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| Tri-Valley Herald, Sunday, October 21, 2001 |
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| NEW VALLEY TOWNS BLOSSOM DUE TO BAY AREA SLOW-GROWTH - Mountain House changes Central Valley-scape |
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Until recently, the site of Mountain House—a planned community five miles from downtown Tracy in rural San Joaquin County—was 5,000 acres of corn and alfalfa fields punctuated by an occasional dairy farm. But the growl of tractors and heavy equipment can now be heard in the area as the first wave of crews level dirt and bury storm drain pipes.
Streets will be built and those will make way for homes, schools, community centers and businesses—all part of what will grow up into a living community with some of the first residents moving in as soon as Spring 2003.
Project developers expect 44,000 people to populate the town over the next two decades, reminiscent of California’s historical Gold Rush era that saw communities spring up seemingly overnight.
Trailing the energy crisis and education, housing tops the list of issues looming in the mind of California’s leaders.
The Department of Finance project the state will grow from 34.4 million to 45.8 million people by 2020, with San Joaquin County alone expecting to grow by 55 percent, from 573,600 to 887,600, during that same time period. "While California has had a housing need of 220,000 new units a year, in the last decade we’ve produced less than half of that on average," said Cathy Creswell, deputy director for the housing policy development division of the state Housing Department.
Providing California’s work force with affordable housing and reasonable commute is a cornerstone to a stable California economy, according to Creswell. In recruiting campaigns, business and industry hold up these two factors that affect quality of life.
Enter Mountain House, a planned community designed with the idea that—like it or not—growth from the Bay Area is spilling over into the Central Valley. "Rather than allow that to flow out onto the valley floor, the idea was to trap it at the county line," explains Eric Teed-Bose, director of planning for Trimark Communities, the project’s developer for the past four years.
First proposed in 1987 and given the go-ahead by the San Joaquin County Board of Supervisors in 1994, Mountain House turns seven-and-a-half square miles sitting north of Interstate 205 and next to the Alameda County border into a town.
Mountain House takes its name from the stagecoach stopovers that pioneers used at California mountain passes as they traveled east to the Sierras from San Francisco and other port cities. Today uttering "Mountain House" conjures up http://www.mountainhouse.net/ebroadcasts/6GNCMHS009/images of a biker bar that sits at the lonely intersection of Mountain House Parkway and Grantline Road near the planned community.
Reaching maturity, the community will hold 12 neighborhoods, each with its own park, elementary school and retail convenience store, Teed-Bose said. Although Mountain House is a "new town" that will be built in phases over the next 25 years, Trimark hopes to capture the "charming valley town" feel with turn-of-the-century designs, Teed-Bose said.
The homes, as well as the schools in each neighborhood and the central firehouse, will follow Spanish Colonial, American Farmhouse, Cottage, Prairie or Craftsman design patterns. Each neighborhood will flank a five-acre park and a commercial component. And a central "town square" will have both retail and office space.
Mountain House is set apart from Central California counterparts like Elk Grove and Laguna West in the Sacramento area because of its emphasis on industrial and commercial space in the mix that includes housing, Teed-Bose said. "With neighborhood centers, you could avoid the need for people to commute into the next town for daily goods, like eggs and bread," he said.
Beyond the essentials of life, the plan allows enough acreage for two 18-hole golf courses. A portion of the Old River, which forms the northern boundary for Mountain House, will contain a marina.
Putting in the roads, water, sewer and the schools will cost about $500 million, Teed-Bose said. The expense will be spread out over the next 20 years of development with the first neighborhood named "Wicklund" coming in at about $60–65 million.
There will be a variety of housing options: single-family, townhouses, condominiums and apartments.
Mountain House will be more than just residential neighborhoods. The key to the project’s success is attracting employers to fill the 800-square acres of office and industrial space giving residents local job opportunities, Teed-Bose says.
Already, East Bay and Silicon Valley companies have contacted Trimark, only to be turned away, he said, because business facilities haven’t been built yet. "That bodes well for Mountain House," Teed-Bose said.
Something from nothing
Paul Sensibaugh, general manager of the Mountain House Community Services District, jokes that he’s the only city manager around with no city to manage. The first residents are still a couple of years off, but Sensibaugh, who has been on the project for about a year, is already thinking about the stuff that communities are made of. "All those things a city has, we don’t have yet—but we will," said Sensibaugh, who is charged with putting in place a city administration for the county.
Residents of Mountain House will need a library, police and fire emergency services, as well as a public transit system and utilities. Refuse collection is one service Sensibaugh is working through right now: "We have to find a way to deal with that before we get residents in Spring 2003," Sensibaugh said.
That includes finding a means of collecting the refuse and billing residents for that service. "The county has no system in place to bill for utilities," Sensibaugh said, adding that right now there isn’t even a building where people can issue complaints.
The eventual goal is to graduate Mountain House into a city governed by elected officials. Sensibaugh now answers to the San Joaquin Board of Supervisors, but once population reaches the 1,000 mark, a ballot measure will ask the residents to elect their own city council, he said.
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