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| Tracy Press, Sunday, March 16, 2003 |
| by Tanya Rose |
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| A TALE OF TWO CITIES - Mountain House, River Islands to shape county’s future landscape |
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More than a decade in the making, the villages of Mountain House and River Islands are finally becoming something tangible. They are two distinct urban communities being built literally from scratch, and when finished, they should grab almost 80,000 residents and keep them in San Joaquin County.
The cities — one west of Tracy and one to the east — are designed to capture the growth spilling over from the Bay Area, a responsibility that Tracy has taken on, like it or not, for as long as the first city people hit this side of the Altamont.
Mountain House will hold a preview Saturday, and River Islands is in the final planning stages. The timing is perfect. When a Tracy growth ordinance causes housing construction to halt around 2005, new permits will likely dry up, and pressure will fall on surrounding areas to take on growth.
"When that happens, these are going to be the hot spots," said Paul Sensibaugh, general manager of the Mountain House Community Services District.
But as perfect as it all sounds, building two communities from the ground up is an enormous task, and planners are not yet out of the woods on either project. Environmentalists are still lodging lawsuits designed to stop River Islands, which is proposed for 4,800 acres of the Stewart Tract just off Interstate 5 across from Lathrop — smack dab in the middle of a flood plain.
And they’re skeptical of Mountain House, a community that started out as a "smart growth" area, but could very well turn into typical suburban sprawl. It’s just "more of the same," opponents say, except it’s more high profile, right at the edge of the Altamont Pass.
"We won’t really know if it’ll be different until we actually see it," said Eric Parfrey, who was a county planner 15 years ago when Mountain House was conceived. Now he’s chairman of the Mother Lode chapter of the Sierra Club, and he says that, for better or for worse, residents should pay attention to what’s going on.
"People think what’s going on 10 miles down the road doesn’t affect us, but it does," he said.
As a planner, Parfrey was intrigued by the idea of "new town" development, where a city like Mountain House caters to pedestrians, and each neighborhood has a commercial center and a school.
"It makes sense, but over the years, I’ve become skeptical. Now it has to be proven to me that it’s a superior way to do things."
Proponents, however, have not lost their optimism. They believe wholeheartedly that the communities are creative enough and different enough, and will usher in a new era of growth and innovation.
That faith comes in large part from the fact that out of more than a dozen "new towns" proposed in San Joaquin County and elsewhere in the 1980s, these two projects are the only ones that survived.
Mountain House
Just months ago, there was nothing at the 4,800-acre Mountain House site but some curved roads, a smattering of streetlights, and dirt. Now, there are about a dozen homes perched on the site at the edge of the Alameda County line, with the picturesque windmills and hills of the Altamont providing the backdrop. The streets actually have names now, such as "Prosperity," "Historic" and "Heritage." The Wicklund School’s multipurpose room is visible, and even though it’s just in the framing stages in front of what will be a K–8 school, playground equipment sits fully assembled.
"It’s so exciting to see it take shape," Sensibaugh said. "We’re expecting thousands of people to line up for the first houses." That release is scheduled for next month, and the first move-ins will be in June and July.
Manteca residents Jerry and Cindy Pettit, along with their 5-month-old baby boy, plan to be first in line.
"We’ll be there," said Jerry, a teacher in Oakley. "We hope we get it. Then, maybe in five years, we’ll move into a different neighborhood, but it’ll be in Mountain House."
The Pettits are both teachers, with Cindy teaching at Liberty High School in Brentwood. The pair thought about moving to Tracy to shorten their commutes, but when they heard about Mountain House, they decided it would be perfect. They both hope to one day teach in Mountain House schools.
"We knew it had been a long time in the planning and decided to wait," said Jerry. "The idea of starting small and growing up with the community is very appealing to us. We’ll stand in line if we have to at the first release, but we hope it won’t come to that."
It’s been a long road
When conceived in 1987, the town was actually split down the San Joaquin/Alameda County line. But anti-growth politics from Alameda County brought opposition to the project, and developer Trimark Communities pulled that part of the plan just three years later. San Joaquin County supervisors, however, were supportive of a project that would be bordered by Mountain House Parkway to the east, Interstate 205 to the south, Old River to the north and the Alameda County line to the west.
Tracy opposed the plan at first, worrying that it would turn into "leap frog development." Lawsuits were filed by the state Department of Fish and Game and by a trade union, but those were both dismissed in 1995. And after Mountain House planners and developers promised to produce a self-sustaining government that would provide many of its own city services, Tracy officials have learned to live with it.
Planning started there about the same time Tracy and Manteca began building their own homes at record speeds, largely for Bay Area commuters. Tracy’s population alone grew to five times what it was in the 1980s, with 65,000 people today. Despite that explosive growth, it hasn’t sufficed, and housing prices have gone through the roof.
The state Department of Finance estimates that California’s population will grow from more than 34 million people to more than 45 million in 2020, with San Joaquin County expecting to grow by more than 50 percent. By then, the county will have a population of almost 900,000.
Eric Teed-Bose, Trimark’s director, has said the company did thorough studies early on to predict exactly where the growth would occur naturally, and Sensibaugh said the idea was to stop growth at the county entrance rather than letting it overrun the Central Valley, where it may not be wanted.
Tracy is a perfect example of that sentiment — voters in 2000 approved Measure A, an initiative designed to stop or at least slow down construction of subdivisions that have popped up west of town.
When completed in 20 years, Mountain House is expected to ease at least some of the demand. It will cover 5,000 acres or even more if future annexation proposals go through. It will have some 15,000 homes and almost 44,000 people, and will generate about 20,000 jobs, supposedly dealing with the jobs-to-housing imbalance that most Bay Area suburbs continue to grapple with.
There are several neighborhood parks, plus at least one linear regional park that slices through the community, said Sensibaugh. And modeled after communities in Southern California, Mountain House will have high-tech wiring under every street. Teed-Bose has said that’s something the marketing gurus at Trimark embraced as a tool to attract families who are used to being "wired."
Fashioned after the villages of the 1930s, Sensibaugh and Teed-Bose say there will be 12 villages, each with a distinct character and feel. There will be winding, pedestrian-friendly streets complete with biking and walking trails, and each village will have its own school, park and commercial center.
Neighborhood F, under construction now by Lennar Corp., will turn into "Wicklund Crossing" when finished and will have 1,000 single-family homes, 500 multifamily units and 70 acres of office and industrial space.
There are many people like the Pettits, ready to buy homes. But there’s some question about whether there will be office tenants right away. Sensibaugh said that’s expected a little later.
"Early on, you flat out can’t get businesses to move there without people living there first," he said. "It’s a chicken and an egg thing. You get the people there, and the jobs will follow."
The real challenge, he said, is building the city’s government at the exact time that the town is going up. Right now, the community services district offices are in Stockton, but Sensibaugh, who is basically the town’s city manager, hopes he and his staff can move to Wicklund School offices.
"We want that so we can establish a presence," he said. "People need to feel that their city officials are accessible."
The city’s wastewater plant and separate pumping facility are already standing and have been for some time now. In fact, they are already slated for expansion. Also, Sensibaugh said officials are looking to annex acreage north of the current boundary.
Opponents, however, are saying officials shouldn’t start talking expansion just yet.
Parfrey, who actually worked on the Mountain House environmental documentation in the mid-1990s, says he doesn’t have a major dispute with the project, but that the devil will be in the details.
"People will be watching to see what that first neighborhood is really going to look like," he said.
The initial concept was for fewer cul de sacs and less of a tract-home feel. That includes sprinkling affordable housing (i.e. apartments and condos) in with other housing, putting garages in the back instead of the front and assuring pedestrian walkways.
"But it’s very hard for developers to confront radically new designs for single-family homes, and what happens if they sort of gravitate toward the old way of doing things," Parfrey said.
"They start balking, and I wonder if it will just be another cookie-cutter development where each lot is maximized for square footage."
He pointed to new cities like Rancho Margarita and Temecula, planned just the same as Mountain House, but the jobs that were supposed to come never materialized.
Sensibaugh said a lot of it will be up to the market, but he genuinely believes the jobs will come — simply because it’s cheaper to operate here than it is in the Bay Area, and because people are sick of their long commutes.
Warehouse and distribution centers, however, will not spring up in Mountain House. That was deliberate, said Sensibaugh. It would ruin the feel of the community.
The community services district that Sensibaugh oversees will provide city services. He and his staff have been working on nothing but that for the last few months. That includes fire, police, trash collection and other services.
Sensibaugh also said that Bay Area companies have been contacting the developer for some time, scrambling to get their businesses approved for the new community.
"It’s bound to affect Tracy," said Sensibaugh. "We’ll just have to see exactly how."
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