habitat and Joshua Hills would sit directly atop drainage areas that replenish the preserve’s sand dunes. He says the projects would interfere with vital wildlife corridors between the park and preserve and--if wells are drilled for any of the golf courses--possibly even dry up the preserve’s natural oases.
“They have chosen to place these in extremely sensitive areas,” he said.
Replied Winchester principal John Shaw:
“I think it’s wonderful that Joshua Tree [National] Park exists, but there’s a boundary drawn for a reason. And the fringe-toed lizard folks drew a line that doesn’t link [the park]. We’re doing a development that in my mind would be far superior.”
