Homes on the Bolsa Chica horizon

Saturday, June 24, 2006

Homes on the Bolsa Chica horizon

By JENNIFER MUIR and JEFF COLLINS
The Orange County Register

HUNTINGTON BEACH – Bulldozers will break ground Monday on a neighborhood of ocean-view homes on the Bolsa Chica Mesa – a symbolic end to a 30-year feud over one of the last remaining coastal wetlands in California.

The construction culminates a landmark deal between developers and environmentalists in which homebuilder California Coastal Communities Inc. sold 103 acres of its wetlands holdings to the state in exchange for permission to build 356 homes.

The million-dollar houses will be the first to go up in the wetlands area, where American Indians worked, where farmers harvested lima beans and where until recently, residents hiked and walked their dogs.

But controversy surrounding Bolsa Chica isn't over just yet.

A day after the groundbreaking ceremony, stockholders will meet in Irvine to consider a shareholder insurrection seeking to put the development – if not the entire company – up for sale. Shareholders Mellon HBV Alternative Strategies and Mercury Real Estate Advisors LLC, which together control about a fifth of the company, fear a housing slowdown will deplete the value of the ocean-view development before the homes can be built.

(snip)

http://www.ocregister.com/ocregister/money/abox/article_1192294.php

When I left CA it seemed that it was safe. :evilfrown: