Post-Recession, Master Planned Communities Come Back to Life
- Josh Stephens
- Apr 17, 2017
- 8 min read
Up to the year 2000 or so, through the headiest days of growth in the Inland Empire, the 13 square miles between Ontario and Chino now known as Ontario Ranch had a population of over 300,000. If all goes according to plan, it will have roughly 150,000 by the midpoint of this century.
Despite this dramatic decline, Ontario Ranch is not some woebegone Rust Belt city. Indeed, it is experiencing not so much one of population so much as it is a change of species: from cattle to human.
What it does not represent, however, is much of a change in California’s development patterns.
In decades past, outer suburban areas like the Inland Empire, inland San Diego County, Sacramento’s rural counties, and the far tendrils of the Bay Area boomed with subdivisions and master planned communities — typically dominated by single-family homes. Recently, though, economic conditions and a new regulatory climate put a halt to much of that type of growth as cities turned towards infill development and greenfield development was deemed unsustainable.
“The size and scope of master-planned communities meant that they did take a larger hit because of their size,” said John Beckman, CEO of the Building Industry Association of the Greater Valley.
The recession and housing crisis of 2007 onward stopped development, of all types, in its tracks. Meanwhile, the 2008 passage of Senate Bill 375 was intended to usher in a new age of infill development in center cities. Cultural trends, consumer preferences, and environmental concerns inspired the tantalizing notion that, perhaps, sprawl was dead, interred in a cemetery of its own making. (See prior CP&DR coverage here and here.)
Don’t order the headstone yet.
Ontario Ranch is but the most massive of a new generation of large master planned communities that are in various stages of development statewide. Technically, Ontario Ranch is an annexation, consisting of nine master-planned communities that are enormous — on the order of several thousand residential units — in their own right.
They are joined by the likes of Mountain House in San Joaquin County, Otay Ranch (5,300 acres) in San Diego County, The Villages of Lakeview in Riverside County (11,350 homes, 2,800 acres), Tesoro Viejo in Madera County (5,190 homes, 1,600 acres), and Newhall Ranch in northern Los Angeles (21,500 homes, 10,000 acres). The community of Grapevine (12,000 units, 8,100 acres) recently received approval from Kern County; a sister community on the 270,000-acre Tejon Ranch site, Centennial, is awaiting approval from Los Angeles County.
(See sidebar on California's pending large master planned communities.)
Despite some exceptions, many of these developments aren’t so much new as they are remnants of the early 2000s with new funding and old approvals. Mountain House, Newhall Ranch, and Tesoro Viejo have been kicking around since the 1990s.
